Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness has been reimagined as an opera for the first time. Tom Service meets its composer Tarik O'Regan in the Guardian.
From the article...
The book has an archetypal resonance as a piece of matchless storytelling. On a boat on the Thames, Marlow relates the drama of his journey to encounter the mysterious Kurtz in the geographical Heart of Darkness, up-river in the uncharted wilderness of central Africa. The story is a still-controversial meditation on the dangers and excitements of colonial power, with the novella either adopted as a visionary anti-empire narrative, or a racist diatribe that silences the voice of the natives.
"What was most interesting for me was the nature of storytelling," O'Regan says. "The most important thing in the book and the libretto is that we see the lie that Marlow tells." Charged with delivering the dead Kurtz's effects to his fiancee, Marlow tells her that Kurtz's last words were her name; in fact, they were: "The horror, the horror."
"One of my favourite lines in the book is when Marlow says, 'It seemed to me as if I was also buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets,'" says O'Regan. "And that's the drama of all this, that he is finally able to say, 'I saw all of this', and the real tragedy is that he also kept it a secret. And it's in that gap between the truth and the narrative of the truth where our piece of drama can fit. That's what music can do; it can amplify the ambiguity of the story."
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