Nelson | note
In October 2005 it will be two centuries since Horatio Nelson died while commanding the British Fleet off Cape Trafalgar. Throughout most of that time Nelson’s victories and his heroic death were smoothly assimilated within Britain’s twin vision of itself as imperial power, and plucky, often-isolated defender of liberty.
With the passing of empire and the decline of European superpowers, however, it is now possible to detach Nelson’s story from nationalism, and to explore the strange paradoxes of his dramatic life. He was, after all, a man who espoused duty as the highest of values, yet abandoned a faithful wife for Emma Hamilton ; a man who showed sympathy to the wretched, yet orchestrated a terrible political massacre of civilians in Naples ; whose life was devoted to the sea though it often tortured him physically and mentally. And standing upon these stark psychological fissures, we have the man of precarious vanity, charisma, and thirst for personal danger and oblivion.
If the opera is a psychological colour portrait of figures we now see only in historical outline, then these are set in a gallery of sweeping events. For Nelson’s story is almost archetypically ‘operatic’ in the old sense – it has passion, the horror of war, political intrigues, gross betrayal and heroic death set in a time of sweeping historical change. In writing the libretto, the aim was to draw this large world and then gradually to concentrate the light upon a psychological portrait, much as the sun can be focused, through a lens, to a burning point.
Ross Baglin
librettist