After 14 years playing viola in the Berlin Philharmonic, Brett Dean craved uncertainty.<\/p>\n
He had been creating his own music since shortly after he joined the orchestra in 1985, first improvising in underground Berlin clubs, then writing for classical ensembles. By 1999, he was itching to compose full time. But his wife, the painter Heather Betts, was already a freelancer, and the couple had two young daughters.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll manage somehow,\u201d Betts recalled telling Dean. \u201cWhat we can\u2019t manage is if you don\u2019t do this. Then you become stale and bitter.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was Betts, Dean said, who got him to take the leap. She had the \u201cimpetus to boot me up the bum,\u201d he said, \u201cand make me take the risk.\u201d<\/p>\n
That risk paid off spectacularly. While many Berlin Philharmonic musicians have gone on to become soloists and conductors, Dean is a rare case: the orchestra member turned composer. His music, of impeccable craft and unusual verve, is performed frequently by the world\u2019s leading orchestras \u2014 including the one he left behind. Last month, the Berlin Philharmonic announced Dean, 64, as its composer in residence for next season.<\/p>\n
His work has also appeared on some of the most prestigious opera stages, and on Sunday, a new work by Dean called \u201cOf One Blood,\u201d premieres<\/a> at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. Arguably his highest-profile commission to date, the piece concerns the tumultuous relationship between the cousins Queen Elizabeth I of England and Mary, Queen of Scots.<\/p>\n Like its subject, this opera is a family affair, with a libretto by Betts, music by Dean, and one of their daughters, the mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, among the cast.<\/p>\n Dean\u2019s operas have a musical variety, psychological insight and wit rare in contemporary music. His first, \u201cBliss\u201d (2010), is a fever dream about an Australian businessman who survives a near-death experience and believes he has landed in hell. His second, \u201cHamlet,\u201d premiered in 2017 at the Glyndebourne Festival in England and traveled to the Metropolitan Opera<\/a> in 2022.<\/p>\n For \u201cOf One Blood,\u201d Dean has extended his fascination with the Elizabethan period. After \u201cBliss,\u201d Dean felt \u201ca kind of poetic deficit,\u201d he said. Starting from \u201cHamlet,\u201d he said, he felt more inspired by the unfamiliar rhythms and idioms of 16th-century English than by contemporary language.<\/p>\n For the libretto, Betts collated historical material, much of it from real correspondence between Elizabeth I and Mary. She brought to the project a feeling for the turns of phrase that would catch Dean\u2019s ear.<\/p>\n \u201cSimply because we\u2019ve basically spent our entire lives together, I know why he writes music,\u201d Betts said. \u201cI know what ignites the music in him,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Dean said the new work would be less philosophical and more direct than some previous works. \u201cMy hope is that it continually interests the ear above all,\u201d he added, \u201cand then the eyes and the emotions will hopefully come along for the ride.\u201d<\/p>\n A Muscular Approach<\/p>\n Dean was raised in a working-class family in Brisbane, Australia. His mother was a homemaker and his father worked at a power station. Both of his grandmothers played instruments, though, and he began learning the violin around 8.<\/p>\n A few years later, he joined the Queensland Youth Orchestra, which kindled his love of music. Playing Holst\u2019s \u201cThe Planets\u201d there, as well as Mahler\u2019s First Symphony alongside members of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, stirred powerful feelings in him, he recalled.<\/p>\n Classical music was an unusual hobby for a boy in 1970s Brisbane. Although Dean also played Australian rules football \u2014 the ultimate currency of Australian manliness \u2014 his elementary school classmates gave him \u201ca really hard time\u201d for playing the violin, he said.<\/p>\n When he switched from violin to viola as a teenager, Dean began experiencing the sound of an orchestra from deeper within.<\/p>\n He met Betts, then also a musician, in the viola section of the Australian Youth Orchestra. Betts said he struck her as a quiet, gentle man with a muscular approach to his instrument.<\/p>\n In 1982, while studying viola at the Queensland Conservatorium, Dean met Wolfram Christ, then the principal viola of the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan. At a meeting in Sydney, Dean played for Christ, who said that if he made it to West Berlin, he would accept him into his class.<\/p>\n Dean and Betts arrived in the city in January 1984. The place was gray, grim and still marked by war, but had an appealing intensity, Dean recalled. Dean began substituting at the Berlin Philharmonic. \u201cThe very second gig that I was asked to play was a Karajan concert,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was a pinch-me moment.\u201d<\/p>\n As a member of the orchestra, Dean played under Karajan and his successor Claudio Abbado. But he missed a more creative outlet. Through Betts\u2019s mother, he got to know Simon Hunt, an Australian post-punk musician who later created the satirical drag persona Pauline Pantsdown. Dean and Hunt connected as artists eager to explore new territories.<\/p>\n Dean \u201cloved being in the Berlin Philharmonic, but he wanted to do more than just sit there, play and respond to Karajan\u2019s commands,\u201d Hunt said. \u201cAnd I was over the musical structures of a post-punk type band with major or minor chords and nothing in between.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1987, they formed a duo called Frame Cut Frame. Dean improvised viola lines and Hunt used primitive sampling technology to create eclectic soundscapes. They played at underground venues \u2014 including Fischlabor, an early predecessor of Berlin\u2019s techno clubs \u2014 and released two<\/a> albums<\/a>. For one performance piece, meant to channel hostile grocery store cashiers, Hunt and Dean threw change into the audience.<\/p>\n At the same time, he was exploring composing in a more classical idiom. He would pump his Philharmonic colleagues for information about their instruments. The percussionist Jan Schlichte recalled taking Dean to a storage room and showing him a range of mallets and performance techniques.<\/p>\n Dean\u2019s potential as a composer was quickly apparent, Schlichte, said. \u201cIn all his pieces, there\u2019s an incredible richness of ideas,\u201d Schlichte said. \u201cHe has an insane feeling for sounds and mixtures of sounds.\u201d<\/p>\n Richness and Risk<\/p>\n In his Dean\u2019s first major chamber work, \u201cNight Window\u201d (1993) for clarinet, viola and piano, a wistful first movement is followed by one in which the clarinet rudely honks and squawks. In the third, a series of delicate variations congeal into an impassioned climax.<\/p>\n Those shifting moods are typical for Dean, whose music combines a restless sonic imagination with an intimate knowledge of the classical canon. His approaches to gesture and especially contrast draw deeply from his experience with the repertoire.<\/p>\n In that sense, said Vladimir Jurowski, the Bavarian State Opera\u2019s music director, who is conducting the \u201cOf One Blood\u201d premiere, Dean \u201cis a Richard Strauss for our times.\u201d<\/p>\n Like Strauss, Dean is a creative orchestrator and a canny dramatist. Late in \u201cOf One Blood,\u201d Mary, Queen of Scots is placed under house arrest in England. An oboe plays a desolate, misshapen trill over an impassive string chord. The passage evokes the loneliness of her imprisonment in the countryside.<\/p>\n In \u201cHamlet,\u201d adapted from Shakespeare by Matthew Jocelyn, funny passages rub shoulders with melancholy ones, which makes the funny moments funnier and the sad ones more affecting. In one scene, the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sing in a close canon, an old musical technique that Dean uses to depict sycophancy. Then the bustling music stops. You hear, among other instruments, a high, dissonant, offstage accordion, like a laugh catching in the throat.<\/p>\n While \u201cOf One Blood\u201d is built on poetic language \u2014 like a line attributed to Elizabeth I: \u201cI may not be a lion, but I am a lion\u2019s cub, and I have a lion\u2019s heart\u201d \u2014 it also has surprisingly frank sexual jokes. Early on, Mary\u2019s arrogant lover is described as \u201cbest proportioned,\u201d to titters from her servants.<\/p>\n Such jokes work thanks to Dean\u2019s traditional approach to text setting. His operas don\u2019t deconstruct the genre. \u201cWhat thrills me about Brett Dean,\u201d said Claus Guth, who is directing \u201cOf One Blood\u201d in Munich, \u201cis that he comes from the tradition that holds onto opera as it was created and as it has existed for centuries.<\/p>\n \u201cHe doesn\u2019t break the mold,\u201d Guth added \u201cbut continues working with these same criteria.\u201d<\/p>\n Those are the criteria against which he\u2019ll measure the new opera\u2019s success. If the piece \u201cdoesn\u2019t stand up as a score, as a piece of music, as a fusion of words and music,\u201d Dean said, \u201cthen not even the most brilliant staging and performance will necessarily save it from being the lemon that it probably then genuinely is.\u201d<\/p>\n Then again, Dean knows something about taking chances. After he left the Berlin Philharmonic to be composer, \u201cI\u2019ve never looked back, and I feel very fortunate,\u201d he said. \u201cNothing ventured, nothing gained.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After 14 years playing viola in the Berlin Philharmonic, Brett Dean craved uncertainty. 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