Imagining the end of time is never a productive exercise but a temptation that attracts us all – including young composers like the noted Tom Coult, whose first ever opera premiered at last month’s Aldeburgh Festival and was an interesting essay in the Last Things, delicately balanced between whimsy, pantomime and nightmare warning.
Its title, Violet, gave nothing away beyond the name of a character who, though central to the plot, is more its servant than its mistress. She’s a strangely disaffected woman who perceives that time is literally running out, each day an hour shorter than the one before. While those around her see this, not unreasonably, as a crisis that will sweep them into an abyss of nothingness, she sees it as escape from a routine existence and sails out to sea – presumably in the belief that nothingness will be better there.
