After 14 years playing viola in the Berlin Philharmonic, Brett Dean craved uncertainty.
He had been creating his own music since shortly after he joined the orchestra in 1985, first improvising in underground Berlin clubs, then writing for classical ensembles. By 1999, he was itching to compose full time. But his wife, the painter Heather Betts, was already a freelancer, and the couple had two young daughters.
“We’ll manage somehow,” Betts recalled telling Dean. “What we can’t manage is if you don’t do this. Then you become stale and bitter.”
It was Betts, Dean said, who got him to take the leap. She had the “impetus to boot me up the bum,” he said, “and make me take the risk.”
That risk paid off spectacularly. While many Berlin Philharmonic musicians have gone on to become soloists and conductors, Dean is a rare case: the orchestra member turned composer. His music, of impeccable craft and unusual verve, is performed frequently by the world’s leading orchestras — including the one he left behind. Last month, the Berlin Philharmonic announced Dean, 64, as its composer in residence for next season.
His work has also appeared on some of the most prestigious opera stages, and on Sunday, a new work by Dean called “Of One Blood,” premieres at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. Arguably his highest-profile commission to date, the piece concerns the tumultuous relationship between the cousins Queen Elizabeth I of England and Mary, Queen of Scots.
Like its subject, this opera is a family affair, with a libretto by Betts, music by Dean, and one of their daughters, the mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, among the cast.
Dean’s operas have a musical variety, psychological insight and wit rare in contemporary music. His first, “Bliss” (2010), is a fever dream about an Australian businessman who survives a near-death experience and believes he has landed in hell. His second, “Hamlet,” premiered in 2017 at the Glyndebourne Festival in England and traveled to the Metropolitan Opera in 2022.
For “Of One Blood,” Dean has extended his fascination with the Elizabethan period. After “Bliss,” Dean felt “a kind of poetic deficit,” he said. Starting from “Hamlet,” he said, he felt more inspired by the unfamiliar rhythms and idioms of 16th-century English than by contemporary language.
For the libretto, Betts collated historical material, much of it from real correspondence between Elizabeth I and Mary. She brought to the project a feeling for the turns of phrase that would catch Dean’s ear.
“Simply because we’ve basically spent our entire lives together, I know why he writes music,” Betts said. “I know what ignites the music in him,” she said.
Dean said the new work would be less philosophical and more direct than some previous works. “My hope is that it continually interests the ear above all,” he added, “and then the eyes and the emotions will hopefully come along for the ride.”
A Muscular Approach
Dean was raised in a working-class family in Brisbane, Australia. His mother was a homemaker and his father worked at a power station. Both of his grandmothers played instruments, though, and he began learning the violin around 8.
A few years later, he joined the Queensland Youth Orchestra, which kindled his love of music. Playing Holst’s “The Planets” there, as well as Mahler’s First Symphony alongside members of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, stirred powerful feelings in him, he recalled.
Classical music was an unusual hobby for a boy in 1970s Brisbane. Although Dean also played Australian rules football — the ultimate currency of Australian manliness — his elementary school classmates gave him “a really hard time” for playing the violin, he said.
When he switched from violin to viola as a teenager, Dean began experiencing the sound of an orchestra from deeper within.
He met Betts, then also a musician, in the viola section of the Australian Youth Orchestra. Betts said he struck her as a quiet, gentle man with a muscular approach to his instrument.
In 1982, while studying viola at the Queensland Conservatorium, Dean met Wolfram Christ, then the principal viola of the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan. At a meeting in Sydney, Dean played for Christ, who said that if he made it to West Berlin, he would accept him into his class.
Dean and Betts arrived in the city in January 1984. The place was gray, grim and still marked by war, but had an appealing intensity, Dean recalled. Dean began substituting at the Berlin Philharmonic. “The very second gig that I was asked to play was a Karajan concert,” he said. “That was a pinch-me moment.”
As a member of the orchestra, Dean played under Karajan and his successor Claudio Abbado. But he missed a more creative outlet. Through Betts’s mother, he got to know Simon Hunt, an Australian post-punk musician who later created the satirical drag persona Pauline Pantsdown. Dean and Hunt connected as artists eager to explore new territories.
Dean “loved being in the Berlin Philharmonic, but he wanted to do more than just sit there, play and respond to Karajan’s commands,” Hunt said. “And I was over the musical structures of a post-punk type band with major or minor chords and nothing in between.”
In 1987, they formed a duo called Frame Cut Frame. Dean improvised viola lines and Hunt used primitive sampling technology to create eclectic soundscapes. They played at underground venues — including Fischlabor, an early predecessor of Berlin’s techno clubs — and released two albums. For one performance piece, meant to channel hostile grocery store cashiers, Hunt and Dean threw change into the audience.
At the same time, he was exploring composing in a more classical idiom. He would pump his Philharmonic colleagues for information about their instruments. The percussionist Jan Schlichte recalled taking Dean to a storage room and showing him a range of mallets and performance techniques.
Dean’s potential as a composer was quickly apparent, Schlichte, said. “In all his pieces, there’s an incredible richness of ideas,” Schlichte said. “He has an insane feeling for sounds and mixtures of sounds.”
Richness and Risk
In his Dean’s first major chamber work, “Night Window” (1993) for clarinet, viola and piano, a wistful first movement is followed by one in which the clarinet rudely honks and squawks. In the third, a series of delicate variations congeal into an impassioned climax.
Those shifting moods are typical for Dean, whose music combines a restless sonic imagination with an intimate knowledge of the classical canon. His approaches to gesture and especially contrast draw deeply from his experience with the repertoire.
In that sense, said Vladimir Jurowski, the Bavarian State Opera’s music director, who is conducting the “Of One Blood” premiere, Dean “is a Richard Strauss for our times.”
Like Strauss, Dean is a creative orchestrator and a canny dramatist. Late in “Of One Blood,” Mary, Queen of Scots is placed under house arrest in England. An oboe plays a desolate, misshapen trill over an impassive string chord. The passage evokes the loneliness of her imprisonment in the countryside.
In “Hamlet,” adapted from Shakespeare by Matthew Jocelyn, funny passages rub shoulders with melancholy ones, which makes the funny moments funnier and the sad ones more affecting. In one scene, the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sing in a close canon, an old musical technique that Dean uses to depict sycophancy. Then the bustling music stops. You hear, among other instruments, a high, dissonant, offstage accordion, like a laugh catching in the throat.
While “Of One Blood” is built on poetic language — like a line attributed to Elizabeth I: “I may not be a lion, but I am a lion’s cub, and I have a lion’s heart” — it also has surprisingly frank sexual jokes. Early on, Mary’s arrogant lover is described as “best proportioned,” to titters from her servants.
Such jokes work thanks to Dean’s traditional approach to text setting. His operas don’t deconstruct the genre. “What thrills me about Brett Dean,” said Claus Guth, who is directing “Of One Blood” in Munich, “is that he comes from the tradition that holds onto opera as it was created and as it has existed for centuries.
“He doesn’t break the mold,” Guth added “but continues working with these same criteria.”
Those are the criteria against which he’ll measure the new opera’s success. If the piece “doesn’t stand up as a score, as a piece of music, as a fusion of words and music,” Dean said, “then not even the most brilliant staging and performance will necessarily save it from being the lemon that it probably then genuinely is.”
Then again, Dean knows something about taking chances. After he left the Berlin Philharmonic to be composer, “I’ve never looked back, and I feel very fortunate,” he said. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
Source:
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