Given its world premiere at the Brighton festival, Ed Hughes’s chamber opera States of Innocence marks the 350th anniversary of Milton’s death. Setting a libretto by Peter Cant, it dauntingly takes the writing of Paradise Lost as the starting point for a meditation on the relationship between creator and creation in both aesthetics and theology, as well as an interrogation of the poem’s sexual politics. You can’t help but feel it buckles under the weight of the task it sets itself.
We see the blind Milton (John Tomlinson, no less) dictating Paradise Lost to his wife (Rozanna Madylus), his assistant (Thomas Elwin) and a group of friends and family, played by a small vocal ensemble. The characters are soon reconfigured as the protagonists of the poem, so Milton becomes God, his wife becomes Eve, and the resentful assistant morphs into Satan. Much is made of inconsistencies in the Book of Genesis as to whether God created Adam and Eve simultaneously, and therefore as equals, or whether Eve was created from Adam and consequently his subordinate. Milton ambivalently accepts the latter, but Cant and Hughes, drawing on a passage from the poem in which Eve gazes at her reflection in water, give her an alter ego called Eve’s Image (Rachel Duckett), who voices the alternative perspective in language drawn from The Woman’s Bible, written in 1895 by the American activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Hughes’s score can be sinewy, eclectic and attractive. A folk song from Cromwellian times threads its way through it. Piano figurations pick out the pealing of church bells. Adam (countertenor Matthew Farrell, replacing the indisposed Tim Morgan) contemplates the movements of the cosmos to a whirling scherzo, and a set of variations on a ground bass gradually ratchets up the tension during Satan’s temptation of Eve.
The real problem, however, is that we hear too little of the text – fatal in an opera essentially about literature. Apart from Tomlinson’s fierce delivery of the poem’s closing lines, and a tellingly sorrowful aria for Elwin that sets the famous passage about the mind as its own hell or heaven, we get little indication why Paradise Lost ranks among the towering achievements in the English language. There’s nothing wrong, meanwhile, with the concept of an opera of ideas, but we have to be able to engage with them, which is well nigh impossible here when the vocal writing for Eve’s Image is so stratospherically high that vowels and consonants become indistinct. Consistently fine voices and excellent conducting from Andrew Gourlay don’t really supply the necessary clarity. Nor does Tim Hopkins’ handsome semi-staging, with its video projections (by Ian Winters) of whirling skyscapes, lush vegetation, astrological charts and strikingly beautiful chiaroscuro lighting.
