The musical score to Alice in Wonderland: a Musical Dream Play bears the solemn responsibility of leading the audience into the world of the Hatter, the Hare, Alice, conjuring the shape and form of the landscape of Alice’s dream (or is it ?) as it unfolds. Like Alice herself, it has to move through several states – by turn full of charm, or moving in dance-rhythms such as a waltz or the mazurka, or creating a sense of nostalgia for lost childhood in the naivety of the child-like songs.
Slaughter’s music deftly responds to the requirements of the drama in a variety of creative guises; the simple appeal of the melodic lines in Alice’s songs; the militaristic dotted rhythms for the Queen’s court; the brooding music announcing the arrival of the Executioner. There are dances, too; the stately Gavotte of the cards, Alice’s waltz with the flowers, all keeping the music (and the characters) moving. The pace of the dream-play is unrelenting – not driven, necessarily, but once Alice has been sung into wakefulness by the chorus at the beginning, the pace never flags; songs, dances, potential executions, all tumble across the stage. There’s a state of nervousness to be found amongst the lyricism, too; the White Rabbit’s clock-watching, the King of Heart’s anxious placatory remarks to appease the Queen’s lust for the tumbling of heads; for all the dream-state towards which the story aspires, there are some edgy elements too that keep the pace moving forward. Slaughter’s bustling music captures this at times, the chorus scurrying out of the way as Alice starts to wake, or the White Rabbit’s frantic entrance; the music is sometimes reminiscent of a Strauss waltz or Waldteufel’s Skater’s Waltz.
There is an undercurrent of nostalgia pervading both words and music too, as though the music yearns to transport both itself and the listener into that dream-world, that reimagining of childhood, and free itself (and us) from all other cares. The haunting pastoral moment when the chorus calls Alice awake in the opening act with a falling fifth is highly effective.
For all its immediate appeal, the music can also be fiercely dramatic, as for instance in the diminished chords underlining the swirling energy of the opening chorus reacting to Alice beginning to wake. A sense of anticipation is formed immediately at the very opening; a trembling first inversion chord set above the melodic line creates a feeling of rootlessness, underlined by the ensuing quick procession of keys, stepping from major to minor in a fugal state of uncertainty - is it a dream state ? This same material returns at the very end in an altered state, now a semitone higher as though the story has moved Alice (and us) into a different realm, akin to the progressive tonality of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. There’s a hint of menace, too; the obsessive White Rabbit, the tyrannously murderous Queen of Hearts, the relentless grinning of the Cheshire Cat; the music reflects some of that, too, but never forgets its first duty, to beguile the listener; it’s the music’s lyricism, its charm and its wholesomeness that clothes the action throughout. The chorus can be quite menacing, too; as the courtiers of the Queen of Hearts, their ‘Ahs’ during the Executioner's Chorus create the vivid impression that whole ensemble is seized with the Queen’s bloodlust, using dotted rhythms and minor keys.
There’s a wonderful ease to the way the melodic lines unfold that can’t always have been straightforward (think of Ravel’s comment on the difficulty of writing the melody to the slow movement of the Piano Concerto), a lovely flexibility that fits the text; for instance, a suitably feline grace to the duet between Alice and the Cheshire Cat, with an ascending chromatic slide to start the chorus each time the voices come together at “For your / my answers come so pat, You’re / I’m a wondrous Cheshire Cat.”
Slaughter’s melodic shapes are always mobile, often rising, as though the music is yearning towards a higher realm, such as the opening of Gavotte of Cards, or indeed the very first melody, heard at the opening, springing upwards into the pastoral scene, or the charmingly decorative grace notes of the Voice of the Lobster. His music deals effectively with the wonderfully unsettling dissonance that often exists between the content of the words and the musical means used to tell the story. How doth the little crocodile opens with an arching melodic shape leading into a lilting aria that revels in the contradiction between beautiful music and slightly menacing text; ‘and welcomes little fishes in / With gently smiling jaws.’ The high tessitura of the tenor’s Beautiful Soup creates a hugely expressive aria where crazy words are not sung manically but beautifully, heightening the strangeness of the Mock Turtle’s heartfelt ode to soup ‘so rich and green / Waiting in a hot tureen.’ Slaughter’s music elegantly rises to the task of writing charming music to positively strange words.
Slaughter’s harmonic palette is richly expressive too, demonstrated in the colourful extended arpeggios which open the Gavotte of Cards, or the poignant harmonies of the central Trio section.
It would be easy to dismiss Slaughter’s score as charmingly inconsequential, but that would be to overlook the way it is wedded perfectly to the unfolding narrative, the different moods through which it changes in response to the characters and to events. The music is reaching beyond itself to a lost Garden of Eden, to a place where the beauty and simplicity of childhood still reside; transcending the antagonism between text and the music used to express it, the score aspires to a state where words and music exist in harmony with each other, and where the listeners might too. It is the combination of nostalgia for that which has been lost together with a yearning towards a recaptured state of effortless contentment that lifts Slaughter's score into a wondrous odyssey for cast and audience alike. It never gets in the way, or outlasts its welcome; instead, it neatly captures the essence of the drama at any given moment and sets it forth, allowing the characters to sing, to dance and to move through the plot in a way totally at one with the nature of the story. A perfect synthesis of sound and story; don’t underestimate the superficial charm of Slaughter’s musical realisation of Alice’s world.
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