"What Next?"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, Aug. 21, 2006.
July
was New American Opera Month in the purple hills of upstate New York
and western Massachusetts. You could hardly drive your Smart car from
the lesbian bed-and-breakfast to the organic farm stand without running
over an adaptation of a literary property. Stephen Hartke’s “The
Greater Good” made its début at the Glimmerglass Opera, in Cooperstown.
The Lake George Opera, in Saratoga Springs, presented Ned Rorem’s “Our
Town,” which had its première in Indiana earlier this year. Elliott
Carter’s opera “What Next?” (1999) belatedly had its first American
staging, at Tanglewood. Back in New York, Elliot Goldenthal’s “Grendel”
was the centerpiece of the Lincoln Center Festival, in a Julie Taymor
extravaganza. These performances, all well attended, came at the end of
a musical season that brought John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic” to the San
Francisco Opera, Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy” to the Met, and
Lowell Liebermann’s “Miss Lonelyhearts” to Juilliard.
Are any of these new operas towering masterworks that will alter the
course of music history while winning the hearts of millions? People
have been asking that loaded question of American opera for a hundred
years, and the way they phrase it almost demands a negative answer.
Better to ask whether a new work is strong enough to hold the stage. If
it does, it has a future, and the masterpiece-sorting can be done by
later generations. “The Greater Good,” “Our Town,” and “Grendel” passed
this test: lustily, wistfully, and by a hair.
Hartke’s “The Greater Good” is a tightly constructed, vividly
imagined piece that may mark the emergence of a major opera composer.
The excellent libretto, by Philip Littell, is based on Maupassant’s
story “Boule de Suif,” which tells of the misadventures of a menagerie
of bourgeois and aristocratic types who are travelling by coach in the
middle of the Franco-Prussian War. A Prussian commandant stops the
coach and lets them know that they can proceed only if Boule de Suif, a
bighearted, big-boned prostitute who is on board, services his needs.
She patriotically refuses. The others play elaborate psychological
games to make her give in. They are greater whores than she. The
challenge of this scathing little tale is that not a lot actually
happens. Hartke seizes control with a subtle riot of sprung rhythms,
colliding tunes, jazzy rave-ups, onomatopoeia (cat lovers will want a
forthcoming Naxos recording if only for the Comtesse de Breville’s
mewling, chirruping aria, “I miss my cat”), musical in-jokes (listen
for the would-be-transcendent “Rosenkavalier” trio that never gets off
the ground), and, at the end, a delicately shattering anthem of
despair. Hartke is celebrated for his orchestral music, which mixes
Stravinskyan neoclassicism, minimalism, jazz, and Balinese gamelan. The
dazzle of his orchestration was no surprise; the sizzle of his theatre
sense was big news.
The melancholy Americana of Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town” has
long fascinated American composers. Aaron Copland, who wrote music for
the 1940 film adaptation, wanted to make an opera out of it, but Wilder
did not coöperate. Ned Rorem, who has written only one other
evening-length opera in his eighty-two years, eventually received
permission from the playwright’s estate. The drama plays to his
strengths. Its mundane scenes of all-American life—baseball,
drunkenness, gossip, marriage—elicit from Rorem the clean-lined,
crisp-figured style that typified American music before the Cold War,
and to which he has stayed uncompromisingly true. The unsettling
transformation of the third act, in which we see the world through the
eyes of the dead, makes him go deeper; at times, the music becomes
uncharacteristically turbulent and grand. (Rorem has always prided
himself on his Francophile restraint.) Wilder’s ghosts remind us that
we never appreciate the transient glories of daily existence until it
is too late. The very fabric of the score—its luminous orchestration,
its pearly vocal lines, its gently pulsing rhythms, its celestially
circling song of young love—evokes the mundane beauty that we overlook.
J. D. McClatchy, who sleekly adapted “Our Town” for Rorem, is the
librettist of the moment; somehow, he also found time to write “Miss
Lonelyhearts” for Liebermann (unfortunately, not a success), and to
collaborate with Taymor on “Grendel.” The original source for the
latter is John Gardner’s sardonic, poetic 1971 novel, a postmodern
masterpiece in which the monster whom Beowulf slew strikes back with a
tell-all memoir. The New York State Theatre was packed with spectators
who were eager to see what new wonders Taymor had wrought, and they
were not cheated: her staging included a decadent, stage-spanning
Dragon, figures dancing in midair in strobe light, decomposing puppet
beasts and beastly machines, and comically preening heroes who appeared
to have studied the production numbers in “Showgirls” for choreographic
inspiration. Goldenthal kept pace with the images, deploying a
meta-Wagnerian, bass-heavy orchestration, semi-improvised episodes with
a hard-rock tinge, thumping bacchanalia in the manner of Carl Orff, and
spells of post-minimalist lyricism along the lines of recent John
Adams. The trouble was that he merely kept pace; the score followed the
action rather than drove it. Still, it had a certain mythic weight, and
the show was a wow.
Glimmerglass, Lake George, and the Lincoln Center Festival all
fielded mostly young, mostly unknown casts for their productions,
proving that celebrity singers aren’t needed to attract audiences to
new opera. True, Denyce Graves played the Dragon in “Grendel” (in
woefully ragged voice), but the main attraction was the little-known
but very fast-rising bass Eric Owens, in the title role. His hefty,
tonally focussed, richly colored voice cut through the tumult of
Goldenthal’s score, and his vital, naturalistic acting gave heart to a
high-tech spectacle. Steven Sloane authoritatively marshalled the
orchestra. In “Our Town,” which was directed by Nelson Sheeley and
conducted by Mark Flint, the vocal standout was Sarah Paige Hagstrom,
passionately engaged as Emily. At Glimmerglass, where David Schweizer
put together a sharply humorous staging of “The Greater Good” and
Stewart Robertson led a spot-on orchestral performance, Caroline Worra
created a radiant and heartbreaking Boule de Suif.
At the Tanglewood festival, everyone was
dumbstruck by the work ethic of James Levine. Sidelined in the spring
with a rotator-cuff injury, the grand Pooh-Bah of the Met and the
Boston Symphony has shed several dozen pounds and, if possible, seems
more unstoppably dynamic than before. One weekend, he conducted three
different all-Mozart programs, including all of “Don Giovanni.” Another
weekend, he led, on consecutive nights, Schoenberg’s “Gurre-Lieder” and
Strauss’s “Elektra,” which require orchestras of a hundred and forty
and a hundred and fifteen players, respectively. I caught Levine’s last
Tanglewood feat of the summer, in which he dissolved the difficulties
of Carter’s “What Next?” The piece appeared on a program of short
operas, alongside Hindemith’s “There and Back” and Stravinsky’s
“Mavra.” The director Doug Fitch deftly tied the three works together
with Dali-meets-Warhol imagery. The singers were Tanglewood students;
the gleaming soprano voices of Chanel Marie Wood and Kiera Duffy, and
the commanding contralto of Christin-Marie Hill, stood out.
“What
Next?” is an anti-opera that pointedly avoids conventional narrative.
Paul Griffiths’s libretto describes, in knotty, jokey, Samuel
Beckett-like style, the aftermath of a highway accident. The characters
may or may not be dead, and are trying to figure out what world they
belong to. Carter’s hyper-complex musical language is fit for the
subject, effortlessly summoning a hectic, rush-hour atmosphere. The
various characters are assigned governing intervals—perfect fifths,
minor and major seconds, tritones, and so on—and if two notes are
insufficient to define a personality, that may be the point; at the
border of death, the precious illusion of individuality disintegrates.
This is the same disenchanting wisdom that Rorem imparts in the final
act of “Our Town.” The overlap is ironic, because, for fifty years,
Rorem and Carter have been considered polar opposites in American
music, the one defending tonality and the other rejecting it. In their
late operas, they are seeing humanity with almost the same eyes, as a
frantic dance to a misheard tune.
