Between Two Silences is a chamber opera for three sopranos, four cellos and piano with a libretto by Carol S. Lashof, based on the writings of Virginia Woolf.
The Jukebox contains four extracts (tracks 2-5) from the opera recorded at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.
Between Two Silences has yet to receive a fully-staged performance. If you are interested in premiering the work or have any other queries I'd be delighted to hear from you. me.
Between Two Silences: Synopsis
Between Two Silences takes place in Virginia Woolf's writing studio on the morning of March 28, 1941, the day on which Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse. Threatened by the forces of war and the mounting conviction that she is losing her sanity, she struggles to find her way out of a trough of despair. Virginia Woolf's complex consciousness is represented by three characters, all of whom are Woolf at age fifty-nine. MRS. WOOLF is the social persona, most concerned with her relationships to others, her place in society, and how other people see her. VIRGINIA is the private self, the most emotional and direct of the three. And VW is the writer: she analyzes, she mediates, and she tries "to put the severed parts together."
The opera opens joyously, with MRS. WOOLF composing a letter of thanks to her friend and sometime lover Vita Sackville-West. Vita has given Virginia and her husband, Leonard, a whole pound of butter, an extraordinary luxury in this time of war. The characters rhapsodize:
Bombs fall near me. Trifles. A plane shot down on the marsh. Trifles.
Floods. No, nothing seems to make a wreath on the pedestal fitting your butter.
But the effort to focus on immediate joys—such as the goodness of her friends and the taste of butter ("It's something like honey/It's something like dew")—fails to eclipse her dread of what the future holds. VIRGINIA wonders when the next air raid will come, and she confesses that she has begun to hear voices again. VW muses bitterly: "We pour to the edge of a precipice . . . / and then?"
The characters seek refuge in the past, calling upon memories of childhood summers "and of the waves/ that break against the shore," calling most of all upon memories of a seemingly perfect mother who "brought to life the crowded/ merry world of our childhood." But the death of her mother when Virginia was just thirteen put an end to the safe and joyful world of her childhood, leaving Virginia vulnerable to bouts of madness and leaving both her and her sister Vanessa vulnerable to the emotional demands of their father, as well as to the sexual demands of their half-brothers. Only the death of their father in 1904 frees the young women from the confines of their Victorian upbringing and from the "cramped house" where seventeen people were "shut up together . . . telling lies." They move to Bloomsbury to begin a life "of adventure and reform." VW exults: "We were going to paint;/ we were going to write."
It is by writing that Woolf has come to terms with the shocks and blows from the "enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life." VIRGINIA says:
I attach myself to the breath of life with my pen.
Now, at the height of the second world war and feeling her tenuous grip on sanity starting to loosen, Woolf tries to bring "wholeness, order, speed" into her world by beginning a new novel. But she cannot summon her powers. VW acknowledges:
I can't spin a sentence. I sit mumbling and turning. And nothing flits by my brain, which is as a blank window.
In a last effort, MRS. WOOLF attaches a new nib to her pen and tries to compose a friendly letter to a neighbour, but she soon abandons the attempt. Doubtful that England will survive the war and certain that she is going mad again, Woolf chooses to take her life. The voices of VW and VIRGINIA alternate and overlap as they compose suicide notes to Leonard and Vanessa.
The writer's voice survives. The opera ends with the words of Virginia Woolf:
Behind the cotton wool of daily life is hidden a pattern that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with. The whole world is a work of art; we are parts of the work of art. There is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically, there is no God. We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
Carol S. Lashof
Carol S. Lashof (librettist) - Professor of English and Drama, School of Liberal Arts, Saint Mary's College of California.
Carol is the author of a dozen plays for the stage and radio. Her work includes: The Melting Pot, full-length stage play based on Israel Zangwill's 1908 melodrama. Premiered January 2004 at Saint Mary's College; Matzah and What Color Is Your Mama? published in Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry, (Theatre Communications Group, 2001); Medusa's Tale, published in Plays in One Act (Ecco Press, 1991) and in An Anthology of Contemporary American Short Plays (Foreign Language Press, Beijing, China, 2006); The Story, a radio play produced by Pacifica Radio in Berkeley, California and aired on National Public Radio affiliates throughout the United States. For further information click on the Contact page.
Abigail Sudbury (soprano) - Abigail studied for a Bmus at Goldsmith's College, and is planning to study Performance as a Post-Graduate this year. She has played 1st Lady, Mslle Silberkang, Countess Almaviva, Cherubino, Donna Elvira (Mozart), Dido (Purcell) and the Marschallin (Strauss) in full productions and scenes from operas, and has attended Masterclasses run by Peter Ford, Norman Beedie and Marie-Therese Driscoll. Whilst studying, she collaborated with composer Walter Cardew, in his setting of Blake poems. She has performed Poulenc's Gloria at Peterborough Cathedral, and Elgar's Sea Pictures at the University of Sussex. She has performed as a soloist with The Purcell Singers and the English Baroque Choir. Most recently, Abigail sang with world renowned Harpist Christina Rhys in Cork, a selection of songs by Britten, Arne and Vierne. Future performances include Szymanowski's Stabat Mater, and Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs this Autumn with Goldsmith's Orchestra
Between Two Silences: Libretto Extracts
Jukebox Track 2
MRS. WOOLF (at her desk, composing a letter.) Dear Vita: I wish I were Queen
VW (To the audience.) I'm sure you no longer remember the taste of butter. So I'll tell you what it's like: the taste of butter! It's something like honey. It's something like dew.
MRS. WOOLF Lord, Vita! Please congratulate the cows from us, and the dairymaid, and may I propose, if the calf is a male, that he be known as Leonard. And if it's a girl may she be called ever onward:
ALL I can't break off this rhapsody, for it's more than a year since I saw a whole pound of butter. Nothing else seems to matter. Yes, our house in London was bombed. Tomorrow our books will come to us here, all mildewed and battered. Yes, I've been made the Treasurer of the Institute of Women.Bombs fall near me. Trifles.A plane shot down on the marsh. Trifles. Floods. No, nothing seems to make a wreath on the pedestal fitting your butter.
Jukebox Track 3
VIRGINIA Things have gone wrong somehow...the war... We wait for the knives to sharpen. It is gone now, the outer wall. No echo comes back to reassure us. I begin again to hear voices, wild, like water after the storm, roiled and grey. No echo comes back... all is wide and wild as the desert now.
VW It is March 28th today; it's nineteen hundred and forty-one. Does that mean something? What does it mean? There is no winter, no spring ...
VIRGINIA Why did our parents conceive us...
VW No summer, no autumn, no...
VIRGINIA so we would see this particular stretch of time?
VW We pour to the edge of a precipice...and then?
Jukebox Track 4
MRS. WOOLF When I was a child, these shocks, these moments of being, often left me in despair.
VIRGINIA My brother Thoby and I were fighting. I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand and stood there and let him pommel me.
VW And then there was the moment of the puddle in the path,
VIRGINIA When for no reason
VW No reason I could discover, everything
VIRGINIA became unreal; I was suspended. I tried to touch something ...
VW I was suspended. Everything became unreal.
VIRGINIA That evening, I huddle at my end of the bath, silent, motionless. I say nothing, not even to Nessa,
VW I felt as if I had been struck by some sledge hammer blow; I felt exposed and passive below an avalanche of meaning, and I had nothing to ward off the blow.
VIRGINIA That night I lay awake longing for Mother to come. She told me to think of all...
MRS. WOOLF the lovely things ... of summer at St. Ives, and of the waves that break against the shore.
VW I remember lying in bed in the nursery at St. Ives...
VIRGINIA I was half asleep, half awake, hearing the sound of the waves break, one, two, sending a splash, one, two, of water across the shore and then breaking, one, two, behind a yellow blind; the wind pushing a leaf across the floor.
VW If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills— then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory...
VIRGINIA of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light and feeling: it is almost impossible that I should be here.
VW May 5th, 1895: our childhood world stopped.
VIRGINIA I leaned out the nursery window. It was a beautiful morning, about six, I suppose, very still, very blue. I saw the doctor walk away. I saw the pigeons float and settle.Everything had come to an end.
Jukebox Track 5
MRS. WOOLF The characters of Mother and Father are at the centre of To the Lighthouse. The is Father in a boat, reciting, "We perished each alone" as he crushes a dying mackerel.
All texts are copyright of Carol S. Lashof with permission of the Woolf Estate