ABSTRACT
What first attracted me to The Duenna was its setting in Seville. It is true Sheridan did not trouble himself about local colour. Seville was probably a mere stage-convention to him, not meant to be taken more realistically than Shakespeare’s Illyria or his seashore of Bohemia. But Seville is full of a wealth of associations for me: its colour and atmosphere; its social climate, wealth and fashion rubbing shoulders with beggars, gypsies and picaresque rogues; extreme cultural refinement with the vigour of the common vernacular; lightheartedness and tormented pessimism side by side; wild superstitious beliefs mingling with intense religious feeling – all this was food for music. Sheridan’s setting vividly suggested to me images of eighteenth-century Seville, where the Brethen of Deadly Sin – laymen dressed in monks’ habits – would be strolling through the streets at night, chanting memento mori and exhorting sinners to repentance. In fact, I felt this so strongly that to create this atmosphere of the streets of Seville at night with adventure and death both round the corner, as it were, I have given my opera a dumb-show introduction which is dominated by the chanting Brethren.
