Working on this opera has been a privilege and a pleasure for me.
Army of Lovers, an opera collaboration between David Flusfeder, novelist and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent, and piano virtuoso and composer Mark Springer premiered at the Playground Theatre in September.
The opera is based on the legend of the Sacred Band of Thebes: 150 pairs of male lovers, the single greatest fighting force of the Classical age. The strength of the army was due to the strength of the individual bond between each of its lovers, as well as, Plutarch related 400 years later, the shame that would result if a lover showed cowardice in front of his beloved. The army’s combination of love, loyalty and passion made it fearsome and unbeatable.
It is possible that the Sacred Band of Thebes did not actually exist. Maybe it is a legend of an idealised, eroticised past. But there’s no point having legends unless we can choose to believe in them. The opera takes as true the Band that Plutarch wrote about, founded on an erotic principle that defied tyrants. Sparta has been defeated, and now Thebes is allied with Sparta and Athens against Macedonia. The action begins in the aftermath of the Band’s penultimate battle and ends in the ruins of its final one, at Chaeronea against Philip II’s army in 338BCE.
This is a world of war and gods and prophecy, when the greatest good—personal, national, religious, military—was embodied in physical love. Plutarch gives us the fixed number of lovers that comprised the Band but doesn’t tell us what would happen when an individual soldier died in combat. Considering this question prompted the opera. Laius’s lover has fallen in the previous battle. He must take on a new lover to make the army whole but he cannot separate himself from his grief.
The full-length, two-act opera that is being performed now has a greatly expanded text, with the action opened up and the story developed, and set to entirely new music.