For many people classical opera is an outdated, even archaic and elitist art form, using musical styles and plots irrelevant to the 21st century, some lovely tunes maybe by Rossini or Puccini, but of little relevance to our lives or times.
This could not be more wrong.
A powerful new one-act opera by a Yorkshire composer proves beyond question how the power of music combined with a brilliant and thought-provoking libretto, superbly sung, played and imaginatively staged, can convey ideas and ask questions of huge contemporary relevance and significance that few other art forms can match.
A carefully crafted opera explores technological advances
Bradford Opera Festival doesn’t have the huge millions in financial support of Covent Garden or Glyndebourne but can stage music theatre to pack a punch well beyond anything a newspaper column or television documentary can achieve.
The Last Machine Breaker might be described as a one-act chamber opera, utilising just two singers and a small ensemble of skilled players, and performed on a very small but cleverly crafted stage in several small halls in North and West Yorkshire – in Bradford, Leeds, Skipton and appropriately enough in Marsden, in the Colne Valley above Huddersfield where so much Luddite protest took place.
The opera explores one of the greatest questions of our time. How can humanity survive the ever-accelerating pace of technical change, most notably in our times, the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI)?
Past and present intertwine
The libretto is by Kamal Kaan, described as a “British-Bangladeshi working-class writer” with extensive experience of writing for stage, film and television. The story explores the stories of four Yorkshire people, two real, two fictitious. Separated by over two centuries, they all face the tragic consequences of events that shape their destinies.
One of the two intertwined stories is based on historical fact. This is the last few hours in 1813 of Huddersfield cropper and Luddite George Mellor, in a condemned cell in York prison. Mellor was sentenced to death for the murder of mill owner William Horsfall, who had replaced skilled textile workers with hugely more efficient mechanised looms in his great mill, resulting in unemployment, poverty and starvation for Colne Valley weavers and their families.
Despite pleas from his wife Mary, George chooses death rather than betray his comrades, in the hope that he might have a place in history. George and Mary’s experiences are counterpointed with a purely fictional couple, sung by the same performers, whose drama takes place in the near future, 2030.
Adam and Eva
Eva is a scientist, an IT genius, who has created an AI humanoid, Adam – a name not without significance. Eva’s intention is to exploit this Frankenstein-like, superhuman, AI-driven being whose intellectual abilities will rapidly outstrip mere human intelligence. In so doing, Adam will create huge wealth for his creator, Eva.
Adam, however, after initially cooperating with his creator, soon resists. Even his artificial intelligence allows him to realise the huge implications for society if he is reproduced in huge numbers for financial gain, whilst Eva relishes the wealth and power her creation will bring. As librettist and composer imply, like Eva, we all have moral choices – for humanity or for personal greed. Sadly, greed too often wins.
George goes to his fate refusing to betray his comrades but hoping that his story will be remembered: a story which is also about Mary’s sacrifice, as she carries his unborn child.
Mechanisation of the textile industries brought unimaginable wealth to mill owners while workers worked long hours to remain in abject poverty.
Adam foresees Eva betraying him to allow his clone to be reproduced. As the opera ends, untold millions of Adam-images fill the screen; machines that will make astronomic wealth for the few trillionaire tech emperors soon to rule the Earth as much of humanity starves.
Genius creativity with a local feel
Using a range of clever techniques, sound and video recordings allow singers Daisy Mitchell and Neil Balfour to take on both parts simultaneously, sometimes singing duets with their own or each other’s carefully created and replicated image. An opera about technology uses technology with creative flair.
The production is a tour de force, using a combination of live and recorded vocal, instrumental singing and mirror-like living images to create an extraordinary work of art. It is produced with flair by Alex Chisholm, noted for her acclaimed 2023 Yorkshire version of The Barber of Seville sung in perfect West Riding dialect.
But none of this would work without the powerful and beautiful score written by Yorkshire composer and conductor Ben Crick. This is music which is both melodic yet at times powerfully dissonant, carrying forward the great 20th-century heritage of such composers as Janaceck, Shostakovich, Tippett and Britten, but with a voice that is unmistakably his own. Yet also very Yorkshire, even with hints at times of folk song.
Provocative work from Yorkshire’s most significant modern composer
The five virtuoso instrumentalists find an intensity of sound from such a small ensemble that proves the point that opera doesn’t need huge orchestras, lavish sets and costumes to thrive. Following the recent success of the highly evocativeSoundscapes suite, which so perfectly evokes the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, and his highly entertaining Northern Score that delighted audiences at Bradford Live on Yorkshire Day, The Last Machine Breaker establishes Crick as perhaps the most significant Yorkshire composer since Frederick Delius, a very German composer who just happened to be born in Bradford.
Crick brings a Yorkshire accent and directness to this score, both with imaginative scoring and hauntingly beautiful and evocative word-setting so superbly delivered by Mitchell and Balfour.
But this isn’t saccharine-sweet entertainment. The Last Machine Breaker is an angry, provocative, polemical piece of music theatre about ideas. It is not anti-machine nor anti-progress, but questions why, two centuries after the much-maligned Luddites, technology is once again being used to impoverish the majority of the world’s population while allowing a tiny minority to become obscenely rich and thereby control both media and political power to a terrifying degree.
Opera heroically lives on despite a lack of funding
Albeit with some Arts Council support, Bradford Opera Festival has achieved something little short of miraculous with minute resources. But this very achievement also hides the appalling lack of funding for the arts outside London, emphasised by the loss of Yorkshire Regional Arts Association funding. This was highlighted all too vividly when the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra’s magnificent Yorkshire Day closing concert ultimately had to be financially underwritten by Crick himself, taking risks no public or private institutions would fully share. This is a disgrace. It would not happen had this same concert been in London: another woeful example of how the north is starved of funding for the performing arts.
There should be more public/private partnerships – if necessary, with generous tax breaks – to allow more affluent individuals and foundations within our region to put something back by supporting the arts, including music. Funding is needed not just for our internationally acclaimed Opera North but also for the grotesquely underfunded Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra and smaller, cutting-edge groups such as Bradford Opera Festival.
Yet, and perhaps against the odds, with two more major Crick works – about Frederick Delius himself and, intriguingly, the tragic Pendle Witches – now in the pipeline, 2026 promises another vintage year for everyone who cares for the cultural life of our great region.
The Last Machine Breaker received its world premiere at Bradford Opera Festival, with performances in Skipton, Leeds and Marsden from 10-16 November 2025.
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