Arianna

It was surely an act of faith - if not of folly - for me to choose Rinuccini’s old Arianna libretto, when I could barely make out the meaning of the words. Yet I knew it was right for me, just as I would have known that Orfeo or Poppea or, for that matter, La Traviata or Lohengrin (had they been so unfortunate as to lose their music) would not be right. I also knew and this may seem almost perverse, that it was to be Arianna and not Ariadne – that is Italian and not English. Common sense led me to experiment with the possibility of an English version, for it would certainly have made things a lot easier; but in this case I knew that my attraction had as much to do with the sound as the meaning of the antique Italian [...]. My final score is deliberately patchy: some parts are highly worked, polyphonically and instrumentally; elsewhere the bare bones of the original are left to stand. The impression I aim to create is one of transparency: the listener should perceive, both in the successive and simultaneous dimensions of the score, the old beneath the new and the new arising from the old. We are to see a mythological and ancient action, interpreted by a 17th-century poet in a modern theatre. My hope, as expressed by Rinuccini’s Apollo in the (unset) prologue of Arianna, is that ‘it will come to pass that in these new songs you will admire the ancient glory of the Grecian stage’.

(Alexander Goehr, Royal Opera House programme, 1995)