Jane Eyre (Complete Opera)

'Michael Rafferty's deeply committed conducting elicits fine performances from the entire cast and ensemble'
- Sunday Times

First broadcast on BBC2 in 2001, Michael Berkeley's opera Jane Eyre here receives its premiere recording.

The 2002/3 season sees Natasha Marsh's debuts with both Opera North and Welsh National Opera.

Michael Berkeley's music captures the brooding atmosphere of Charlotte Brontë's story. He is able to explore the psychological undertones of the novel and the complex relationships among its leading characters.

'Berkeley makes the music, full of alluring glissandi, work hard to carry the drama. Silences are used to dramatic effect. A saucy Parisian waltz and a snatch of Donizetti offset the terse chromaticism of Berkeley's score, in which he moves impressively beyond the brighter lyricism of his music to date.'
The Observer

It might seem that choosing to set a pre-existing story as an opera neatly circumvents the problem for both librettist and composer of having to create an entirely new drama. However, when that story is as famous as Jane Eyre, there is clearly more to do than simply furnish a narrative with a musical cloak. How do you reduce so familiar a work to a drama sufficiently compressed for the operatic stage, while maintaining the integrity of the story?


For David Malouf, the librettist, the main task was to boil down the complexities of the book and focus on the events at Thornfield. As Berkeley says: 'It is no good just putting on a Hollywood re-run… You have to show it in a new light'. So we do not experience Jane's early years nor her encounter with the Rivers family; rather, the opera concentrates on the psychological core of the novel - the relationships among Jane, Rochester and Mrs Rochester.

Berkeley characterises the sound world of Jane Eyre as a 'dark glissando-y turbulence'. It is the centrifugal power of Berkeley's score which articulates the intense psychological undercurrents in Brontë's story, and which fills out the framework of Malouf's skeletal but poetic libretto. In the composer and librettist's hands the narrative becomes an investigation of 'suppressed eroticism', as Berkeley puts it. Far from being a reduced version of Jane Eyre, this adaptation magnifies and illuminates previously hidden corners of the story, thereby creating a strongly independent operatic work.