Basically, it looked like his career was over.” Depressed and sick after the failure of his 1741 composition Deidamia, he had vowed to abandon the genre, but after an invitation to Dublin, Handel began composing again.Īs Drake explains, being invited to Dublin was a bit like colonial exile for the composer. I was struck by how this incredible piece came out of this massive personal disaster.”Īt the time Handel started writing The Messiah, Drake expands, the composer had just “suffered a massive financial and artistic failure at the opera in London. When he realised an old university lecturer had written a book about Handel, he read it “and the whole world of the Messiah, this most famous piece of choral music, opened up for me. Sometimes the music hit me and sometimes it didn’t, but there were certain arias that really did, and I always wondered why.” I used to go to see it with friends every year before Christmas. Drake admits he had the idea to write something about the Messiah “for a very long time. The play, which charts the creation of George Frideric Handel’s famous Christmas oratorio, The Messiah, is partly set in Dublin, where the work premiered in 1742. We are scheduled to talk about his 2015 play All the Angels, which receives a festive Irish premiere this week courtesy of Rough Magic Theatre Company.
The challenge is not an individual one: it’s to persuade governments whose entire financial wealth depends on the economy of fossil fuels to change.”ĭrake is speaking to me from his book-lined office overlooking Hackney Downs, a vast green space in greater London, where the Hertfordshire-born writer has lived for most of his adult life. “What we are talking about is pollution and it is a huge structural problem, to do with capitalism and the world economy. “It is crazy we are even still using words like climate change or climate emergency,” he says. Based on the poetry collection he wrote after a journey around the Svalbard archipelago in 2010, the fusion of text and music (by composers Emma Donald and Isbel Pendlebury), explored a history of exploitation of the Arctic landscape that goes back as far as the 16th century, and continues in the present day, with catastrophic consequences for our climate.ĭrake, who works across literary mediums – he has written screenplays, librettos and many plays – says it was “a life-changing trip”, but he is not surprised that the climate debate has not moved on in the intervening years. It does not store any personal data.Writer Nick Drake has recently returned from Cop26, where his latest work, The Farewell Glacier, was performed. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
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