Sarah Angliss: how I built an opera from the bones of a real-life giant

The 18th-century’s ‘Irish Giant’, is the subject of an acclaimed new opera. Can music give Charles Byrne the dignity he was denied in both life and death? Its composer tells how she gave shape to his story and sound to his world

It was going to be an album track: Charles Byrne Is Dreaming – but somehow, like this song’s protagonist, the music outgrew itself. My three-minute number evolved into a 90-minute opera, which opened the Aldeburgh festival last summer and is coming to the Linbury theatre at the Royal Opera House this week.

This outcome would have astonished me in the early 1990s when I had my first, conflicted encounter with the skeleton of Byrne, “The Irish Giant”. I was working as a curator in the Science Museum, London. At the end of the day, I found it eerie and overwhelming to step through the darkened galleries, the gloom punctuated by countless artefacts. On a visit to the Hunterian Museum I saw thousands of human specimens prepared and preserved in the 18th century by surgeon and anatomist John Hunter – a child in the uterus, the branching vessels of a lung, a cancerous growth gnarling a femur. These exquisite human structures were finely wrought examples of the anatomist’s art. Hunter learned about the body by looking, smelling and touching, and I’m one of many millions who have benefited from his research. But there was an uneasiness in seeing his collection – these tissue specimens held traces of many past human tragedies. I wondered how it felt to be among these artefacts after hours with their complex biographies crowding out the night. Continue reading...


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