Due to ANZAC Day my recently deceased father is in my mind for he was a returned serviceman, an ANZAC Man. Quite by chance I hear The St Mark Passion by the Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijo. It’s a rolling choir of tumbling voices, leaping unison, splintering to harmony and I imagine a choreography. I see men leaping, falling, they are spirit figures, dead soldiers, the ones who never returned, the ones whose names are set into the many cenotaphs throughout Aotearoa, every town has them, the remembered dead.
Like many baby-boomers I have my ANZAC memories, my father and his friends swilling beer and passing the pouch for hand rolled tobacco, talking of El Alamein, Tobruk, Crete, Monte Cassino. Such memories and the notion that the dead might return to tell their story lingers and I begin to research and write. I have my fathers photos of his time in Italy, letters he sent home to his mother and I also visit his now elderly war comrade, a man I remember from my childhood. This is Major Maurice Robertson, my dads’ old mate, alone in his farm house at 87. I went there often as a child and would gaze at at de-commissioned pistol hanging on the back of his study door, my mate Johnny Robertson would show me while the men were sitting in the garden rolling their smokes, drinking, talking. At the time of my visit some 40 years later Maurice somewhat reluctantly told me of some of his war experience and as we said our goodbyes, he told me
“We never wanted to go but we knew we had to and we made the best of it. There was a job that had to be done, we just wanted it over so we could come home. It was a bloody business really.”
Further research only served to cause a feeling of dread, of a heavy burden to shoulder, how to do justice to the ANZAC tradition, which of the hundreds of stories could I write about?
More research lead me to focus on the battle of Monte Cassino, a particularly wretched conflict and one of which my father had often spoken. The facts are frightening, 343 New Zealand dead, the brutal pummeling of the Māori battalion at the Cassino railway station, the New Zealand General Bernard Freyberg persuading allies to bomb the Benedictine Abbey.
Gradually a series of iconic scenes emerged, an antipodean war widow at a European war cemetery, a train station in a small New Zealand town with locals huddled in tearful farewell to the pride of their valleys. A country picnic where a young man farewells the girl he always wanted to touch.
Michael and I maintained a constant conversation as we moved closer to an operatic confrontation and then one afternoon we were able to identify the penultimate scene, the super-objective of the drama and we named it The Juniper Passion. Our opera would be an encounter between Catholic mysticism of the Benedictine kind, Nietzsche as appropriated by the Nazis and self reliance of the Do-it-Yourself Kiwi kind.
We decided that these were the three central dynamics to our story and we should get them to confront one another within the context of the battle of Monte Cassino. My challenge was to somehow get those three into the same time and place.
A nice problem.
Then I read Hapgood and Richardson Monte Cassino
which gives a detailed account of the art of Monte Cassino monastery and how the Germans moved it from the abbey in anticipation of the allied bombing. The Nazi propaganda machine made much of their self-promoted saving graces,
and yes, ancient treasures were saved, but many were transported directly to Germany, stolen, war booty. And so from all this I birthed a fiction, the story of a Madonna carved from juniper, and this precious relic would draw into its presence a Benedictine monk, a Nazi art thief and a New Zealander, an infantryman.
Michael Williams went on to compose a moving and powerful score. The entire opera was recorded and upon hearing this recording an Italian producer invited us to premier the work at Teatro Roma an ancient Roman amphitheater on the slopes of Monte Cassino. This took place on June 21st 2013.
Celebrated poet and theatre critic Maria Lanciotti reveiwed The Juniper Passion at Cassino. The following is a quote from the review.
For The Juniper Passion opera company one word comes to mind: indescribable: eight elements with one soul.
The philosophy and ethos of this opera is rowing against.
Against the absenteeism of a society distracted and disengaged, against the Cassandras and dropouts bereft against bureaucracy and bureaucratic fashion.
Against the skepticism and logic (illogical) of consumerism.
Against the phlegm of the institutions and against the concept of convenience of said 'crisis'.
Rowing against the distrust upon which this society feeds; a madness, in short, an irrational obstinacy.
Instead this opera feeds the faith to push away disillusion.
Because someone had to take steps to welcome you in our beautiful, suffering Italy, a proposal for such a significant and artistically powerful event.
This opera can lead to 'outbreaks' around the old Europe, and build a centre for a collection of innovative proposals:
A launching pad for a new takeoff.
Our experience of gifting this opera to the Italians was exceptional due to their response and our sense of reconnecting to the Italian experience of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Michael’s composition and our New Zealand singers and dancers received great acclaim and it was a gratifying example of what opera can do, to reach deep into the lives of strangers on the other side of the world. After our performance at Sapienza University I was approached by a family of Italians, the daughter translated the words of her mother who said,
“I was eight years old when the Americans bombed my town of Cassino. When the planes came my family would take us onto the mountain and we would watch the American bombs fall like pearls from the planes.
Then we would go down to search amongst the ruins for what remained of our houses. My father was killed by those bombs. I am very old now but I heard about your opera so I wanted to come, and your father was there, and I was there and now you are here. This is very good for all of us. Your opera is beautiful. I don’t speak English but I understand everything.
And thank you for giving this to us. Thank you”.
