The Day After (2015)
(Version with Chorus)

Jonathan Dove THE DAY AFTER Opera in One Act Libretto by April de Angelis Commissioned by Holland Opera with assistance from the Eduard van Beinum Foundation.

The earth bursts into flame, in the highest regions first, opens in deep fissures and all its moisture dries up. The meadows turn white, the trees are consumed with all their leaves, and the scorched corn makes its own destruction. ....

Great cities are destroyed with all their walls, and the flames reduce whole nations with all their peoples to ashes. Metamorphoses, Book II Ovid's description of the catastrophe wrought by Phaeton's reckless journey has the vividness of cinema. Phaeton has rashly been entrusted with task of pulling the sun across the sky: he loses control of it, and careers through the heavens before coming perilously close to the earth. Then Libya became a desert, the heat drying up her moisture… The sea contracts and what was a moment ago wide sea is a parched expanse of sand. Mountains emerge from the water... The fish dive deep, and the dolphins no longer dare to rise arcing above the water, as they have done, into the air. The lifeless bodies of seals float face upwards on the deep… Writing two thousand years ago, Ovid’s apocalyptic vision has a particular resonance for us now, sensitized as we are becoming to global warming and vanishing species. April de Angelis has reimagined the story as something that has just happened, presented as an act of communal storytelling by the survivors of a global catastrophe, who relive the events that led to the disaster.

The Day After was written for Holland Opera, a company that often works outdoors on a very large scale, albeit with relatively few performers, frequently making dramatic use of fire. Director Joke Hoolboom and conductor Niek Idelenburg were very clear that a strong myth is needed for this kind of storytelling. It occurred to me that the story of Phaeton could be presented on this scale, and it felt timely: a story of human hubris and the uncontrollable power of the sun bringing the planet into danger. The original production outside Fort Rhijnauwen, in the summer of 2015, was spectacular. The sun’s chariot was an extraordinary machine that travelled along tracks of fire, and Phoebus’s thunderbolt created a huge fireball, whose giant smoke-ring floated high in the sky over nearby Utrecht, persuading some of the residents that they were seeing a UFO. Five singers (amplified) played the individual characters, and sometimes sang together as a chorus. While we were working on the opera, Joke and Niek saw Graham Vick’s production of Life is a Dream in Birmingham, and were inspired to expand the small cast of The Day After to a similarly large community chorus. However, Dutch singing traditions are different to British: it proved impossible to find enough good amateur singers, and this idea had to be abandoned. But it made me realise that the opera would gain from having a real chorus, who could more easily suggest all the people of the earth trying to save themselves. I hoped to see it done in this way one day, so I am grateful to ENO for making this happen now.