Antony & Cleopatra at San Francisco Opera

Last Saturday I was at the San Francisco Opera for the first time since December 2019, when I saw a disappointing production of Hansel & Gretel; my first post-lockdown visit was a happier occasion: the kick-off to SFO's centennial season with the world premiere of the new John Adams opera, Antony & Cleopatra, based mostly on Shakespeare (thanks to Lisa Hirsch for inviting me along).

I was one of the many disappointed in Adams's previous opera, Girls of the Golden West, which I found simultaneously meandering & inert, &, as with Doctor Atomic, I felt the libretto, a patchwork by Peter Sellars, was a large part of the problem. I'll admit I was one of those making the easy joke that Shakespeare would be a better librettist than Sellars, but honestly, that's not necessarily the case: any one trying to set Shakespeare's plays as operas is running up against a giant mountain of marble: not only do you have a long performance/reading history of these masterpieces of the stage (to go along with the operatic masterpieces any new opera is, however consciously or unconsciously, compared against), you have the sheer power (as well as familiarity) of Shakespeare's words, which have sunk into & shaped our own language, centuries later. There are very few Shakespeare operas that I think can stand up with their source; I can muster only a cold admiration for Verdi's Otello, as I prefer the messier, grimier original to the neatly wrapped nobility of Boito's adaptation. Of the Shakespeare-based operas I've heard, my short list of true successes are Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream & Verdi's Falstaff (which, really, outpaces Merry Wives by miles). (I will also gladly concede that The Boys from Syracuse is an improvement on The Comedy of Errors.)

So I'm happy to report that Antony & Cleopatra looks likely to join that company for me; kudos to Adams, who prepared the libretto himself (with some additions from Virgil, Plutarch & other classical writers), in consultation with dramaturg Lucia Scheckner & director Elkanah Pulitzer. As was to be expected, the focus of this rich, sprawling play, with its multitude of people, places, & themes (both poetic & political), had to be narrowed. Many favorite moments are, inevitably, lost. Some story lines (particularly Enobarbus's) suffer a bit. But adjusting to that is part of taking in what is, although based on a familiar work, also an entirely new one that needs to stand independently. The central relationships among Antony, Cleopatra, Octavian (the nascent Caesar Augustus), & his sister Octavia (married off to Marc Antony in a failed attempt to cement a peace between the two rivals) are fully present. The additional texts also work well: the most prominent of these is a passage, used towards the end of the opera, from the Aeneid about the future imperial glory of Rome, given to Octavian & chorus (one of the few big choral numbers in the opera, which is an interesting change for Adams, whose earlier operas, particularly The Death of Klinghoffer, tend to be chorus-rich): it's the Leader & his multitudes, an accurate reflection of the new political order Octavian is ushering in, replacing the multiple personality cults of his Egyptian rivals with a single one of his own. The use of Dryden's translation is particularly astute, as the regularity of his rhyming couplets gives a sense of conformity & control to the passage, in contrast to the freer, more fluid blank verse of Shakespeare.

The music, of course, fills in the missing spaces, creating layers & connections of its own. At Girls of the Golden West I was initially a little surprised at how comparatively spare the music seemed. I had been used to each new score from Adams growing in complexity & lushness, so I needed to adjust my expectations (I'm not sure the approach worked that well in that piece, but the composer apparently felt the need, for whatever reason, for a change in direction). The music for Antony, full of quicksilver transformations, struck me as rich, & even grand, without being overtly, opulently, operatic. The "Roman" music tends to use more brass, & the "Egyptian" music more harps & some relatively unusual percussion, such as celesta & cimbalom, & it uses them without sounding inappropriately or unfashionably "Oriental"/exotic in sound. (After all, though the cultures & personalities are very different, it's not all contrast between the two: Rome & Egypt are both empires run by a few powerful individuals).

Some musical moments that struck me: Octavia, married to Antony & resident in Athens, is lamenting to him that she is caught between her brother & her husband & the tensions rising between them; as she sings her long, yearning lines, we hear, faintly beneath her, the Egyptian instrumentation: you can actually hear the distracted Marc Antony, longing to return to Cleopatra, not listening to her. I think repeated listening will reveal other connections & subtleties like this. In the Adams style, there are also quotations from others: in the scene in which Cleopatra interrogates the messenger who tells her Antony is now married, I heard in her initial reaction a splash of Baba the Turk's "Scorned! Abused!" from The Rake's Progress, which sets the right tone for this scene – strong, dramatic, intense, but also a bit overblown & faintly comic – particularly as the follow-up in which she quizzes him about Octavia, which gives an overtly comic edge to the entire scene, is not included in the libretto. There is also an extended use or adaptation of what sounded to me like the Rhine theme from Das Rheingold, which I believe occurs when Rome declares war on Egypt: evoking a new world, or at least a new empire, rising based on gold connected with the abundant flowing waters of a great river, gold ready to be taken, shaped, & misused for ends both creative & destructive.

There's a lot to ponder with this score, & in particular the final scene. One of the remarkable things about Shakespeare's play is that half of the titular couple dies at the end of Act IV, in a fairly messy way, leaving Cleopatra center stage in Act V for an extended, exalted farewell  to life – given the heavy use of sexual slang in this act (die, come) & her elevation above mundane realities (reflected in her physical elevation on the stage, secured in her Monument), it is pretty much a Shakespearean Liebestod, & given Wagner's influence on Adams, I was expecting the ending to be treated that way. But it's not: I don't want to suggest that the music is a let-down, or not up to the tragic occasion; it continues to be complex & beautiful, but it doesn't soar the way the end of Tristan does, or even the end of Jenůfa. Again, listening to this new work meant adjusting what I was expecting. I was looking to the wrong operatic couple: the ending is more like that of Pelleas et Melisande (& in fact in his program note Adams cites the Debussy as a model for what he was trying to do in this opera).

So what's going on with the ending, besides my need to correct my expectations & listen to the work on its own terms? Part of it may be Adams's on-going resistance to the traditional trappings of Opera – although he must surely be considered at this point one of the most important living operatic composers, his works are, in style & substance, steadily resistant to, or subversive of, the traditionally operatic (some of this resistance may be why he insists on using amplification for the musicians, & yes, he uses it here as well). A resistance to the emotionally blatant – the operatic – may be part of this feeling. His works frequently lean towards the contemplative rather than the action-packed, closer to a Bach Passion than, say, Tosca (see, for example, The Death of Klinghoffer) & he does have a history of quieter, more meditative endings (see, for example, Act III of Nixon in China, after the coloratura fireworks that end Act II). Perhaps the Wagnerian key here is to be found not in Tristan but in the quotation from Rheingold: we've sat through an epic, but no matter how deeply moved we are, these characters will be swept from the stage, & the cycle starts all over again – in short, the lack of the expected musical soaring is an astute philosophical & political comment on the inevitable course of empires, as well as individual lives, however grand. I'm sure further exposure to this opera will lead to further contemplation; the dubious statement that familiarity breeds contempt is nowhere more convincingly refuted than in Operaland. (I will also admit that the long lock-down has left me unused to sitting for extended periods as well as to late hours; physical realities were making themselves known by the end of the three & a half hour running time, & those things also play a part in how spectators feel in the end.)

The production is mostly modern dress, except for the occasional cuirass or sword. I'm not wild about this, but it seems like a sensible solution to a staging problem: you can't count on people knowing how to read ancient outfits (would a purple toga convey status to contemporary audiences the way golden epaulettes do?) & attempts at putting suchlike on modern performers risks making them look uncomfortably & unaccountably draped in sheets & towels. The Romans are mostly in black & Antony's people mostly in white, which is perhaps a bit obvious (the Romans don't come off well here in general) but is also a helpful way to tell the two sides apart, especially if you're in the farther reaches of the opera house. Cleopatra is suitably glam in sparkly evening gowns. There's sort of a semi-contemporary look to the whole production: there are frequent projections conveying Rome or Egypt, but they're in black-&-white, showing buildings (in Rome, that is; Egypt's monuments were always ancient) that postdate, sometimes by centuries, the action of the opera. There are striking stage pictures, particularly a tableau of Antony & Cleopatra & their offspring posing as Osiris & Isis: lots of gold & sparkles.

The performers are all magnificent. It's no surprise at this point that Gerald Finley brings superb empathy & commitment to the aging, flailing, grand Antony, but Amina Edris as Cleopatra will be a revelation to many: in a role written for someone else (Julie Bullock, who withdrew a few months ago because of pregnancy) she gives a glorious, star-making performance as the mercurial queen, easily holding the stage at the end for her extended death scene. (She is also, unlike the historical Cleopatra, of Egyptian descent.) (There is a moment I could do without: when she first realizes Marc Antony is dead, the music stops & she screams; I've experienced effects like this before, & though Edris does it superbly, I find moments like these take me out of the opera. I have no idea if this is written in the score or was inserted by director or performer or what. [UPDATE: see the comments for the source of the scream.]) Paul Appleby provides equal weight as the sweet-faced, sweet-voiced, fanatically & frighteningly ambitious Octavian. The rest of the cast is also excellent: Taylor Raven as Charmian, Brenton Ryan as Eros, Alfred Walker as Enobarbus (he does get one of the work's few arias, a splendid setting of the famous description of Cleopatra floating down the river: "The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne. . . ."), Hadleigh Adams as Agrippa, Philip Skinner as Lepidus, Elizabeth DeShong as Octavia, Timothy Murray as Scarus, Gabrielle Beteag as Iras, & Patrick Blackwell as Maecenas. This was my first time hearing the orchestra led by new Music Director Eun Sun Kim, who did, to my ears, a masterful job of leading the large forces through a completely new & obviously complex score.

This is definitely an opera that deserves frequent hearings, & I hope a recording will be forthcoming – I guess I should work in a variant of "custom cannot stale [its] infinite variety" as I think appreciation for it will only deepen as it takes form in our minds.

(my first steps into the War Memorial Opera House in nearly three years)