The silence at the centre of a room full of people with dementia can be profound.

Last year, composer John O’Hara and I spent a week working in two residential care homes on the banks of the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal on a music research residency. We would turn up at the front door with an electric piano, a pile of song books and my writing pad and biro. Each day our little rooms full of people grew until our sessions were spilling into corridors and colonising larger spaces. We watched the residents emerge over the week, often as if from a deep sleep, swimming to the surface, lighting up from within. Mrs M, who at the beginning of the week could barely open her eyes, by the end was able let out a long note, rising up out of her chair as she did so, lifted on a breath, her delight at the strength of that sound reflected on her face. It was as if she had taken the essence of the idea arrived during a conversation which was unfolding about childhood games. It had flowed quite naturally from a number of remembered songs and comfortable reminiscences about teatime’s and playground rhymes.

“We used to play hide and seek,” said one lady.

“But we don’t play that anymore,” said the lady next to her. “We are not allowed to go. Because one of us is drowned.”

John and I spent a couple of days walking along the towpaths talking about the different qualities of breathing, and this group of elderly people, all in their 80s and 90s and all with a diagnosis of dementia. They have lived in the villages of Frampton-on-Severn and Berkeley all their lives. They were neighbours and friends and sweethearts, many are related, and yet those silent care-home rooms had seemed to swallow up those connections and blur their individual relationships.

We wrestled with the notion of how to portray that silence, not as a deadened emptiness but as a vibrant and living essence. We tried to capture the resonances of the watery landscape of rural Gloucestershire, along the Sharpness and Severn canal, where the opera that was slowly taking shape, is set. We wanted to craft a piece that shows how people are shaped by and reflect their landscape and that dementia does not diminish that connection but actually seems to enhance it.

There is so much to forget and there is often such a desperation around the grasping for names and places which are slipping away that silence is an easier refuge. Here, suddenly was a half unfolded memory on which they could all agree. And here was the story. One of us is drowned.

Local dementia charity, Mindsong, who were working in the same care homes, became involved. Mindsong use music therapists to work with groups of people with late-stage dementia – highly skilled and challenging work that allows the very frail to participate and make their own music. Their director, Dr Anthea Holland is determined that people with dementia should not be forgotten, and her faith in our project led to the opera, the Bargee’s Wife, being commissioned by Mindsong and Three Choirs.

Once we had established that the piece, which at that point was in fragments of half articulated ideas, would be crafted as an opera, John and I set to work arranging and rearranging words on the page and discussing how to make these voices heard. Neither of us were interested in verifying the incident by pinning it down as local history or fixing dates and places. People with dementia do not need to be shackled to truth in the way of documentary evidence; the feeling, the emotional truth is enough. They all agreed upon the idea that one of us is drowned, and they were all moved by the memory it. So the centre of the story is just that; a moment stopped in time, the flash of memory which is the tragedy of a child slipping into the water, like Brueghel’s Icarus.

  Poet and librettist Karen Hayes It is the quality of memory which is so fascinating and which we have tried to capture musically in the fabric of the opera. My task as librettist has been to create a text in which the weave has the fleeting and iridescent sense of dream memories in the process of disappearing, yet which enable the listener to enter that delicate world while still telling the central story and also to navigate, as someone with dementia does, the competing chronologies of past, present.

Our central character, the bargee’s wife, is herself a memory, an outsider. Like a lost way of life she is undomesticated, not quite fixed in time and place, caught on camera as a curiosity, not to be talked to or played with, and yet her moment of human empathy makes her the central witness to a tragedy. She narrates it again and again in the very present tense of our ladies in the care homes. Her presence, in the now of the story is flanked by other aspects of self which we all carry with us, the past and the future, memory and insight, often woven together and which look both backwards and forwards.

There are two choruses, one 160-strong group of adults made up of a number of local choirs, and one of children who sing as a lay-choir within the Cathedral. Like any chorus, they are ourselves, joyful and unworried as children at one moment, fearful and nostalgic at another. The many layers of voices and emotion which flash through the story are also our own. The fragmentation of memory and experience is the way we tell our own life stories.

In the end the opera is about more than memory and more than dementia, more than changing landscape and more than the story of a fleeting childhood memory. It is about being human, and it is about ourselves. I hope that an audience will come away from the opera feeling moved, uplifted and hopeful.

* The Bargee’s Wife, by John O’Hara and Karen Hayes and starring Barbara Dickson, has its world premiere on 4 August at Gloucester Cathedral.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/aug/03/dementia-opera-karen-hayes-john-ohara