Alchymia is a 2021 quintet for basset clarinet and strings by Thomas Adès composed for Mark Simpson and Quatuor Diotima. At its premiere it was Adès’ most substantial new chamber work in over a decade, following The Four Quarters (2010). Its title – the Latin word for alchemy, from the Arabic kīmiyā – evokes two complementary postures: speculative, mystical capriciousness and experimental precision.
Alchymia is wrought from the base metals of four classically shaped movements. The first – ‘A Sea-Change (…those are pearls…)’ – sees a falling melodic sequence of four notes metamorphose, as the clarinet snakes its way downwards. In a quasi-developmental section rhythmic subdivisions shift continually as the clarinet grows more recalcitrant, probing the space available in each bar – seventeen, thirteen, eleven quavers squeezed into the time of eight. Ever more volatile syncopations accompany these unsteady figures before a whispered coda implies recapitulation of sorts.
‘The Woods So Wild’, based on WIlliam Byrd, follows in scherzo-like fashion: moto perpetuo in scurrying triplets. Its feet only touch the ground in the final bars: an emphatic plucked F in the cello sets off a miniature coda and breaks the hypnotic spell. The abrupt closing unison is like suddenly emerging into a clearing. A slow movement – ‘Lachrymae’, after John Dowland – recalls the four-note figure of the opening in a middle section, flanked by music whose lyricism treads slowly and softly, albeit with growing emotional commitment. A set of “divisions” – a nod to Byrd’s earlier keyboard music – closes the piece, with variations on music from Alban Berg’s Lulu.

Alchymia is the precipitate of several musical chain reactions, each stage heaping transformation upon transformation. The music and culture of ‘Alchymia is Thomas Adès’s most substantial chamber work in over a decade…one of his finest achievements of recent years.’
The Guardian

Elizabethan London provides a centrifugal force. ‘A Sea-Change (…those are pearls…)’ references Ariel’s song ‘Full Fathom Five’ from The Tempest, recalling the drowned king whose eyes are transformed by the sea into pearls.
Shakespeare’s play, with a text refashioned by Meredith Oakes, was the subject of Adès’ 2004 opera. In The Tempest alchemy and music both loom large: the title denotes the dramatic moment of transformation in an alchemical experiment, the sort represented by the figure of Prospero as magical philosopher and scientist. Several songs punctuate a play in which music has talismanic properties. It is the “thousand twangling instruments” of the island’s “sounds and sweet airs” that soothe and humanize Caliban. The connection between music and alchemy are found all over the writings of the period: in German physician Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1617) epigrammatic verse and prose are accompanied by fifty fugues, whose three voices represent the adept, their obstacles, and the philosopher’s stone.
One accompanying illustration is of a shipwrecked King swimming in the sea, calling out for help – eyes before they turn to pearls.

Metamorphosis is a pervasive feature of Adès’ work. An 1842 painting by Daniel Maclise inspired The Origin of the Harp (1995) for chamber ensemble. The picture captures the moment before a Celtic nymph turns from woman into musical instrument, the drifting strands of her hair on the cusp of hardening into strings. 1993’s Living Toys sees a child-hero dream his dumb playthings into brilliant and nightmarish life.
In Alchymia instruments aspire to take on other forms. In the first movement plucked strings are meant to imitate a lute, in one nod to the seventeenth- century background of the piece. When string parts. When string parts occasionally dovetail with the clarinet line, echoing or shadowing it for a handful of notes, Adès writes “inside clarinet”, as if one could show, like a magician, that a cello or viola were concealed in the bell of the instrument all along.
It represents an alchemical treatment of timbre. One of the principles of alchemy is that lead and gold are not different substances but at base share the same essence – it is only their external form that differs. ‘As above, so below’ was the Ur-maxim of alchemy, from its cryptic foundational text the Tabula Smaragdina, attributed to the mythic Hermes Trismegistus. It embodies the wish for a system of knowledge that reconciles macro- and microcosms, heavens with earth, and asserts the fundamentally unitary connection of all matter, whatever its myriad forms.

Alchymia is also possessed by a transformational musical momentum already set in motion by the composers Adès draws on. ‘The Woods So Wild’ references a popular Tudor street song William Byrd had already to ‘divisions’ – variations – for keyboard, before Adès makes it over into a silken scherzo.
‘Lachrymae’ takes its title from a 1600 lute song by Dowland reworked for viol consort. Mark Simpson noted of Alchymia that it represents Adès’ musical past (as well as present and future). This is especially evident in the slow movement. Dowland’s lute songs were the starting point for two 1992 works for piano: the blu-tack muffled melancholy of Still Sorrowing (based on ‘Semper Dowland, semper dolens’) and Darknesse Visible, a shimmering, tremulous ‘explosion’ of ‘In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell’. The use of basset clarinet again recalls Adès’ early music – he had originally intended his Op. 2 Chamber Symphony (1990) as a concerto for the instrument, being enamored of its extended range.
In the final movement Adès’ invokes Lulu, specifically Berg’s use in his Act three Verwandlungsmusik of Frank Wedekind’s ‘Konfession’, a 1905 ballad ventriloquizing a sex worker. On the surface this might seem like an aesthetic departure from the piece’s Tudor grounding. But Wedekind’s song is a Lautenlied, evoking the instrument of Dowland and Purcell, reworked by Berg to sound like a barrel-organ (another seventeenth-century instrument, albeit for the street rather than the Court). Even in high modernist orbit, Alchymia’s gravitational pull is still Elizabethan.

That particular sequence in Lulu is one previously admired by Adès. In 2012’s Full of Noises, a book of conversations with Tom Service, he describes the way Berg is able to integrate the street song into the language of the opera. It appears “at once something literally external, heard outside the window in the street in King’s Cross, and outside the serial environment we are living in, but at the same time woven into the web so that it belongs to the supremely intricate universe Berg has created. There is a total unity between the highest and lowest material.” As above, so below: musical alchemy in Berg, transcending musical boundaries, remade in turn by Adès’ set of variations.
For Adès composing means transforming matter. It is a kind of alchemy that unleashes something vibrant and fluid from the thick and intractable. In a 2022 interview in the Guardian Adès commented on why he composes:
There are obstacles in my way, dense solid knots, like ganglia; they block my path, infinitely heavy…They consist of everything, every sound, all
at once, compacted into an instant. They are dangerous, suffocating masses. While they are in the way, I can’t breathe…By undoing these knots, I release a living thing.

Benjamin Poore