Music
Music has always occupied a central place in Roger Scruton's life and thought. His works on the philosophy of music are widely read and discussed and it is to music that he has always turned for consolation in times of trouble and celebration in times of joy. In this way, when discouraged from writing words by the hostile reactions his words seem to provoke, he writes music, secure in the conviction that his music will provoke no reactions at all. This conviction suffered a set back when his opera, The Minister, was warmly received.
Opera
Mark Milhofer as
the Minister, Quenington 1994, Oxford 1998. (Photograph by John Haynes)"Roger Scruton has written an opera. Enough of Art and Imagination, enough of The Aesthetics of Music. It was time for the real thing. Scruton had an Idea, failed to interest any composer in it, and so, with characteristic determination, rolled up his sleeves and got on with it. The Minister, a one-acter about a politician who exchanges love for power and meets his nemesis, has been performed twice in Prague, but its English [public] premiere took place on May Day . . . Its six scenes unfold in hauntings and in masks: the Britten of Curlew River and The Turn of the Screw is irresistibly invoked. But Scruton, whose music is tonal and you've guessed it - partial to the odd leitmotif, is a diligent and sometimes daring pupil. A single dinner party at which the Minister's masked guests, Sir Henry and Lady Milhouse, are revealed (or imagined in his psyche) as former abandoned lovers, yields some robust and eloquent solo writing, fluently if conservatively folded into and out of ensemble. And these centrepieces are framed by ministerial soliloquies with a view to the sea; the 16 piece band, conducted by Jonathan Williams, enjoys its fleeting, shimmering echoes of Cosi fan tutte. Scruton's libretto deals trenchantly with social tittle-tattle, guilt, forgiveness; and his score responds with a passing Elgarian ache, a heady Straussian waltz, dislocated by dissonance and dry rhythm. . . for most of its 60 minutes The Minister is a disarmingly unpretentious and often artful piece of writing." Hilary Finch, The Times (6/5/98)
"It's a shortish piece - six scenes played continuously - for four singers and chamber orchestra strengthened by keyboard and timpani, helpfully called 'Lot 18' and deftly conducted by Jonathan Williams. References abound - crisis-point Greek drama, the masks of Noh plays, Eliotian cocktail parties. The music too, as one should have expected is tonal, melodic, indeed conventional, with sombre lower strings, keyboard and timpani to mark emotional climaxes, falling phrases of the central concept of 'forgiveness', and several Britten allusions. Richard Hughes, in what might be called the Ian Richardson part, agonises convincingly; Miranda Rogers and Tim Armstrong-Taylor are moving as the ditched mistress Olga and betrayed homosexual William, and Sarah Wright has the enigmatic other-worldliness as the catalytic servant. The ensemles are well-written and the powerful last scene is in highest romantic mode. So those who came to scoff remained to praise." Jeannine Alton, The Oxford Times, (8/5/98)