Songs from St Kilda

by ruth barker, 23 Apr 2009

Hello,
The news that Saint Kilda in the Western Isles may get it’s own visitor centre (albeit – due to practical constraints – one located miles away from the island itself) reminded me of the opera that was staged on the island a couple of years ago.

For those who don’t know, St Kilda is a small archipelago lying about 40 miles west of the Western Isles of Scotland. It’s often called ‘the most remote place in Britain’ although it was inhabited from earliest prehistoric times right up until 1930, when sustaining a community there finally became untenable and the final 36 people living on the island relocated to mainland Scotland.

The story of St Kilda is one that has often been told, and coloured to suit the teller’s political or romantic persuasion. What is certain is that a combination of emigration, lack of self sufficiency and chronic levels of disease and infant mortality combined to ensure that by the early 20th Century the St Kildan population felt that they could no longer remain on the island. In 1957 however, the 5th Marquess of Bute bequeathed the group of islands to The National Trust for Scotland, at which point St Kilda was designated a National Nature Reserve. These days the National Trust shares the island with the Ministry of Defence, who maintain a missile tracking station of the St Kildan island of Hirta.

In cultural terms, the island has in some senses become an image of loss and regret, or the one hand, balanced a sense of giddy remoteness, possibility, and non-conformity on the other. It has been used as an icon from everyone from Ross Sinclair’s New Republic of St Kilda to Scottish band Runrig’s At the Edge of the World, (sharing a title with the – to my mind – infinitely better 1937 film by Michael Powell [sorry Runrig fans, but there you go; I can’t stand them!]) to Bill Brydon’s 1982 Channel 4 film Ill Fares The Land

It was none of these that my vague train of thought turned to this morning however, but to St Kilda: A European Opera, performed in Gaelic in 2007. This laborious, ambitious, but in many ways groundbreaking international co-production was performed simultaneously on 22 and 23 June 2007 in five European venues: France (Valenciennes), Belgium (Mons), Germany (Düsseldorf), Austria (Hallstatt) and Scotland (Stornoway). The five performances were linked by live satellite connection to St Kilda and publicly webcast live on the BBC. You can read all about it “here.” http://www.stkilda.eu/the-project And it’s worth noting as well, that the Belgian production of the opera (called St Kilda: L’île des Hommes-Oiseaux) will be at the Edinburgh International Festival this year on the 15th, 16th and 17th August. I may even try and get tickets.

I can’t tell you why this project has stuck with me so endurably. Maybe it’s the simplicity of it, though ‘simple’ seems an odd way to describe such a huge work involving so much money and so many people scattered over half of Europe. And yet it is simple in some way. The act of singing, or of writing a song and singing it at the same time as someone else sings their song, seems to me a very simple and essential thing, and all the more powerful because of that. There’s a gesture of ephemerality to the gesture of song that is soft in the way that water can be soft (strong enough to tear down cliffs and gouge out landscapes) or brief in the way that words can be brief (long enough to withstand centuries and change the way we think and live and dream). Maybe it’s just that singing (or listening to song) sometimes makes us vulnerable, and that vulnerability seems a good memorial for a lost society and it’s people.

More later,
R