Morton Feldman composed his only opera, Neither, in 1976. The text – all 87 words of it – was written by Samuel Beckett, but before Feldman had even made contact with the playwright to discuss a collaboration, he had begun his preparations for the stage work by composing a trilogy of pieces. All three – Orchestra, Elemental Procedures and Routine Investigations – were completed within a month, and all are based upon what Feldman called his “Beckett material”, a nine-bar sequence that repeats a collection of adjacent semitones in irregular patterns.
In the event, Feldman never used this material in the opera itself, though it does recur in a number of his pieces from the late 70s and early 80s, beginning with those in the trilogy. It’s quoted towards the end of Orchestra, among the displaced, shifting pianissimo chords and stuttering chorales. It also introduces the fragments of Beckett text that eventually emerge in Elemental Procedures, for soprano, choir and orchestra, which are so carefully, so purely sung by Claudia Barainsky in this performance. In that piece and in the pared-down soundworld of Routine Investigations, for six instruments, there’s the sense of Feldman edging ever closer to the expressive world he imagined so precisely for his opera, even before Beckett had agreed to work with him.
