Boosey & Hawkes

Elliott Carter: What Next? premiere in Berlin

(February 2000)

A highlight of 1999 was the world premiere of Elliott Carter's one-act opera What Next? at the Berlin Staatsoper, conducted by Daniel Barenboim and staged by Nicholas Brieger. Further performances, paired with Schoenberg's Von Heute auf Morgen, are scheduled in Berlin on 25 and 31 March. The intimacy and refinement of What Next? makes it also eminently suitable for concert performance, and it is already programmed by the Chicago Symphony under Barenboim (24/25/26/29 February in Chicago, 5 March in New York), the Matinée series in Amsterdam conducted by Peter Eötvös (9 September), and the Ensemble InterContemporain under Kent Nagano in Paris (7 November).

This first foray into opera for a nonagenarian is "strikingly original" (Sunday Times) and, rather than pandering to traditional operatic expectations, is a clear extension of the concerns of Carter's concert works. The text by Paul Griffiths explores whimsically the rich multiplicity of human interaction, as observed in the composer's string quartets, here becoming tinged with sadness as more details of personality and situation are revealed.

"There is a car crash. Six people - a bride and professional soprano, Rose, a bridegroom, a middle-aged mother, a 12-year-old Kid, an astronomer named Stella and a seer or charlatan called Zen - are left in the wreckage to ponder what has happened, what has got them to this point, who they are anyway, and what they are doing with the rest of their lives... The score's unceasing flow is one indicator of its refinement, others being the fastidious blend of tone-colour and Carter's spare, late, scintillating polyphony... One takes away the impression of an opera whose exploitation of ensemble-singing is radically new." Sunday Times

"Carter's music, from the opening crash of the prelude, remains active throughout the entire single act - in the spasms and splinterings of the percussion, where the coalescing of the sounds are continually being torn asunder again... So the central interlude of the work provides a great surprise: the lost characters abandon the stage, the dreamlike scenery becomes even more unreal, the wrecked car seems to explode in slow motion. Here Carter suddenly develops, in extraordinarily skilfully constructed music, a powerful sense of poetry, whose magic is sustained through soft sounds and melodic lines. It is the sound of transformation..." Suddeutsche Zeitung

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Photo © Misha Donat

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