The 63-year-old Englishman Sir George Benjamin is one of the leading composers of the present day, whose works have been lauded worldwide. Notable among them are his two most recent operas, Written on Skin and Lessons in Love and Violence. Together with his regular artistic partner, English author Martin Crimp, Benjamin’s pieces of musical theater exemplify a psychologically precise, classical approach to literary-dramatic material. They are sharply contoured character studies featuring expressively vivid orchestral treatment. We now present the Swiss premiere of Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence at the Opernhaus Zürich, which first bowed in London in 2018. The source material stems from Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe and his play Edward II, which Crimp adapted for the opera. At the center of the dark drama is the power-weary King Edward, who neglects the business of his government and his people in favor of a perverted love of art and a homoerotic relationship with his favorite, Gaveston. The king’s enemy is Mortimer, an ambitious army commander and the lover of Edward’s wife Queen Isabella. Mortimer has Gaveston executed, and the king cruelly killed. The spiral of violence eventually spreads to the next generation: Isabella and Edward’s children, who have learned lessons in love and violence. Lessons in Love and Violence is a story about the amorality of rulers, about naked lust for power and the heat of desire, and the intimate as the real battleground of political cruelty. In addition to the composer, the production brings other new artists to the Opernhaus Zürich: The firebrand Russian theater and opera director Evgeny Titov, who has caused a sensation from the Salzburg Festival to the Komische Oper Berlin in recent years, makes his debut. Meanwhile, Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov, an expert in contemporary scores, takes the conductor’s podium, and the highly touted Trinidadian-born soprano Jeanine De Bique also makes her first appearance at the Opernhaus Zürich.

SCENE 1
At a time of famine and war, Mortimer, the King’s military chief, is trying to persuade the King to end his damaging relationship with Gaveston, his lover and intimate friend. Mortimer argues that it’s unacceptable for the King to spend money on – for example – poetry and music for Gaveston, 
while people starve. He also questions the wisdom of for­ming relationships – whether with men or with women – based on love, rather than political expediency. But the King refuses to listen.
Gaveston provokes a crisis, claiming that Mortimer is motivated by envy and a thirst for power. He demands that Mortimer be punished – and strippe of his rank and prop­erty.
Aware of the danger of humiliating Mortimer, the King hesitates. But when Gaveston plays his trump card by direct­ly challenging Mortimer to accept his physical intimacy with the King, Mortimer is forced to silently acknowledge that it fills him with disgust.
This infuriates the King who – despite his wife Isabel’s attempt to intervene – takes away Mortimer’s rank and prop­erty exactly as Gaveston has demanded.

SCENE 2
Some months later Mortimer, who has been gathering evi­dence of disaffection and civil unrest, has a secret meeting with Isabel, to which he brings witnesses.
Each of these has a story to tel1, which Mortimer hopes will persuade Isabel that Gaveston is a political liability and needs to be destroyed.
The witnesses claim that while their families have starved, Gaveston has stolen their property – complain that each of Gaveston’s musical entertainments costs more than they eam in a year – and report that the sexual conduct of the King and his entourage is a source of satirical speculation.
Isabel claims she understands what the witnesses have suffered, but tells them they are nai’ve if they think there’s a simple equation between a musical performance and wage­labour.
Finally – unable to suppress her anger – she has them thrown out.
She has however fully absorbed Mortimer’s lesson. She accepts the necessity of eliminating Gaveston to restore political stability, and reluctantly agrees to help Mortimer destroy him.

SCENE 3
Inside the auditorium of a private theatre Gaveston and the King are waiting for a musical entertainment to begin.
The King asks Gaveston to predict his future – how will he die? – will it be slow or sudden? – and, most importantly, how will he, Gaveston, figure in that death? Gaveston’s repiy is a tender statement that his own life and the King’s are one and the same.
Now Isabel enters with the rest of the invited audience and asks Gaveston to sit beside her.
The music begins: two singers sing a setting from the Old Testament of David’s famous lament for Jonathan, which moves Gaveston to tears.
But during the concert Mortimer appears, and Gaveston realises he’s walked into a trap.
The King stops the music and repeatedly calls for Mor­timer’s arrest, but nobody in the audience moves. Instead it is Gaveston who is seized and taken away.
To his great humiliation, the King realises he no longer has the authority either to rule or to protect the man he loves.

SCENE 4
The King, unable to sleep, holds a letter informing him that Gaveston has been murdered. Isabel tries to comfort him – but in a trance­like state, and numbed by grief, he continues to dwell on his failure to save his friend.
In frustration, Isabel tums away, but when the King ac­cuses her of hiding her feelings, she tums back to him in tears. She points out that she has never hidden anything from him – not her body – not her opinions – not her love. 
He – she claims – is the one who has deliberately poisoned their relationship through his obsession with another man.
lgnoring her, the King now begins to obsess about Mor­timer and his associates, threatening to instigate a bloody civil war. Isabel realises that her husband has lost not only his political allies but his political judgement too – and even perhaps his sanity. She therefore tells him that she’s going to take their son – the future king – to Mortimer, since Mor­timer at least will be able to protect the boy.
The King still seems numb and makes no attempt to op­pose her.
Left on his own, the King starts to re­read the letter de­scribing Gaveston’s brutal murder, obsessing over the phrases that seem to confirm to him Gaveston’s fearlessness in the face of death.

SCENE 5
Isabel and her children are now installed in Mortimer’s house, and Isabel and Mortimer are planning to depose the King and install Isabel’s son – still a child, who they believe they can control – in his father’s place.
The scene begins playfully with the adults promising gifts to the boy. But it then materialises that to prepare him to be king, they have devised for him a cruel lesson in statecraft.
A Madman is brought in who claims that his cat has told him that he – the Madman – is the true king. The boy’s task is to interrogate the Madman and decide what to do with him.
The boy listens to the evidence and says that since the Madman is clearly just that – mad – he believes they should be merciful. But Mortimer over­rules him, insisting realpoli­tik dictates that any kind of threat to the royal succession deserves the harshest penalty.
In front of the child, Mortimer strangles the Madman while Isabel forces him to watch. The child is deeply dis­turbed, and begs for mercy. When he asks if it’s true that his father is now in prison, Isabel sends him out of the room. Isabel now wants to know how Mortimer intends to get the crown from her husband. When he claims that he can persuade the King by logical argument, she presses him to explain what will happen afterwards – how exactly will her son become king? – the unspoken implication being that first her husband will have to die.
Finally Mortimer allows Isabel to seduce him – at the same time tacitly consenting to have the King murdered.

SCENE 6
Mortimer has gone to the King in prison to persuade him in front of witnesses to give up the crown. 
The King, although confused and experiencing hallucina­tions, is humble in front of the witnesses and admits that he has been at fault ­ but for Mortimer, he shows total cont­empt. Not only does he refuse to abdicate, but deliberately taunts Mortimer about his own sexuality. 
Mortimer rages against the King’s moral degeneracy and instructs the witnesses to record that the King is mentally unsound. He drives home his point that if the King won’t pass the crown to his son now, the succession will be perma­nently broken and there is no guarantee the boy will ever be 
king. 
The King bows to Mortimer’s inexorable logic. He sur­renders the crown and Mortimer takes it away. 
Two women now announce that a man is waiting to see the King. Although the King realises the man must have come to murder him, he tells them to let him in. A Stranger appears and stands in the shadows. When the King asks him who he is, he steps into the light. The King is disturbed because he believes that the person he is seeing in front of him is Gaveston, but the Stranger continues to deny this.
When the King repeatedly asks the Stranger to tel1 him how he will die, the Stranger takes his hand and reads from it an increasingly nightmarish summary of his life, before in­forming him that he – the King – is already dead.
The King refuses to accept this. In a state of terror and exaltation he begs the Stranger to love him and bring him back to life.

SCENE 7
Back in the private theatre of the third scene, Isabel waits with her son – now the Young King – for a performance to begin. They are both in mouming.
Isabel asks if there will be music – but the Young King replies that he has forbidden music, and that when the cur­tain rises, there will simply be ‚an entertainment’. The atmos­phere between mother and son grows increasingly tense as she accuses him of childishness, and he reminds her he’s a 
king, not a child.
The Young King now begins to explain the background to the entertainment his mother is about to watch. As he speaks, it becomes clearer and clearer to Isabel that the story is precisely the story of her own conspiracy with Mortimer to murder the King, her husband. As her fear and discomfort grow, and she demands to know what has happened to Mor­timer, an invited audience silently begin to take their seats.
The Young King explains that Mortimer has been arrest­ed and condemned – and that, in the interests of justice and political stability, the entertainment they are about to watch will be the execution of the man responsible for killing his father.