Red Dragon, White Dragon
Librettist, Tony Bicât, writes:
Arthur’s journey like that of all great heroes – Beowulf’s for example – follows a well-marked path. There is the first victory, a period of peace, then a long journey or absence, during which things fall apart. The hero eventually returns, fights a last great battle against overwhelming odds and dies. But in his death, a deathless legend is born. Who could not be stirred by this?
I completed the first draft of the libretto working always on the principal that it should be fast-paced, clear and free of all archaisms like ‘thee’ and ‘thou’. Despite it being fifteen hundred years ago, I wanted the characters to be recognisable to a modern audience. Arthur, Guinevere and Bedivere became very real to me and soon took over my imagination. Arthur, with his bravery and idealism but also his impatience with the tedium of diplomacy and government; Bedivere with his dogged devotion to his friend and sovereign and his talent for the fine detail of running the Kingdom that so bored Arthur. Guinevere seemed as heroic a character as Arthur; in Arthur’s absence, she fulfils an impossible task to the end, submerging her love and happiness to duty – a great queen and a genuinely tragic figure. Lancelot, a much later French invention, designed to bring a chivalric gloss to the story, I reduced to a minor role. Merlin, a bogus wizard invented by that arch propagandist Geoffrey of Monmouth, to plant fake prophecies, in his History of the Kings of Britain, I was having no truck with.
Above all, the text was written not to be read but to be sung, and Nick and I pushed it back and forward as we always do knitting lyrics and music together so that they would sing easily and directly.
Some two years later in Nick’s studio in Kent we played, sung and spoke Red Dragon, White Dragon, through to Cantata Dramatica; more changes followed and yet more after the workshop performance at Cumberland Lodge in March 2015. Today we are in this historic park under a great tree, sitting on the grass telling once again the legend that remains a vital part of our national story.
REX QUONDAM
REX FUTURUS
DUX BRITANNIAE
The once and future King who will one day return to save us all.
TB 24-Jun-15
I don’t think there has ever been a time when I did not know the story of King Arthur. Where did I first hear it? Was it a story told by my father or read to me by my mother? Was it something we learned at primary school? Was it a picture book I read myself? I certainly remember, as a little boy on my trike, playing ‘knights’ with an improvised cloak and a wooden sword; perhaps there was a round table involved, I do not know.
Everyone has their own image of King Arthur; mine is a fanciful collage of books, illustrated in the artistic styles of their day, and images from movies, TV and graphic novels. All of this is fleshed out with those strange but telling details we all know – the sword in the stone, Guinevere and the Round Table.
I began the project sitting in a pub in Oxfordshire with Nick Pitts-Tucker listening to his scholarly exposition of the known facts, with quotes from Roman and Celtic sources. There was a King or Chief (The Latin word is Dux) called Arthur. He was a Roman-educated Briton. He was an awesome fighter, who was the first to unite the warring British tribes and, most startling to me, he was sixteen years old when he won his first battle. Upon these few facts I set off on my writing journey, realising that like Tennyson, T.H. White and Alan Jay Lerner, I would have to reinvent King Arthur for my own age. For that is the truth of a legend – it is a myth we all invest in.
Arthur lived in a chaotic and bloody world. Britain after the Romans had left was an anarchic mess. In 490 AD neither Christianity nor chivalry had arrived on these shore. It was a world where the strong took from the weak and you did not spare your enemies even to ransom them, you put them to the sword. There was no law outside the fortified towns left by the Romans and now inhabited by British chiefs; outside their gates it was every man for himself. The Romans had left their roads and bridges but there was no mercy and little peace. There are plenty of parts of the world where this is still true.
Arthur’s journey like that of all great heroes – Beowulf’s for example – follows a well-marked path. There is the first victory, a period of peace, then a long journey or absence, during which things fall apart. The hero eventually returns, fights a last great battle against overwhelming odds and dies. But in his death, a deathless legend is born. Who could not be stirred by this?
