The visions of John Ball

David Jones’s epic In Parenthesis (1937) was generated by the author’s traumatic experiences at the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, at Mametz, as well as his long term of service at the front. In Parenthesis fuses the vernacular and detailed sensory observations of war-realism with Welsh myth in a modernist free-verse hybrid of prose and poetry that contemporaries saw as ‘authentic realism.’ At the centennial of the battle of Somme, this epic poem became the basis for a libretto and opera performed by the Welsh National Opera in 2016, to commemorate the tragic losses of the First World War and to explore their meaning. This paper traces the layers of adaptation across media from Jones’s poem to the libretto by David Antrobus and Emma Jenkins, and from language to Iain Bell’s music and ultimately to the staging by David Pountney. Jones’s poem and Bell’s opera both draw on myth (e.g. sacramental Marian and pre-Christian Welsh motifs) to endow the historical moment of rupture and massive human sacrifice with meaning. Thus there is both a historical level of ‘real’ experience and a performative level of adaptation, translation, and dialogue between the ‘realist’ underlying material and the ‘surreal’ of more transcendent moments in the opera. The linguistic ‘coding’ in the poem that records the experience of Jones is adapted musically, recoded in the operatic narrative, and dramatized in yet another dimension by the Pountney transposition into lighting and stagecraft. Each of the different aspects of opera tests the possibilities of representation and transforms the realm that Jones’s original readers found to be so ‘realist.’