“Emma is probably my favourite,” says Jonathan Dove of Jane Austen’s novels. “It’s the one I’ve reread and that always makes me cry in the same place. Pride and Prejudice makes me laugh, but I never heard music. Mansfield Park, I did.”
Dove is not speaking metaphorically. The Englishman is among the world’s most performed and prolific stage composers, with more than 30 operas to his name. Among them is Mansfield Park, a full-length but small-scale work for voices and piano, which NZ Opera is presenting in Wellington and Auckland. The concerts take place in historic buildings (Public Trust Hall in Wellington, Settlers Country Manor in Auckland), with full Regency costume, to capture a sense of music-making in Jane Austen’s time.
Of the author’s novels, Mansfield Park is the downbeat one. The writing still sparkles – this is Jane Austen, after all – but with an underlying seriousness rather than the combative wit of Pride and Prejudice or Emma. Meanwhile, the lead character, Fanny Price, isn’t always easy to like.
“[Fanny] is not everyone’s favourite heroine,” admits Dove, “but I suppose I felt some sort of connection and wanted to tell her story.”
In the book, says Dove, Fanny’s emotions are internalised; she is not outwardly expressive or vocal about her feelings. She doesn’t tell us she’s disappointed by events, we observe it. Dove’s opera spins that around.
“In operas, people get to sing their feelings,” he says. “Fanny is the only character who gets to sing on her own, so she’s the one person on whose inner world we eavesdrop; everyone else, we learn what’s going on through their exchanges with others.”
Another of Mansfield Park’s compositional tricks is to have the performers sing Austen’s chapter headings.
“It creates a sort of frame and it’s an acknowledgment of the literary source, but it’s more than that, because the headings help convey that life in 1813 is very different from life in 2024. There’s a formality, a slight element of distance, that’s part of the manners of the period.”
Dove thinks long and hard about how his music can and will be performed, cutting his quill accordingly. Mansfield Park was commissioned by Heritage Opera, a touring company that performs in British stately homes. Although it boasts 10 singers, the work asks not for an orchestra but just two pianists playing a single instrument.
“I originally imagined the sound of two pianos, but then I realised there usually isn’t room for two pianos and an audience. And many country houses have one piano but none of them have two, so you’d have to bring another one in, get it tuned, and suddenly it becomes impractical.”
As a result, Mansfield Park’s piano four-hands approach is chamber music of the sort Austen might almost have recognised. “Mansfield is to an extent, a period piece,” Dove says. “I’ve not tried to pastiche musical styles but I have restricted myself to a musical vocabulary. Jane Austen could have heard every chord in the piece, she just wouldn’t have heard them in that order.”
His model in this and several of his other works is Mozart – not quite period correct for Austen (Beethoven would be more accurate for 1814, when Mansfield Park was published), but consistent with the lightness of touch Dove was looking for.
Mozart’s personality matches him better than furrow-browed Beethoven, too. As an interviewee, Dove is jovial and twinkly; so are most of his stage works, even the ones you don’t expect to be. His best-known work, Flight, makes comedy of the well-known story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the refugee who spent 18 years living in citizenship limbo at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
“My kind of musical temperament, my musical idiom, tends towards the festive and celebratory rather than the anxious or despairing or gloomy,” Dove says. “I felt that magic and comedy were the things I would be able to do. [Nasseri’s] story is not funny, but around him are other characters who are funny and behave in a way not unlike characters in Austen: finding themselves, teaming up with the wrong partner, and so on.”
Similarly, Marx In London (2018) is less concerned about historical materialism than the fling Karl Marx was said to be having with his housekeeper.
“On one hand, I want to write about important things that are happening; I’ve had several goes at writing about climate change. But if I go to the theatre, I don’t want to be given a lecture or sermon.”
Though neither a lecturer nor a sermoniser, Dove is soon to be a facilitator. Right at the end of Mansfield Park’s run, he’s coming to New Zealand to lead NZ Opera’s New Opera Forum in Kirikiriroa Hamilton (April 22-26). The forum aims to bring together opera and opera-curious composers, librettists and arts organisations to consider what it takes to get a work off the ground.
Accompanying him to Aotearoa will be long-time collaborator Alasdair Middleton, who has written the words for many of Dove’s vocal works, including Mansfield Park.
“One of the satisfying things about working with [Middleton] is that each collaboration is different, and he finds a different style every time. Because of his long experience of writing words I’m going to set, I think he knows how to tickle my funny bone and make things happen. That history of trust means knowing that even when maybe it’s arriving a bit later than we’d hope” – a wry smile – “it will work and it’ll be worth waiting for.”
Of his visit, he says: “I’m looking forward to meeting emerging opera makers, or people thinking they maybe want to make one, and encouraging them along that path. Because it’s not that we need more operas, we need good operas.”
NZ Opera’s Mansfield Park, by Jonathan Dove and Alasdair Middleton, plays at Public Trust Hall Wellington, April 17 & 18, and Settlers Country Manor Huapai, Auckland, April 21.
