Gregory Rose inspired by Sigiriya’s famed verses
Amid all the gruesome tales of regicide in ancient and medieval history, the story of Sigiriya from 5th century AD remains uniquely disturbing. Shakespeare would likely have made a compelling drama of a king’s disgruntled son seizing the throne and walling up his father alive and then building a palace complex on an expanse of granite 180m high to escape the revenge of the rightful heir, his half-brother. This paranoia ends badly for Kashyapa, of course, in a climactic battlefield scene worthy of Richard III.
Yet it is not war and revenge that are the principal motifs of the song cycle based on the legends of Sigiriya composed by the English conductor and composer Gregory Rose, but love. That paradox is easily explained. Rose is focusing on the famous Sigiriya Mirror Poems, graffiti scribbled from the 8th century AD by people who visited the erstwhile palace complex.
Gregory Rose conducting St. John’s Passion in March in Colombo. Pic by Kesara Rathnavibushana
He is the latest Englishman to pay homage to Sigiriya and its graffiti. Richard Murphy composed his own verse about the fabled lion rock, which formed part of his book The Mirror Wall. Sigiriya even inspired a film, The God King, decades ago. The film’s making was so packed with incident and drama that it deserves a book.
The poems and songs that inspire so much commentary are on a giant mirror wall, made of brick and covered in white plaster, where the tourists of the day wrote love poems but also odes to the mountain. Some managed to do both at the same time:
I came here because I had heard
That golden women frequented this place
My mind full of this as I climbed,
I didn’t notice that the sun had set.
I came here because I had heard
Of your secret loves. Though
You didn’t say what I wanted to hear.
I remain enslaved on the mountainside
Ah, do not turn away
And another verse in similar vein is an ode and lament to these somewhat mythical women:
Blue girl of the mountainside. I hoped
That you, at least, would not reject
A poor man’s love. I worship you
She returned look for look
With eyes like blue water-lilies.
But she has lingered too long on the mountain:
The stone has gone into her heart
The wall is believed to have been so polished that the king could see himself in it. This turns on its head the notion that a man who had murdered his father and stolen a kingdom from his brother would not want to see himself in a mirror, let alone see his reflection several times a day, but Kashyapa’s bloody legend also paradoxically created a benign aftermath. Rose characterises the Sigiriya Graffiti as statements of awe, declarations of love and even a kind of ancient ‘I was here’ inscription, an Instagram of several hundred years ago. About 700 inscriptions survive.
In 1995, the Kandy-based poet and scholar, Ashley Halpé, published English translations from the late Sri Lankan archaeologist Senarath Paranavitana’s modern Sinhala versions. Working with the text after receiving permission from Halpe’s family, Rose arranged relevant poems together to form movements. “The lovely thing about the verses is that they are unpretentious and very vivid,” says Rose. “The love poems are pictorial and rather sensuous without being vulgar.”
Like the Therigatha, a collection of poems written by Buddhist nuns two thousand years ago and published by Harvard University as part of the Murty Classical Library, the boldness of verses written by women several centuries ago is startling.
We, being women, sing on behalf of this lady:
“You fools! You come to Sihagiri and inscribe
These verses, hammered out with
four-fold labours,
Not one of you brings wine and molasses
Remembering we are women!”
“Go on, look at my waist,
Don’t be frightened!
- He has taken us at our word:
He isn’t running away!”
Setting these diverse themes to contemporary classical music was a challenge. Before Covid, Rose had discussed with Chamber Music Society of Colombo (CMSC) principal Lakshman Joseph-de Saram the possibility of combining voice with strings before settling on voice with piano. The accomplished baritone Dhilan Gnanadurai, who sings as a professional for the Norwich Cathedral choir, will sing them in collaboration with CMSC keyboardist Johann Peiris, who was part of a memorable concert with soprano Dhanushi Wijeyakulasuriya in a CMSC evening of Schubert lieder about a year ago. Rose notes that Dhilan doesn’t ordinarily perform contemporary classical music.
The atonal flourishes of much contemporary classical music make a song cycle that seeks to weave unconnected prose and lament together a high-wire act, akin to the metal ladder that enables tourists to clamber up the final ascent to the top of Sigiriya. “I said I would make it as singable as possible,” says Rose. Nevertheless, listeners unused to contemporary classical may find it hard going. The programme balances Rose’s premiere with Bach’s well-known Ich habe genug, a loving and lyrical affirmation of faith that is a centrepiece of the classical baritone repertoire. There will be an interlude of baroque or 18th century classical instrumental music, likely a trio, between these two works.
The English composer and conductor has been travelling to Sri Lanka and working with musicians here for more than two decades, mentoring them in taking on challenging performances such as Verdi’s Requiem, for instance. On Wednesday August 20, he will collaborate yet again with Colombo Philharmonic Choir’s conductor Harin Amirthanathan in choral evensong at the Church of St. Michael and All Angels. Rose has composed an anthem of Psalm 150 for the occasion.
More than two decades after his first composition for Sri Lankan audiences was premiered by the Symphony Orchestra of Sri Lanka, Rose is so at home in Sri Lanka that he favours bus rides to travel around the island. He recounts with relish the worried warnings he received during the years of the civil war not to take buses and how he took them anyway. But as the Sigiriya graffiti reminds us, the occasional grim violence and tragedy that has stalked this island is often balanced, as in the Aragalaya of 2022, with humour. In the mirror poems, as in Sri Lanka, lament and laughter are intertwined.
| The performances | |
| The CMSC will present the world premiere of Gregory Rose’s composition the Sigiri Mirror Wall at the Goethe Institute on Friday, August 22 at 7.30 p.m. The programme will also include Johann Sebastian Bach’s well-known cantata Ich habe genug(BMV 82) with Dhilan Gnanadurai performing with CMSC musicians.On Wednesday August 20 at 6.30 p.m., Rose will conduct the Colombo Philharmonic Choir’s Choral Evensong at the Church of St Michael and All Angels, Polwatte. The music includes compositions by Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten, both former patrons of the CPC, and Rose’s anthem for Psalm 150. |
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