True Stories from the Hermitage Artist Retreat -- Burke and Hare

Burke and Hare Victims -- All opera photos by Liza Voll Photography for Boston Lyric Opera

"Opera gets a bum rap," composer Julian Grant lamented on a recent evening at Hermitage Artist Retreat. "It's not all large people yelling at each other in a foreign language."

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.  Take, for instance, The Nefarious, Immoral but Highly Profitable Enterprise of Mr. Burke and Mr. Hare, with music by Grant and libretto by Mark Campbell. The darkly comic chamber opera was commissioned by the Boston Lyric Opera and premiered in November 2017. Grant said the title was offered up to BLO in jest; they jumped on it.

The opera tells the story of the Scottish serial murderers William Burke and William Hare. It is 1828 Edinburgh, a time at which medical schools have started using cadavers as a teaching tool. But where to get the bodies -- especially once the authorities cracked down on gravedigging?  It was a particular problem for Dr. Robert Knox, an anatomy instructor who promised "a full demonstration of anatomical subjects at every lesson."  Enter Burke and Hare.

The fellows' significant others ran a low-end boarding house in Edinburgh. One morning they rapped on a lodger's door to collect the rent. Instead of a chap counting out his coins to pay them, they found a dead body. They had been relying on that rent!  What to do?  The enterprising pair took the body to Knox's surgeon's college -- and came away with much more compensation than a month's rent would have yielded.

Dr. Knox defends his actions as being for the greater good

An idea was hatched. Would anyone really miss people living on the periphery of society? Over the next ten months, Knox was the happy recipient of 16 bodies, many of whom were former lodgers at the Burke and Hare residence. Knox turned a blind eye to the question of how Burke and Hare located all these fresh cadavers. Until, that is, a woman who Knox's assistant had been dating turned up on the operating table. As the story goes, unbeknownst to the assistant, his girlfriend was a prostitute. She would kiss him goodnight at the corner before heading off to her night job. Her profession made her fit squarely within Burke and Hare's victim profile.

What goes around comes around -- Burke on the table

Once the truth came out, all hell broke loose. Hare turned on Burke in exchange for immunity. Burke was given the death sentence, hanged, and then dissected in the same anatomy theater in which Knox had anatomized the murder victims. The lines were so long to witness his autopsy that viewers were limited to 50 at a time. Burke's skeleton was preserved and, along with a death mask, can be seen today at Edinburgh's Anatomy Museum. Even more morbid, a book bound in his skin can be seen at the Surgeon's Hall Museum.

As to Knox, he was summarily fired and his assistant elevated to the position. A children's nursery rhyme exists today that goes, in part, "Knox is the boy who buys the beef."

Grant shared a bit of the writing process with the audience. It seemed fitting that much of the work was done in the gritty bars of Greenwich Village. It was clearly a happy collaboration. Grant called Campbell's opening words "genius." (They were: "The people of Edinburgh aren't dying.... quickly enough."  Boston Lyric Opera used them in their marketing of the work.)

Composer Julian Grant

He talked about the final scene in which Campbell had proposed the introduction of a new character -- a police officer who would take Burke and Hare off in cuffs. Grant didn't like the idea. After some brainstorming, the pair landed on a much more creative ending. The five murder victims in the show linked arms and walked in lockstep as they impersonated police officers coming on the scene.

It's worth noting that the opera wasn't performed in a typical proscenium theater. In a flash of brilliance, it was produced at a former indoor venue for cyling races -- The Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the Arts. As a result, patrons peered down into the scene much as Knox' students would have viewed the autopsies.

Time was running short by the end of Grant's talk about The Nefarious....., so we only heard a bit about his other work. I would love to see his feminist version of The Odyssey entitled Odysseus Unwound.  The only male actor in the opera is Odysseus himself. Intriguingly, in the production at the Tete-a-Tete opera company, Shetland Island knitters, spinners and weavers were positioned around the stage and created their craft during performances. It's a far cry from the image that appears in my mind when I think "opera."

To read more about the Burke and Hare murders, click here. To read about the peculiar Burke and Hare "murder dolls" found in a park in the 1830s, click here. And to learn about the Hermitage Artist Retreat -- and sign up for their email blasts to learn about upcoming programs -- click here.