Composer Jack Symonds explains the link between his String Quartet No.2 and its relationship to his new large-scale opera Gilgamesh, which receives its World Premiere season Thu 26 Sep—Sat 5 October 2024.
When I received the commission in 2021 from the Australian String Quartet (ASQ) for a new string quartet, I was deep in the planning and sketching for a large-scale opera adapting The Epic of Gilgamesh. The musical material I was conceiving for this opera was in a highly volatile state; it didn’t have a fixed instrumentation, duration or form – it was like a kind of inchoate lava, incapable of behaving in a rational way, no matter what I did to it. However, I felt sure its essence was ‘right’ for various scenes, characters, motifs and philosophical/existential ideas I needed to create in the opera.
Conceiving and composing the string quartet naturally fused with these ‘Gilgamesh’ ideas, bringing them into sharp focus, giving them a definite and precise character and affixing them to the colour of a string quartet—specifically the colour of the ASQ itself.
The formal strategy I adopted for the string quartet was completely different from the opera. Opposite, in fact. It was very important to me that the string quartet wasn’t merely a study for a larger work; it needed to operate satisfactorily on its own abstract terms and with its own independent form and expressive arc. In the opera, huge scenes must be welded together from disparate materials that sustain themselves with a narrative flow over 2.5 hours in the theatre. In this string quartet, I pushed this ‘abstract’ content to its logical breaking point and extremity and took it on a very different path in 20 minutes.
About 90% of the string quartet found its way into the opera, spread throughout the duration. There is no chronological link between the unfolding of the quartet and the opera, although the small-scale flow of various sections is maintained in both. After hearing a performance of the quartet in Canberra, I conceived an ‘alternate ending’ to the string quartet which I also knew would be the ending of the whole opera, taking this long-conceived material into a barcarole that laps into infinity.
In the quartet, the characters of the vengeful goddess of love, Ishtar and the half-human, half-animal Enkidu are explored thoroughly, even though the narrative sequences in the opera are totally re-made into an abstract instrumental form.
As soon as I heard the ASQ play the piece in rehearsal, I knew I had found the heart of the soundworld of ‘Gilgamesh’. It was hugely inspiring to hear this material come vividly to life, and I wrote the rest of the opera with the ASQ’s colour and boundless virtuosity uppermost in my mind. I am thrilled they are playing in its World Premiere, and amazed at their intuitive understanding of my music.
Written by Jack Symonds
String Quartet No.2
Gilgamesh is presented by Opera Australia, Sydney Chamber Opera and Carriageworks in association with Australian String Quartet and Ensemble Offspring
Jack Symonds’ String Quartet No.2 was commissioned by the Australian String Quartet for the London season of ANAM Quartetthaus through the Australian String Quartet Richard Divall Australian Music Fund