IRMA: An Opera. Op. 12. 1969

These notes are reprinted, with some small changes, from those accompanying the CD version of IRMA made by AMM for Matchless Recordings in 1988. Elise Lorraine sang the role of Irma and Phil Minton that of Grenville. I made yet another farewell performance as The Narrator and the ensemble consisted of John Tilbury, Keith Rowe, Eddie Prevost, Lol Coxhill, Ian Mitchell, with Birte Pederson as auxiliary vocalist. The version of the Libretto given here was also used by AMM for the U.S. première which took place in 1992 at the Stewart Theatre of the University of North Carolina in Raleigh. Making my positively-the-last-farewell - appearance as The Narrator I was fortunate to participate in a performance that almost exactly matched (in terms of sound) my first imaginings.

IRMA: The Score

The general score of IRMA comes from treated fragments of a Victorian novel, A Human Document, by W.H. Mallock. In that I originally bought this book for threepence in 1966, IRMA is thus, authentically, a threepenny opera.

IRMA was composed in 1969, completed in fact on the day a man first walked on the moon. It was first published in a small french avant-garde review (OU: ed. Henri Chopin) in 1970. The score exists as an autonomous artwork and is in the Altmann Museum in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

The score takes the form of a large sheet with prose directions (each a treated fragment of the novel) for the libretto, the Mise en scène and the sound vocabulary of the piece, together with instructions, performance suggestions and a group of melodies. It is to be thought of as the surviving elements of a lost work whose performance tradition is unknown. Realisation of the opera involves the ordering and piecing together of these fragments to a performable work; as an archaeologist might reconstruct a possible coherent pot from scattered shards.

IRMA: The Libretto

This particlar version of the libretto was made my me in January 1988 specially for the AMM recording.

Having seen various versions of the opera and heard recordings of others, I had felt that the score, for all that it seems scanty, was not often mined quite thoroughly enough. This short version explores only one of the possible kinds of event and text, and strictly limits itself to material in the score itself. Because it is made for a recording it avoids any scenic possibilities and confines itself to a single encounter with a very small cast. No comic or buffo elements are exploited.

I don't at all intend this to be thought of as a standard version with any more authority than any other.

Works/Texts (1992),  p. 277-279

See also: IRMA: Performance History

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