Andrew Collis as Captain Cook
Culture
Dog’s truth
by Rachel Morris
Anne Salmond’s The Trial of the Cannibal Dog has been re-imagined as an opera that vividly evokes Captain Cook’s psychological and emotional universe, and how he irreversibly changed the Pacific.
It’s probably about time someone wrote another opera about Captain Cook. The first one was staged at Covent Garden in 1785, and received a boisterous reception akin to that of a blockbuster movie today. In addition to Cook, its characters included Omai, a young Polynesian chief brought to London by Joseph Banks in 1774. The real Omai spent two years charming London society before being shipped back to Tahiti, where he contracted venereal disease.
In the opera, Omai wins the heart of an English princess, and the couple embark on a Pacific tour, dramatically rendered by a gaudy ethnic-costume parade. At the end of the production, Captain Cook, clasping a sextant, ascends heavenwards on a cloud. Similarly fanciful depictions of Cook’s voyages remained popular until the mid-1880s, when Britain’s activities in the Pacific had presumably become too embarrassing for a rollicking night out at the opera.
Several years ago, however, composer Matthew Suttor decided to attempt a fresh imagining of what is arguably New Zealand’s defining cultural encounter. Since 1999, Suttor has taught composition at Yale. He’s now the director of a centre for music and sound design at the university’s school of drama. On a trip home to New Zealand one Christmas, he picked up a copy of The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, Dame Anne Salmond’s acclaimed account of Cook’s voyages. He was struck by its dramatic potential, and decided to write an opera based on the book.
Also titled The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, the opera will be performed at the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington in March – directed by Christian Penny, with libretto by John Downie.
Salmond’s book offers a new way of looking at Cook’s story – she describes its theme as a “process of mutual exploration”. In her telling, Cook is a curiously familiar figure, beleaguered by cultural confusions similar to those we still struggle with today and probably always will. A true man of the Enlightenment, Cook departs from London earnestly intending to follow his instructions to deal fairly with the “Natives of the several Lands where the Ship may touch”.
On his first voyage, he spends considerable time attempting to prevent his crew from spreading VD, and from using excessive force when tensions flare with the inhabitants of the islands they visit. But Cook’s prudence irks his crew, and, when he reaches New Zealand, often perplexes Maori. Towards the end of his second trip, Maori in Queen Charlotte Sound kill and eat crew from an accompanying English ship. On his third voyage, Cook declines to seek revenge, and his mana plummets precipitously among both Maori and his men.
By this point, Cook is showing the strain of his souring good intentions, lopping off the ears of his crew members and ordering floggings at an alarming rate. Finally, in Hawaii, an encounter erupts unexpectedly, and Cook is hacked to death in a shallow pool of water – the casualty, if you like, of an early, botched attempt at political correctness.
“The essence of what I saw as opera is a man of lowly birth who was told to take these ideals and in some ways that was kind of his downfall,” says Suttor. “He ended up not doing what anyone wanted him to. As New Zealanders, we can relate to him. He wasn’t aristocratic. He was trying to be fair and just. He’s one of us.”
As devised by Suttor, Downie and Penny, this production isn’t the “Master and Commander swashbuckling version where Russell Crowe strides on stage and starts singing an aria”, says Suttor. Instead, the opera explores encounters and their aftermath – how Cook irreversibly changed the Pacific, but was also changed by it.
“This is really about peoples meeting,” says Suttor, “and also the nature of voyages – the transformation, the fascination of foreign cultures, the unexpected consequences.”
Musically, this sense of colliding worlds is expressed through the combination of a chamber orchestra, taonga puoru (Maori traditional instruments, performed by Rangiiria Hedley) and digital processing, with opera singers and untrained voices singing in both English and Maori. Suttor envisaged “the two languages and the two perspectives superimposed on each other” – an ambitious attempt to find a musical form for our Pacific past and present.
The Trial of the Cannibal Dog is a project that has been developed across hemispheres, which seems apt considering Trial depicts a time in which intrepid Polynesians and Europeans boarded ships bound for opposite corners of the Earth, and sometimes found themselves happier there than at home.
Suttor grew up in Hamilton and studied composition at Auckland University. His work has consistently revealed an interest in fusing seemingly incongruous elements. In 1992, he began a PhD at Columbia University in New York, and he has lived in the US since then. One symptom of settling overseas is that people are often compelled to consider their origins more consciously than they might have done otherwise; Suttor found that as he considered the idea of a Cook opera, “the sounds I had in my head were thrown into sharp relief”.
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