‘Alice in Wonderland’ gets curiouser and curiouser

It’s a curious thing, our love for Alice in Wonderland. One hundred and fifty years since its publication, Lewis Carroll’s creation is more visible than ever on our screens and stages (Damon Albarn and Moira Buffini’s musical Wonder.Land opened at the National Theatre this week). Even a range of kitchen paraphernalia is now proudly decorated with John Tenniel’s original illustrations for the book.

It’s curiouser still that classical musicians have been among the loudest of those clamouring to make their mark on this year’s anniversary. First the Royal Opera House revived Joby Talbot and Christopher Wheeldon’s 2011 ballet. Then came an opera each from Unsuk Chin and Will Todd. And last week the Wimbledon International Music Festival hosted a musical project consisting of 13 new pieces for violin and piano by 13 composers, each based on one of the book’s chapters, plus its opening poem. Wonderland, created by violinist Matthew Trusler and pianist Ashley Wass, has been making its way across the UK since March. Other stops include Germany, Hungary and Cyprus.

This tale evidently fascinates composers. For Stephen Hough, one of Wonderland’s 13 contributors, that’s at least partly due to its modernity: “It springs us at least 50 years in the future into the modernist era in its whole way of thinking about logic and what makes sense.”

Hough elaborates: “The way the mind thought about precision started to change in the early- to mid-19th century. It has been said that you didn’t need to have a clock that told the time perfectly until you had trains that would leave at a particular time. Alice in Wonderland is looking at this precision world, which had already begun, and then turning it upside-down.”

Hough is well-placed to comment, having set to music the most nonsensical chapter of all: the Mad Hatter’s tea party. But modernity is only one of many reasons why composers seem to keep gravitating towards Alice. Some are enticed by its richly imaginative landscape. Others take inspiration from its language. As Hough points out: “Alice works on so many levels, like the fables of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. They can be taken as face-value stories but you can also go deeply into them and see them as parables of the dark side of human life.”

Indeed, if this year’s anniversary tributes have put the spotlight on anything, it’s the extent to which interpretations can differ. At one end of the spectrum is Will Todd’s opera, whose jolly, jazz-inflected score has “family-friendly” written all over it; at the other extreme is Unsuk Chin’s, which takes us down a far darker rabbit hole. Chin, after all, learnt her craft from the avant-garde Hungarian composer György Ligeti, and her score clearly demonstrates his strengths, not least in its tendency towards sonic extremes.

But it is strange that the more faithfully the opera follows the book, the more it seems to lose its way. Chin brings individual scenes vividly to life, whether those be the grumblings of the Caterpillar on a solo bass clarinet or the pipings of the Mock Turtle on the mouth organ. Then she struggles to weave them into a convincing dramatic arc. Meanwhile, attempts to recreate certain passages of Carroll’s text come across as laboured or simply dull.

Composer Joby Talbot says the book does not translate easily into music: “It is episodic and you have a main character who is professionally disinterested and unconnected. She’s almost an emotional vacuum.” What’s more, Alice in Wonderland relies heavily on wordplay and, as Talbot points out, ‘‘there’s nothing like taking a joke and getting a load of people to sing it very, very loudly to really make the joke not funny”.

One solution, he says, is to take dramatic liberties. In his ballet, Alice falls in love with the Knave of Hearts, providing the narrative with greater dramatic thrust. “You can’t really have a great big ballet without some element of romance in it,” Talbot says. As for the novel’s humour, he generated it using grand balletic gesture: the pastiche of the “Rose Adagio” from The Sleeping Beauty, for example. His score cleverly satirised ballerinas and the very nature of ballet. What it didn’t always manage to do was to tap into a subtler shade of humour and that sense of gentle eccentricity so fundamental to the novel.

Are these beyond a composer’s reach? Hough doesn’t think so. “Humour generally comes from the unexpected. If someone’s telling a joke, the whole point is the punchline that you’re not expecting. I think you can do this musically because in traditional classical music we expect certain things to happen in certain places. Haydn understood this and Mozart and Beethoven.”

Hough seems to have taken this lesson to heart. His take on the Mad Hatter’s tea party opens with familiar allusions, to Brahms’s “Lullaby” and, aptly, “Tea for Two”, then delights in wrong-footing the audience. Harmonies land in the wrong place. Melodies come to premature conclusions. There are frequent digressions into polka, tango and waltz. Most memorably, the moment the music gets into its stride, it’s time for tea, represented by six crashing chords on the piano. The result is a mad jamboree, one that faithfully reflects the novel’s charm and wit.

Wonderland as a whole, however, was a mixed success. A victim of its own repetitive format, in which narration and music were constantly alternated, it struggled to maintain momentum. So did the pieces, which collectively failed to take us on a journey. That said, many of them worked well in isolation: Howard Blake’s lyrical take on the fifth chapter, “Advice from a Caterpillar”, for instance, and Sally Beamish’s feather-light approach to the preface, which effectively evoked the mystery of Carroll’s original. More significantly, they showcased each composer’s individuality, demonstrating why Alice in Wonderland, despite its challenges, still remains a rich source of inspiration.

wonderland150.com

Photographs: Alex Brenner; Will Cooper