Dick van der Harst, Howard Moody, and Moneim Adwan, Orfeo and Majnun (2018)

I suppose every opera is a collaboration of sorts between composer and librettist, but it's surprising--well, maybe not surprising, but noticeable when you think about it--that there aren't more musical collaborations. Apart from posthumously-completed works, I think this is the first one I've seen. Ever. How about that? You'd think that different composers playing off each other could produce and interesting tension or drive them to new heights--or it could be a disaster, of course. But based on this one, I'd like to see more.

Good news: this is still available on La Monnaie De Munt's youtube page (though you'll have to autotranslate if you want English subtitles). It's an East-meets-West project: you have the familiar Orfeo and Eurydice, but it's combined here with the Arabic story of Layla and Majnun. A fairly typical story: Majnun wants to marry Layla but he's too poor so her dad makes her marry someone else. He runs off into the desert. He's sad, she's sad, and in the end they die. Well, in theory. In here, both couples are reunited, as we often see in operatic Orpheus stories.

It's a very abstract kind of thing, without a strong narrative thread. The most interesting thing is that the Orfeo and Eurydice part is sung in English, and the Layla and Majnun part in Arabic--first time I've ever heard an opera sung in the latter language. There's also spoken text in French and German, though I think this is just the ol "in the language of the audience" thing--which would make it odd if it were performed in an English- or Arabic-speaking country. Wouldn't be even.

Regardless, the music is really gorgeous and I liked it a lot, even if a part of me was begging for more actual story. Arabic singing is really appealing to me; I'd love to hear a full opera in the language. When you're in a Muslim country you have to hear the Call to Prayer many times every day, which is not sung, exactly, but in a song-like idiom. It can drive you crazy when it wakes you up at like four a.m., but it actually can be kind of beautiful, at least when you hear it through a high-quality sound system. I'm rambling, but my only point is that the language is good for music. I like it, and I liked this piece a lot. And it encourages intercultural understanding, so that's good.