The First Child

PROGRAMME NOTE
PAGE 5
THE FIRST CHILD
The First Child is the last opera in my trilogy with Enda Walsh. It feels
to me to be the most intense of the three, powered along by a kind of
tidal energy. And yet, within that, I’m forever seeking the melody in
these broken characters. In some way, the opera is about the impact
that circular forces can have on our life and on nature. Though it
has a dystopian looping structure to it ultimately, there is also a kind
of catharsis unleashed by the power of the music. I should let you
know that three of the players within Crash Ensemble also double up
as microtonal pianists, playing notes between the equal tempered
scale. Quite often these relate to the overtone series, but at other
times they present strange doppelgängers of their equal-tempered
equivalents. The bulk of the opera was written during the pandemic,
and one can almost feel the music yearning and bursting to break
the banks set up around it. Writing this opera was probably the most
intense creative experience of my life so far.
Donnacha Dennehy
September 2021