Bart Sher’s Tales of Hoffmann production is returning to the Met this week.
Here’s my essay on Offenbach’s fascinating, problematic masterpiece for the Met Playbill (starts on p. 35 [pdf format]):
Les Contes d’Hoffmann is a most unusual swan song. In its formal ambition
and psychological scope, the opera represents a striking makeover.
Jacques Offenbach hoped to reinvent himself as an artist, proving that he
was capable of more than the wickedly satirical but lightweight brand of lyrical
theater on which his reputation had been built. And Hoffmann did secure his
place in the operatic pantheon, although the truncated version through which it first became known made a jumble of Offenbach’s original vision.
Enjoy your Nutcracker this season, but me, I’d much rather have the other part of the double-bill with which the ballet was first paired in 1892: the one-act fairy-tale opera Iolanta.
I’m currently admiring Peter Sellars’s enlightening interpretation, paired on DVD with Stravinsky’s Perséphone from a production at the Teatro Real.
“It is a very radical opera, it is the start of symbolism in Russia, of modern art, of the search for light,” says Peter Sellars in an interview for El País.
Iolanta was Tchaikovsky’s very last opera and suffered from terrible bowdlerization under Soviet authorities. A new production starring Anna Netrebko — in a double-bill with Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and directed by Mariusz Trelinski — comes to the Met early in 2015.
I’m deeply grateful to Tom Luce to be able to publish his insightful review of the world premiere of the opera staging of John Adams’s The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Directed by Peter Sellars, the production just opened this past weekend at English National Opera.
Review by Tom Luce: The Gospel According to the Other Mary
World Premiere Staging of John Adams’s and Peter Sellars’s Masterpiece
On Friday 21 November, English National Opera unveiled its new production of the Adams/Sellars “alternative” version of the crucifixion of Christ. The two-act work, described by its creators as a “Passion Oratorio”, was premiered in a concert performance at Disney Concert Hall by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in May 2012 under Gustavo Dudamel’s baton. The following year came the first semi-staged concert performance, also featuring the LA Philharmonic under Dudamel. That version later toured to New York and Europe (including a stop at London’s Barbican). Dudamel’s interpretation was released on a recording by Deutsche Grammophon earlier this year, so the music has been accessible to the public at large since then.
Directed by Sellars himself, ENO’s production was the work’s first full staging. Along with its two creators, it deservedly received a prolonged ovation from a rapt and obviously much moved audience.
The performance was uniformly excellent, with cast and chorus admirably meeting the challenging mixture of singing, movement, and acting Sellars demands of and inspires from his performers. All the principal singers — Patricia Bardon as Mary Magdalene, Meredith Arwady as Martha, and Russell Thomas the Lazarus — were committed and effective, as were dancers Banks, Stephanie Berge, Ingrid Mackinnon, and Parinay Mehra, who variously shadowed them and contributed other parts to the narrative.
The musical side at ENO was in the hands of Joana Carneiro. Of Portuguese origin, she is better known in the U.S. than in Britain, having for some years been music director of the Berkeley Symphony. Her technical mastery and impassioned commitment to this highly complex score were remarkable. The ENO orchestra played magnificently.
Those familiar with Sellars’ “ritualisations” of the two Bach Passions with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra would find nothing to surprise them in his staging. One hallmark is his use of dance, mime, and body movement to externalise and heighten emotion. “Put your body where your belief is”, he says in the ENO’s introductory video. Another is the subtle intermingling of narrative and representation. The main thrust is narrative, but to heighten impact at critical points in the drama, the narrators act out the events — just as the Evangelist in the Berlin Bach Passions both expounds the story and at times impersonates characters — e.g., Peter in denial, or Christ at his death. This subtle shifting of roles keeps crude dramatisation at bay but facilitates a wide variety of dramatic tone and effects. I have not seen anything comparable in other directors’ work; it is one of Sellars’s most skilful and original attributes.
The stage design by George Tsypin, subtly lit by James Ingalls, is spare but eloquent: sand and barbed wire represent a Middle East riven by conflict and oppression, simultaneously biblical and contemporary.
The work juxtaposes and fuses ancient and modern in presenting Mary and Martha as running a hostel for homeless, impoverished, and marginalised people, with Jesus as a mixture of family friend, honoured guest, and spiritual patron. He is also a miracle worker in the raising of their dead brother Lazarus, sacrificial victim of the elites whose power he challenges, and a source of hope for the future of the world.
The literary sources are the Bible — especially St John’s Gospel — supplemented and re-interpreted through modern American cultural figures: poet and author Louise Erdrich, who is partially of native American descent; Dorothy Day of the radical Catholic Worker movement; Rosario Castellanos, the Mexican writer, activist, and diplomat; and the black poet June Jordan (who wrote the libretto for an earlier Adams/Sellars collaboration, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky).
In the ENO video Sellars also says: “The moment you feminize Christianity and you go into feminine spirituality, you go into a very different space and it operates very differently”. It is of the essence in Sellars’s dramatic work that he sees the cultural myths we have inherited through women’s eyes. This is as much an emotional and dramatic as a political standpoint.
The main originality of his St Matthew Passion ritualisation lies in its inspiration and liberation in the listener and viewer of wider and wilder feelings going well beyond the conventional liturgical responses or the “authentic” musical response to a deeper human involvement in the passion of Christ and its human and political significance. In doing so he responds to the injunction in the very first line of the work: “Come, ye daughters, help me lament”. (The discreet presence in the audience of Mark Padmore, the Evangelist in the Berlin Passions, at Friday’s Gospel premiere served to underline the connection between the Bach and Adams ventures.)
John Adams’s music reaches new levels of emotional profundity, dramatic responsiveness, and absence of mannerism, going even beyond his achievement in The Death of Klinghoffer. There is an extraordinary richness and flexibility of harmony and melody and a fascinating orchestral sound, to which a cimbalom gives an exotic edge without ever sounding kitschy. Amongst many fine moments, the most deeply moving for me is the aria with which the first act ends, sung by Lazarus after the Passover evening: “Tell me, how is this night different? … This is the night we eat the bread of affliction so that evil may turn into good”. Within an orchestral palette evoking a kind of Nachtmusik, Adams here creates a deep and movingly optimistic reflection on the events of the opera. Over many years I have heard nothing finer from a contemporary composer.
With this production English National Opera cements its standing as the world’s most committed John Adams house, having previously mounted Nixon in China and Doctor Atomic and having originated the Klinghofferproduction admired recently at the Met.
The work itself will surely take a high place in the canon of works from the last century or so in which great composers address themes of human injustice and inequality. It will be alongside Tippett’s A Child Of Our Time (1944) and his The Knot Garden (1970), an opera featuring a female revolutionary fighter and a mixed-race/same-gender couple, which sadly seems to have slipped out of the repertoire in recent years); Hans Werner Henze’s dramatic cantata The Raft of Medusa; and above all Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Its full unveiling at last week’s premiere was an event of real significance.
Tom Luce lives in London and Seattle. He has followed musical events for over 50 years. He wrote music reviews for Seattle’s Crosscut.com.
Jay Myers as Orsino and Allie Pratt as Viola. Photo by John Ulman.
“Why, this is very midsummer madness!” exclaims Countess Olivia in the middle of Twelfth Night — just as the whirligigs of the plot against Malvolio start cranking away. Olivia’s normally uptight steward has been set up to believe his boss is suddenly overcome with uncontrollable passion for him and is putting on a display that makes for one of the most outrageously funny scenes in all Shakespeare.
But Malvolio’s (David Quicksall) crazed behavior is easily matched by the antics indulged in by Olivia herself (Elinor Gunn) in Seattle Shakespeare Company’s deliriously unconventional new production, which opened this past weekend and which plays through Nov. 16 at the Center Theatre at Seattle Center. Visiting director Jon Kretzu approaches Twelfth Night as if it were a vastly elaborated version of the nocturnal spell cast in the Bard’s decade-earlier A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Just about everyone seems to wander about in a woozy haze of confused, mismatched desire.
Tonight brings the opening of Los Angeles Opera’s curious pairing of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with Bluebeard’s Castle by Bartók.
The Australian-born, Berlin-based director Barrie Kosky (intendant at the Komische Oper Berlin) has brought his staging of the double bill for Oper Frankfurt to LA.
In a recent Opera News profile, Kosky explained the connections he’s come to see between these two one-act operas:
“Both pieces are about arrival and departure in different ways. Both operas have a couple and the complexities of love in different ways as the central element of the pieces. And the third thing is, both pieces have a degree of sadness and melancholia running through them.”
Here’s a very brief introduction to the evening by LA Opera’s CEO Christopher Koelsch:
Just to whet your appetite: a snippet from this deliciously sophisticated Handel comedy.
I’ll post my new essay on Handel’s Partenope as soon as San Francisco Opera publishes it. The production, which took the Olivier Award for Best Opera when it premiered at English National Opera, is directed by Christopher Alden, and I had a chance to spend time with him as he was rehearsing the SFO cast (a dream cast, I might add).
Director James Darrah rehearsing Semele, with Haeran Hong as the title heroine; photo by Steve Korn
Music lovers in the Seattle area will not want to miss this weekend’s performances of Semele, a joint effort by Pacific MusicWorks and the University of Washington School of Music.
I was lucky to be able to attend one of the rehearsals, where I found myself spellbound by the flow of ideas and inspired rapport between director James Darrah and the cast — all this without a stage or costumes and only harpsichord accompaniment. Semele is a late Handel work (1743) that never fit comfortably into the era’s expectations for either opera or oratorio, but Darrah and company are treating it as the liveliest brand of music theater, full of humor, wit, enchantment, and (literally and figuratively) epiphany.
It’s easy enough to imagine the musical and theatrical potential Handel saw in this material, retooling a libretto more than 30 years old — it includes the work of Alexander Pope — which itself retells the classical myth of Semele and Zeus/Jupiter. The human Semele has a fateful love affair with none other than the king of the gods, triggering the jealousy of his wife. Juno’s plan to avenge herself results in the destruction of Semele as a mortal woman but leads to the birth of Dionysus/Bacchus — a boon for humanity.
Handel knew how to carve into the meat of the mythic matter with this story of human aspirations for the impossible, of divine vulnerability to human emotion, of the power of irrepressible desire. A century later, Wagner noted the archetypal aspects of the tale and its similarities to Elsa’s ill-fated questioning of Lohengrin in another human-meets-transcendent encounter. (Another variant is found in Apuleius’s marvelously elaborate narrative of Cupid and Psyche.)
Seattle has tended to be a Handel-deprived zone for far too long, but Stephen Stubbs — the visionary artistic director of Pacific MusicWorks — is changing the playing field with his musically and theatrically stimulating advocacy of early and baroque composers. An internationally acclaimed musical director and lutenist, Stubbs marries the energies of his early music expertise with an appreciation of cutting-edge stage direction and interdisciplinary artistic creativity.
And his choice of the Los Angeles-based director and visual artist James Darrah bodes well. (Darrah has worked with the likes of Peter Sellars and John Adams, and among his upcoming projects is a collaboration with Michael Tilson Thomas next month for the San Francisco Symphony’s semi-staged production of Peter Grimes.)
During the rehearsal I saw, Darrah was coaching the appealing cast of young artists singing the chorus into how to develop into a major character in their own right rather than a passive, fly-on-the-wall musical presence. The chorus became a visible and dynamic extension of the power play among Semele, Juno, and Jupiter. And far from purveying an arbitrary “concept,” Darrah showed with his sensitivity to the subtexts of Handel’s melody and counterpoint that he commands an intimate understanding of the score and of the way Handel constructs his narrative arc.
It should be fascinating to compare the final results of performance with what will happen on the Seattle Opera stage next February-March, when the director Tomer Zvulun returns for a mainstage production of Semele. Meanwhile, Stubbs is spearheading experiments in smaller-scale productions involving partnerships between different organizations and even with companies across the Northwest — all of which promises to enliven the ecology of Seattle’s art scene, for early music and contemporary composers alike.
If you go: Pacific MusicWorks and the University of Washington School of Music present Handel’s Semele Friday and Saturday, May 16 and 17, at 7:30 pm and Sunday, May 18, at 2:00 pm at UW’s Meany Hall. (Sunday’s matinee performance is presented by the student cover cast.) Tickets at 206.543.4880 or 1.800.859.5342 or here.
(c) 2014 Thomas May All rights reserved.
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” Dan Kremer as King Lear; photo by John Ulman
To grapple with the challenge of staging King Lear has to be the Shakespearean equivalent of trying to produce an entire Ring cycle. The play is so vast, so all-encompassing, its web of theatrical and emotional motifs so intricately woven, that it’s no wonder old-fashioned — well, OK, ancient — critical opinion deemed the play simply “too huge for the stage” (A.C. Bradley).
But visionary productions over the past century have dispelled that misgiving. Or maybe it’s just that the course the world itself has undergone makes us more receptive to Lear‘s devastating dramatic truths. Sometimes it almost seems as if Shakespeare had written the script for our times — and we’re just bumbling along, trying to act it out. Things don’t just fall apart; they coil toward entropy.
In Seattle Shakespeare’s new production, the play’s apocalyptic dimensions are essentially eclipsed by the familial — and all-too-familiar — realism of dysfunctional relationships and personal psychology.
Linda K. Morris, Patrick Allcorn, and Dan Kremer; photo by John Ulman
Director Sheila Daniels conceives the tragedy as an intimate echo chamber of unstable characters who are progressively losing it. What they undergo entails a series of variations on the theme of Lear’s crack-up. Scene by scene (with the whole divided here into three acts), their attempts to impose order on events, to get closer to their desires, become increasingly desperate. The overriding impression isn’t so much of the grim inevitability of consequences — Shakespeare’s merciless updating of classical “fate” — as of psychological meltdown.
As the ex-monarch, Dan Kremer underscores this approach through the unpredictable variability of his temper. It works very well for the first sections of the play — particularly in how it clarifies the relationship between Lear and his daughters that has already charted the course of the tragedy long before it begins.
We see how Goneril (Linda K. Morris) and Regan (Debra Pralle), given neatly differentiated portrayals here, aren’t just self-serving but have been brought up to fear daddy’s mercurial outbursts. Elinor Gunn’s Cordelia shows a steely stubbornness she must have learned first-hand. That’s what keeps her from seeing the danger she puts herself in — not a martyr complex to speak truth to power.
As for their husbands, while the Duke of Cornwall compresses into a sadistic psychopath (Gordon Carpenter), Shakespeare gives amplitude to the Duke of Albany (Patrick Allcorn) to grow in self-awareness and influence.
What lacks the needed emotional force are the actual climaxes marking each way-station in Lear’s descent. Kremer’s scene on the heath becomes just another fit, his verbal torrent more a fest of self-pity. By the same token, the Lear Kremer depicts in the final scenes fails to stir any deeper pity than he already has at the beginning of his long humiliation.
Kremer is more compelling in his interactions with “the other half” — with the fellow victims of ruin who never seem to faze him as they cross his path and all head toward the final confrontations at Dover. His reunion scene with the blinded Gloucester (Michael Winters) is especially resonant in its unsettling blend of horror and comic absurdity.
Dan Kremer and Michael Winters; photo by John Ulman
Some stand-out performances by others in the cast tilt the focus of the play in interestingly unexpected directions. Eric Riedmann’s chillingly embittered Edmund — possibly the most accomplished single interpretation — conveys the malign intelligence of a Iago yet always feels human. It’s one of Daniels’ strengths to clarify each character’s motivations in a way that makes them psychologically persuasive, further emphasizing the intimacy of family connections in this production.
Riedmann moreover revels in Shakespeare’s poetry, articulating its sonorities and rhythms with a relish and variety I wish were not otherwise the exception in this cast. The only misstep is the close-to-campy exaggeration of the sexual dalliance between him and Regan.
Linda K. Morris and Eric Riedmann; photo by John Ulman
Winters makes Gloucester’s wishful gullibility work, and the scenes with his two sons are among the most vividly realized. In his guise as Poor Tom, Jorge Chacon draws on physical hints he’s shown us as the nervous if good-natured Edgar.
King Lear is notable for the overdetermination of the fool archetype. Along with the official fool (Todd Jefferson Moore), the disguised Kent (played as a “Duchess” by the splendid Amy Thone) and Poor Tom on the heath reinforce the fool’s function of bearing witness to the truth as they retreat most deeply into their roles. Thone and Jefferson have a winning dynamic together and help re-introduce some of the play’s larger perspectives — particularly, its obsession with the power of language to shape reality, both positively and negatively. This is what gives the humor they interject its edge.
After all, they continue to subject Lear to the treatment that outraged him when it came from Cordelia. But even to “speak what we feel” is a kind of rhetoric, if the mirror side of Lear’s fulminations and curses. Language is the one thing the dispossessed king is left with — the very language he obviously abused throughout his reign.
Dan Kremer, Craig Peterson, Sophie Paterson, Amy Thone, and Jonathan Crimeni; photo by John Ulman
The scenic conception is notably weak and lags far behind the many fine nuances of the ensemble’s acting. Daniels, who collaborated with set designer Craig Wollam, opts for a colorless, ultra-minimalist playing space with a backdrop of hanging plastic and linen sheets and a scaffold that rolls to and fro. It is a way of making the stage the world, but the process of stripping away so essential to the play’s arc has already happened by the start.
Melanie Burgess’s abstract-pattern, cheerless costumes seem out of sync with the high contrasts of Jessica Trundy’s lighting. I do like the effect of cruel illumination upon the arrival at Dover, but the veer toward a horizontal Rothko glow at the end puzzles. Robertson Witmer picks up on the script’s references to drums to create a sternly percussive sound design.
Seattle Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear plays through May 17 at the Cornish Playhouse (formerly Intiman) at Seattle Center, Wed. – Sun. Tickets here or call 206 733-8222.
Since my essay is included in this recording, I have to recuse myself from offering a review, but I can say that I consider The Gospel According to the Other Mary among John Adams’s most profound accomplishments. It certainly probes new ground for this ever-evolving, brilliant musical mind.
As for the critical reactions I have seen, nothing yet has come to my attention that seriously grapples with the full complexity of this score.
A curious note: Gospel was among this year’s Pulitzer finalists. I think it’s a safe bet that this year marks the first time two composers sharing the same last name were up for the same prize, which in this case was taken by John Luther Adams for Become Ocean.
If you haven’t had a chance to explore this Adams/Peter Sellars collaboration, do yourself a favor.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic is now presenting its 2014 edition of the Minimalist Jukebox Festival, curated by Creative Chair John Adams. I’m especially excited about the offering for Thursday, 17 April: the Rome section from the CIVIL warS, a Robert Wilson-Philip Glass collaboration. Here’s the essay I wrote for the LA Phil’s program:
Is it too far-fetched to compare Einstein on the Beach’s seismic effect with that of The Rite of Spring? At least in terms of the prospects for contemporary opera in America — in a moribund condition at the time — Einstein’s U.S. premiere in 1976 was a game-changer. And in the context of Minimalism itself, this groundbreaking collaboration between Philip Glass and Robert Wilson opened up a new world of possibilities for a composer who, as Glass has often repeated, up to that point had never dreamed of writing opera.
By the time of his second collaboration with Wilson on the CIVIL warS project, Glass had taken up the “conventional” rhetoric of opera — which is to say operatically trained voices, chorus, and full orchestra — and translated this into his unique style and idiom.
Glass himself considers Einstein to be both his first opera and an end point — the culmination of a long period of experimentation in abstract, instrumental forms with what is now generally regarded as “hard-core” Minimalist processes. This inaugural collaboration with Wilson was followed by Satyagraha, his first work written for an actual opera company (Netherlands Opera). Glass then undertook Akhnaten, completing his trilogy of “portrait operas” based on iconic figures in the period when he was working on the CIVIL warS.
The work we hear on tonight’s program therefore represents another important early step in cultivating a medium on which Glass has concentrated, with incredible productivity, up until the present. It is in opera that “Glass found a medium in which he could put his newly developed language to expressive use,” as the critic Allan Kozinn observed as far back as 1986. His turn “from abstract composition to representational music” has not kept Glass from continuing to write such abstract instrumental works as symphonies, concertos, and quartets, but the collaboration with Wilson in particular left a decisive mark on Glass’s conception of Minimalist language.
This language itself, it should be noted, was in its Glassian dialect initially rooted in “representational” projects from the composer’s early Paris years, when he made pivotal encounters with Indian music and the theater of Samuel Beckett. Through these projects Glass became fascinated by theatrical and musical sensibilities that posited an alternative to Western conventions of narrative linear time and space. Glass apparently first happened upon the work of Robert Wilson via the 12-hour-long The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, which the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented in 1973.
That encounter had the effect of an epiphany. “I understood then, as I feel I have ever since, [Wilson’s] sense of theatrical time, space, and movement,” Glass has remarked. The composer once characterized the sense of time in his own music as existing outside “colloquial time,” with the result that audiences tend to perceive this music “as extended time, or loss of time, or no sense of time whatsoever.”
In Einstein Glass had his first opportunity to match his musical constructions to the vision of the maverick director from Texas. Wilson abandoned the business career intended by his father to instead take up a life in the performing arts, evolving his enormously influential brand of theater in New York City’s avant-garde downtown scene of the 1960s.
Through his idiosyncratic collages of surreal, dreamlike elements, stylized stage movement and gesture, and associative rather than plot-driven content, Wilson created a modernist counterpart to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk — only this is a “total work of art” that, unlike Wagner’s, reflects the intersecting visions of its collaborators rather than the vision of a single artist.
And, as Glass has emphasized over the years, its meaning is outside the control of the creators. Figuring out the relation of his own music to the words and images of the entire theatrical experience (or film, in the case of his collaborations with the director Godfrey Reggio) thus requires the active participation of the audience to be completed. “Early on in my work in the theater, I was encouraged to leave what I call a ‘space’ between the image and the music. In fact, it is precisely that space which is required so that members of the audience have the necessary perspective or distance to create their own individual meanings.”
Even in a cantata-like concert performance lacking the hallucinatory visuals that originally accompanied the full staged version, the Rome section (a Prologue and three scenes), affords the audience fascinating examples of this “intertextual” space, which might be contrasted to a more straightforwardly expressive “translation” of text and feelings into musical content.
The libretto prepared by Wilson and his collaborator Maita di Niscemi, for example, wasn’t intended merely to be “set” to music. Wilson had already constructed a multilayered verbal and visual text lacking only the musical layer. Glass’s contribution thus represented the final creative stage. He carpentered his score to align precisely with the timings from a pre-recorded read-through of the text as a stage play (though with the words delivered at an abnormally but operatically “true” slow pace).
All of this was meanwhile intended as the part of a still larger whole titled the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, to be performed in Los Angeles to celebrate the international spirit of the Olympics held here in 1984. Wilson began with a characteristically elliptical take on the American Civil War — in particular, Matthew Brady’s haunting contemporary photographs — and imagined a world historical juxtaposition of images and associations from antiquity to the Space Age. These riff on themes of war and peace, nation and family, civil and internalized struggle and enlightenment.
The peculiar typography of the title draws attention to a “struggle” between upper and lowercase letters as well as to the plurality of this phenomenon. “Civil Wars” also happens to be the customary translation of one of Julius Caesar’s writings. The subtitle quotes from Carl Sandburg’s canonical biography of Abraham Lincoln, for whom Wilson devised an unforgettable visual of a figure who is eventuality “struck down” (a singer suspended in a 16-foot-high harness, draped with a long black coat and sporting a stovepipe hat).
Never lacking for ambition, Wilson intended to stage a day-long ceremonial opera featuring composers, writers, and performers from around the world. Glass was one of several composers invited to contribute music for a different section of the vast five-act opus. The sections which were completed took their names from the locations of their separate premieres: hence the Rome section, envisioned as the final, fifth act of the CIVIL warS, was independently commissioned and staged (in March 1984) by the Opera di Roma. Glass also wrote the music for the Cologne section (scenes from Acts 1, 3, and 4), while David Byrne created connective pieces to link the scenes, known as The Knee Plays or the Minneapolis section.
At the last minute, the LA Olympic Arts Festival pulled the plug and canceled its plans to fund the complete staging. One of the commentators in Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s 2006 documentary Absolute Wilson observes that the director has since regarded this decision as the single greatest disappointment of his career. The Rome section, like the others, was thus left as a torso that has been occasionally performed on its own.
There is no story to synopsize. Wilson and di Nascemi’s libretto is largely a collage, an assemblage of texts from letters of the American Civil War period, ancient tragedies by Seneca for the Roman connection (in the original Latin and translated into Italian), and stream-of-consciousness word poems by Wilson himself, recited by a male and a female narrator. (On the Nonesuch recording, these parts are taken by Wilson and Laurie Anderson.)
It is for you, gentle listener, to generate what you will from the text’s recombination of historical, iconic, symbolic, and seemingly “automatic” elements. Figures we expect to see from the American Civil War — Abraham and Mary Lincoln and Robert F. Lee (who reappear in Glass’s more recent 2007 work for San Francisco Opera, Appomattox) share this dreamscape with the (French-born) leader of the Italian Risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Hercules and Alcmene (the hero’s mother), and mythic Hopi characters, the “Earth Mother” and “Snow Owl.”
Glass’s very first notes, an ominously descending bass, happen to echo a similar gesture at the beginning of Einstein. But the original commission by Rome Opera — in the land where opera was born — led Glass to reflect on the power of the human voice itself and its central role in this medium. Whereas Einstein had featured relatively little singing, the Rome score is cast for huge, dramatically projected voices, with especially demanding high parts for the soprano and tenor soloists.
At the same time, Glass resorts to a Wagnerian sweep of orchestral sonorousness over which these voices float, as well as recurrent motivic ideas such as the brief trumpet call pervading the Prologue. Oscillation between major and minor provides the fulcrum for Glass’s idiosyncratic slant on tonality. The orchestral writing features primary-color effects, with fresh twists on conventional instrumental “imagery” such as military brass and drums or the floating arpeggios of bel canto accompaniment.
Indigenously American congregational hymn singing also informs some of the choral writing (Scene B), and elsewhere references to nineteenth-century Romanticism (Verdi and Tchaikovsky) color the choral and solo parts as well as the orchestral interludes. Creating a panorama of alternately turbulent and elegiac soundscapes, Glass recontextualizes familiar imagery in a way that’s reminiscent of Wilson’s process. Musically, the result is akin to the opera’s mingling of history and myth, of artifact and dream.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 