Minorities Dominate Upcoming Opera Seasons

 Minorities Feature Prominently in Upcoming New Operas

Contemporary operas can be an ordeal to sit through. Composers are pressured to offer some new and groundbreaking concept, which usually means hard-to-like music, black-and-white scenography, and absolute absence of tradition. Melody is anathema. A few years ago, I came to Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking at the Washington National Opera almost directly from the world premiere of La Ciudad de las Mentiras (City of Lies) in Madrid. While Heggie’s opera leaned toward traditional, Elena Mendoza’s opus at Teatro Real in Spain’s capital, bore all the characteristics of a modern work.

 

 

La Ciudad de las Mentiras, Teatro Real, Madrid, 2017, photo: Z. Hoke

Mendoza used four stories by Juan Carlos Onetti to explore theatrical and perhaps some musical possibilities, but her sopranos, tenors and baritones never sang. They recited lines from the stories so intertwined that only those familiar with Onetti's work could hope to understand what was going on. The English language surtitles kept the uninitiated out of a complete fog, and a written introduction gave some clarification, but I had to agree with a co-spectator who argued that if a work of art needs so much explanation, it is not a good work of art. If Mendoza's singers did not sing, neither did the musicians played much music. At one point a man appeared on the stage with an accordion only to tap his hand on it a couple of times. An actor portraying a bartender scratched a metal tray with a knife, a piano player hit the keyboard a couple of times and the orchestra produced some "atmospheric" sound, sort of like a distant wind howling. Overall, it was an interesting, innovative stage production, but it was not what an average person would call an opera. 

 

That word typically conjures images of Figaro, Carmen or Violetta singing their hearts out in melodies most opera lovers can hum in the shower. We usually think of opera as a dramatic or comic story related through song and instrumental music. It consists of melodic arias that express a character’s feelings, and spoken or almost spoken recitativi, which move the action forward. Of course, today, if you google the word “opera”, you may come across information about a browser for Android devices.

 

Many modern operas veer away from the standard structure. In September of last year, the historic Bavarian State opera in Munich, Germany, premiered a new music-theater work 7 Deaths of Maria Callas by controversial performance icon Marina Abramović. The New York-based artists is perhaps best known for her 2010 MoMA performance The Artists Is Present, in which she sat at a table speechless while long lines of visitors waited to sit across her and watch her expressions. 

7 Deaths of Maria Callas was presented as an opera. It featured seven arias Callas was most famous for, such as Vissi d’arte and Un bel di  sung by various sopranos, while Abramović, occasionally joined by actor Willem Dafoe, recited her own narratives. Music by composer Marko Nikodijević accompanied her recitatives and video projections, which showed Abramović being strangled by snakes or die in some other torturous manner. 

For a classical opera fan, the one-hour performance was an outrage as was Abramovic’s claim that she and Callas have a lot in common. But perhaps more importantly, Abramović’s latest opus was an homage to a great soprano that some of performance art fans may not have been interested in.  Similarly, the television series Lovecraft Country features an episode based on the 1921 Tulsa massacre that is accompanied by operatic music at the request of composer Laura Karpman. The soundtrack ends in a requiem. 

 

Belgian composer Jean-Luc Fafchamps opened the 2020 season at the La Monnaie opera house in Brussels with a “pop requiem” Is This the End?  Éric Brucher's libretto focuses on a woman caught in a twilight zone between life and death. There, she meets other people in a kind of transitional state between this world and the next.  The staging by Ingrid von Wantoch Rekowski contrasts the live action on stage with film sequences shot inside the theatre and then integrated into the live performance. But the piece is conceived for watching from home.

 

Fans of the traditional music theater may wonder why we even call some of these modern pieces of theater “opera.” But we should be reminded that in Italian, opera means work, labor or opus. Operaio is a worker or laborer. So the word opera is not restricted to the kind of music performances with which it is most often associated.

 

The new works we sometimes dismiss too quickly actually bode well for the future of the opera. Their creators acknowledge and often build on the timeless masterpieces and pay homage to old masters. 

Let’s look at some of the novelties in the pipeline for the upcoming opera seasons. 

 

In the United States, hopes are high that the Metropolitan Opera will be able to re-open on September 27 and make history by staging its first ever opera created by an African American composer and an African American librettist. Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones with a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, is based on the memoir by Charles M. Blow and will star Angel Blue, Latonia Moore, and Will Liverman.

 

The Met will premiere two other operas in its new season: Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice, starring Erin Morley in the title role, and Brett Dean’s Hamlet, with Allan Clayton portraying the tortured Danish prince. 

 

Cincinnati Opera’s ambitious plan for the next season includes two world premieres: Fierce by William Menefield and Castor and Patience by Gregory Spears. Fierce focuses on four teenage girls who struggle to adjust to school, family, and friendship, and follows their journeys toward empowerment. In their college essays, one mourns the loss of a special friend. Another one hides behind her popularity. The third feels oppressed by her parents’ expectations. And the last one struggles with a troubled home life. Despite the chorus of trolls that taunts them, the girls unite in their fight against adversity. The libretto is inspired by life stories of real Cincinnati-area teenage girls.

Castor and Patience is centered on two cousins from an African American family who find themselves at odds over the fate of a historic parcel of land they have inherited in the American South. The opera probes historical obstacles to black land ownership in the United States. 

 

Spoleto Festival USA has commissioned a new opera by Grammy Award-Winner Rhiannon Giddens, inspired by a real-life character from the American South. Titled Omar, the opera is based on the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said – an enslaved African man from the Futa Toro region of present-day Senegal - who was brought to Charleston in 1807. Thirteen years later, Omar, a Muslim, converted to Christianity, but his manuscripts written in Arabic, especially his autobiographical essay, suggest that he remained faithful to Islam.  

 

Dayton Opera will present its first ever full-length opera premiere in its coming season. Finding Wright is a result of creative collaboration of four talented women: composer Laura Kaminsky,  librettist Andrea Fellows Fineberg, conductor Susanne Sheston and stage director Kathleen Clawson. In Finding Wright, 21st century Charlotte (Charlie) Tyler, a young, recently widowed, aerospace engineer and researcher learns about the extraordinary life of Katharine Wright, younger sister of flight pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright. The Wrights siblings were born in Dayton, Ohio.

The Washington National Opera is planning to continue its new opera initiative as soon as the circumstances allow with a short work intended for all ages, titled Elephant & Piggie, based on the book I Really Like Slop! The music is by D.C.-based composer and 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence winner Carlos Simon. The libretto is by author and illustrator Mo Willems, who is the Kennedy Center’s first education artist-in-residence.  

Looking beyond 2021, we can expect to see an opera adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours. The film adaptation featured Hollywood stars Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman.  Co-commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the opera by composer Kevin Puts will bring back star soprano Renee Fleming from her semi-retirement. Puts, whose opera Silent Night won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 is collaborating on The Hours with librettist Greg Pierce. The staged premiere, also featuring Joyce DiDonato and Kelli O’Hara is slated for 2022. 

San Francisco Opera is likely to bring in a performance of the new Finnish opera Innocence in the near future. The work by composer Kaija Saariaho and novelist Sofi Oksanen, is a co-production of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the Finnish National Opera, the Royal Opera House in London, the Dutch National Opera, and the San Francisco Opera and is sung in nine languages: English, Finnish, Czech, Romanian, French, Swedish, German, Spanish and Greek.

Here is how Music Finland online describes the opera:  “Innocence takes place at a wedding in present-day Helsinki, Finland, with an international guest list. The groom is Finnish, the bride is Romanian, and the mother-in-law is French. But the groom’s family has a dark secret – ten years earlier, these characters were involved in a tragic event. When the events from long ago begin to unravel and the ghosts of the past revive their memories of the trauma, the family faces the question: where does the innocence end and guilt begins? 

Sounds bergmanesque and intriguing. 

Los Angeles Opera’s new season is highlighting a one-man opera by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun. In the work titled In Our Daughter’s Eyes, baritone Nathan Gunn portrays a father struggling to become a man his daughter would be proud of. As a gift for his unborn daughter, he writes a diary documenting his journey to fatherhood.   

More new operas than ever are written by and about minorities. Just a few years ago the best that a female or African American composer could hope for was a performance at a smaller local theater. Now, the world’s most eminent opera houses are fighting to commission their best efforts and turn the spotlight on them. If successful, these works may change the world of opera in unexpected ways. 

 

 

 

 

 

WNO's Dead Man Walking

On Saturday evening I witnessed an execution by lethal injection. OK, it wasn't a real execution, but an operatic one, terrifying nonetheless. A nervous but defiant "convict" stood center stage in a pair of underpants with a clearly visible diaper stuffed inside. His fear was palpable, his desperation permeated the theater as they dressed him in a white shirt and pants and strapped him to a gurney.  A nurse injected deadly substance into his arm. The audience stopped breathing.  Then his heartbeat, ticked off by a monitoring machine, began to slow down until it became a steady sound signaling death.   

The performance was Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking, offered for the first time by the Washington National Opera. I am somewhat familiar with the work through a recording of the 2000 San Francisco production, but it did not prepare me for the impact this opera can have in a staged performance. Staggering!

Contemporary operas can be quite an ordeal to sit through. Composers are pressured to offer some new and groundbreaking concept, which usually means hard-to-like music, black-and-white scenography, and absolute absence of tradition. Melody is anathema. I came to Dead Man Walking almost directly from a performance of La Ciudad de las Mentiras (City of Lies) an opera by Elena Mendoza at Teatro Real in Madrid, which bore all these characteristics.

Stage set for La Ciudad de las Mentiras, Teatro Real, Madrid

Mendoza used four stories by Juan Carlos Onetti to explore theatrical and perhaps some musical possibilities, but her sopranos, tenors and baritones never sang. They recited lines from the stories so intertwined that only those familiar with Onetti's work could hope to understand what's going on. The English language surtitles kept the uninitiated out of a complete fog, and a written introduction gave some clarification, but I had to agree with a friend who argued that a work of art that needs so much explanation is not a good work of art. If Mendoza's singers did not sing, neither did the musicians played much music. At one point a man appeared on the stage with an accordion only to tap his hand on it a couple of times. An actor portraying a bartender scratched a metal tray with a knife, a piano player hit the keyboard a couple of times and the orchestra produced some "atmospheric" sound, sort of like a distant wind howling. Overall, it was an interesting, innovative stage production, but it was not an opera.

Dead Man Walking definitely is. Heggie did not veer off the traditional operatic structure, or as some would say formula, proving that what worked for Verdi and Puccini works for today's composers as well. The build-up, the drama, the climax - it was all there and it worked. It opens with a young couple frolicking by the lake to the sound of popular music, but disaster is already in the air. And it strikes swiftly. From then on the action moves energetically forward so the first act breezes through without any longueurs. Sister Helen's entry into the death row, with a chorus of men yelling profanities at her is a most powerful scene, musically and theatrically.

The second act starts with the title character, prisoner Joseph de Rocher, exercising in his cell to pass the time or to keep his muscles from trembling.  A great opening!  After that the energy drops and there are scenes, such as Sister Helen's conversation with Sister Rose, and her encounter with the convict's mother that one could do without. Tension returns to the stage full force with re-entry into Joseph's prison cell. He knows the hour of death is approaching and his desperation rises to a fever pitch.  Still defiant, but more dependent on Sister Helen's support, he finally feels compelled to confess his guilt. 

The death scene is one of the most powerful pieces of theater I've seen in recent years. I wish the opera ended right there. The final repeat of a religious song that served as a leitmotif throughout the opera was forgettable and unnecessary. In spite of minor quibbles (occasional clichés of sorrow and sentimentality) chapeau to Heggie and his librettist Terrence McNally for impressive work.

Kate Lindsey and Michael Mayes in WNO's Daed Man Walkong, photo Scott Suchman

In terms of production, this was one of the operas in which a simple, mostly black stage for once worked very well. The black scrim was lifted often enough to break the monotony and create a sense of movement. I usually don't pay much attention to lighting, but this time I thought it played a significant role in creating the right mood at the right time, whether it was camaraderie, anger, children's lightheartedness or dark depths of a tortured soul. Francesca Zambello, riding the wave of her recent success with Wagner's Ring, proved once again that she is an operatic force to be reckoned with.

Heggie's music is unapologetically beautiful throughout this opera, something that the audience loves and music critics condemn. It is the only modern opera I know in which the recitatives sound as good as the "arias" and blend seamlessly together. Dead Man Walking is unmistakingly American in the theme, language, and music expression. At times it sounds more like a musical than opera. But other than that, it was a classical opera in almost every sense. 

The singing and acting on Saturday were excellent throughout. In terms of voices, I would wish a stronger mezzo for the role of Sister Helen than the otherwise brilliant Kate Lindsey. Also, I am not sure if it was a good idea to cast Susan Graham next to her in a minor role. Graham reminded those familiar with the San Francisco recording of her outstanding interpretation of Sister Helen, and she overpowered Lindsey when they appeared together. Lindsey's Sister Helen was a gentle nun, different from the real life person the character was based on.  But such people can wield a power of their own quiet kind and so Lindsey's interpretation worked well, especially juxtaposed with Joseph's belligerence.

Dead Man Walking is one of the most frequently performed American operas at home and abroad, for a good reason. It is one of those works that makes you want to see it again in the same or a different production. Unlike Ciudad de las Mentiras, for example. It's an opera that you can just listen to without seeing it on stage, like La Forza del Destino or Porgy and Bess. If it does not break any new grounds, perhaps it proves that there is no need to keep fixing something that ain't broke. It's a pity WNO offered only four performances of what is arguably its most impressive production of the season, but I feel lucky that I caught the last one.