ABSTRACT
Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Zinovieff's The Mask of Orpheus, on which composer and librettist had been working since the late 1960s, was immediately hailed as the most important musical and theatrical event of its decade. The Mask of Orpheus is undoubtedly a central work in Birtwistle's output, and all his subsequent pieces for stage and concert hall demand to be evaluated in its light. Birtwistle's modernist art attempts to articulate the failure through its fragmentation, its multiplicity, and its melancholic laments. The conflict in Birtwistle's music between the violent and the lyrical, the rational and the irrational, the ancient and the modern, speaks profoundly of the preoccupations and anxieties of late-modern culture. In its imaginative fusion of music, song, drama, myth, mime and electronics, it has become a beacon for younger composers, and the object of wide critical and scholarly attention.
