Tyrannical Queen

Program Notes

In 2010, director Tim Burton filmed a new live version of Alice in Wonderland. To me, Lewis Carroll's imaginative writings fit naturally in Burton's hands, whose film bursted with evocative colors, quirky charm, and also an intensity that made its make-believe-world very real. In particular, the movie's villain, the Queen of Hearts (played by Helena Bonham Carter), was striking, as her terse, biting cries of "Off with their heads!" showed a society ruled by tyranny and supression. Though the film and story unfold as fairy-tale and fantasy, the story's characters, who struggle to exist in a society which stamps out their individuality, are very real.

The Tyrannical Queen (2010/12) was a musical response, with its architecture organized around musical leitmotifs that represent different characters from the Alice story (depicted in the section titles). The Queen is a constant presence, and her musical cries resurface at the end of each major section. The Guardsman are given slow, deliberate, orderly music, with all of the instruments carefully locking together. By contrast, the Prisoners sing sadly as lone individual voices. They reach out to one another, eventually crying intensely to be heard in a society that demands conformity. The climax is the Battle music, where musical themes overlap, clashing violently as did the characters in the famous "chessboard" battle of the Alice story. The battle ends in destruction and decay, and the sad, somber music which closes the piece reminds us how the Queen's presence will hover permanently and forever over a world she destroyed.

- Daniel Temkin