"A face like music": Shaping images into sound in the second Mrs Kong

Beard, David Jason ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3892-843X 2006. "A face like music": Shaping images into sound in the second Mrs Kong. Cambridge Opera Journal 18 (3) , pp. 273-300. 10.1017/S0954586706002205

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Abstract

Premièred at Glyndebourne in October 1994 and subsequently performed in the UK, Austria, Germany and Holland, The Second Mrs Kong was the result of a collaboration between the American writer Russell Hoban and British composer Harrison Birtwistle. The opera’s reception has tended to emphasise the disparity between Hoban’s diverse and eclectic interests, which emerge not only in the libretto but also in his novels and essays, and Birtwistle’s more introspective and linear approach. Possible connections between Hoban’s aesthetics and Birtwistle’s music have generally been disregarded. I argue, however, that the opera’s main aesthetic concerns – namely, the mediation of images through ideas and the workings of image-identification in diverse media – are shaped by a productive exchange between librettist and composer. The clearest expression of this interaction is the love between Kong, who embodies ‘the idea of’ King Kong from the 1933 RKO film, and Pearl, a character drawn from Vermeer’s iconic painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. The representation of these visual icons in The Second Mrs Kong is inflected by Birtwistle’s own views on images, by his attempts to find musical analogues for visual techniques, as revealed especially in his sketches, and by his lively engagement with Hoban’s ideas.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Music
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > ML Literature of music
Additional Information:	Pdf uploaded in accordance with publisher's policy at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/0954-5867/ (accessed 21/02/2014).
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
ISSN:	14740621
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	02 May 2023 18:40
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/4059

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