‘Asphodel’
The lockdown beginnings of Penelope’s Web. Online, 2020.
Support: National Opera Studio
Performers: Samantha Oxborough - Mezzo-Soprano; Juliane Gallant - piano
“12:42 is a testament to collaboration, trust, a meeting of minds and making the very best creative choices at a time of crisis for all performing artists. Many of the new works reflect the mood of the moment”
In the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, when training schemes in performing arts were grappling with a new world of illness and lockdown, the National Opera Studio commissioned the online composition of 12 new works, called 12:42. A documentary made to explore the commissions made under these unusual circumstances, explains that ‘12:42 is a testament to collaboration, trust, a meeting of minds and making the very best creative choices at a time of crisis for all performing artists. Many of the new works reflect the mood of the moment’.
As part of this programme Jeanne Pansard-Besson and Cheryl Frances-Hoad wrote an aria together, without ever having met in person. Pansard-Besson was inspired by the voice of Penelope in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. Penelope in the Odyssey is experiencing her own kind of lockdown, trapped in her palace and desperately outwitting the plague of suitors on her doorstep, while her husband navigates his way home to her through a threatening world. Penelope in The Penelopiad is differently trapped. She is free to speak, and indeed finally granted the chance to tell her own story, but she is locked into the Underworld by the inexorability of death and by her own hyper-cautious behaviour patterns.
The vagaries of lockdown isolation can be heard loud and clear in this aria. Pansard-Besson draws out all the shifting tones of Atwood’s Penelope: cynical, bored, wry, lonely, with flashes of irony alongside moments of lament and lachrymose self-pity. Penelope’s isolation is not only imposed by external circumstances, but also by her rehearsal of a defensive narrative in which she struggles to consider the enslaved palace workers as equal sharers of her pain. She describes herself as being ‘All by myself… alone… without friends or allies, just the maids’ – maids whose voices are unheard in Penelope’s solo aria.
Yet already in this aria we also hear invitations to consider the wider stories that weave their way around Penelope and, before her, around Odysseus. Frances-Hoad’s instrumentation swells at moments where Penelope’s story becomes less about herself, and more about the traditional epic sweep of the Odyssean story. Penelope pauses to dwell lyrically on her role as the exemplary waiting wife – ‘I waited’ – with her repetition of the phrase echoing the many ways in which Penelope’s story has been used as a narrow and limiting paradigm of feminine dutifulness. And yet Penelope’s own voice escapes this lyrical complacency, with her anger building through the repetitions to the point where she abandons the accompaniment, half-singing and half-shouting in an unaccompanied outburst: ‘Don’t follow my example, I want to SCREAM in your ears – yes, yours!’.
This emergent Penelope, it transpires, is desperate to communicate with a wider audience. Her audience, in turn, is being primed to hear other, new stories. The aria lays the groundwork for further myth-making and music-making.