West Edge Opera: American Apollo

The third & final opera of the 2026 West Edge Opera Festival was American Apollo, a new opera with music by Damian Geter to a libretto by Lila Palmer, offering & examining the relationship between John Singer Sargent & Thomas Eugene McKeller, a young Black man employed at Sargent's hotel in Boston, who served as a model for the painter for a set of murals in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. McKeller's body served for various Greek gods & heroes, though his skin, his face, & sometimes his gender were switched, which is not unusual for models, of course, but Sargent also left a radiant portrait of a naked McKeller as himself, a portrait that he kept in his own possession & passed on to close friends. It did not surface into the "official" story of Sargent until the 1980s, when it was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the same museum whose sub rosa renditions of McKeller still greet visitors on the grand main staircase.

The 1980s were the years I spent in Boston; this story resonated with me on several levels, as I was familiar with the splendid Sargents in the MFA's collection as well as the work of another major character in the opera, Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose eponymous museum, located just a few blocks from the MFA (& not that far from my last apartments) is one of my favorite places on earth. (Many a reverie of mine has been if not concluded then ended as I thump down to earth on the thought, Goddammit, why don't I have a Veronese Room?) Sargent gave Gardner an album of sketches of McKeller (signed, unlike many of his sketches: what might that signify?), which she did not display publicly but kept in her Museum. The rediscovery of these sketches led to the exhibit Boston's Apollo, which I missed seeing because of the pandemic; the catalogue is an in-depth look at Sargent & McKeller & worth reading for anyone intrigued by the subject. That show brought new prominence to the relationship between artist & model.

I found the opera a subtle & layered work, & I'm glad I saw it twice. Nobody knows for sure what the relationship was between the painter & his favored model; even bohemian & wealthy artistic circles could be discreet, & passing time always erases life in its wake (a number of scholars have done heroic work piecing together what can still be known about McKeller's life). Time may erase life, but art can linger; there is, above all, the now celebrated nude portrait of the model not as a god or hero but as a man (who radiates godliness & heroism in his joyful nakedness). Probably drawing inspiration from that painting, & its history of being kept privately by the artist, this work tells a definite & probable story of a romantic relationship between the two men. It's not the only possible story from what hints remain to us, but it's convincing & compelling.

The music is lovely & sometimes approaches the perfumed & languishing air of salon music; I assume this is a re-creation of the sophisticated artistic atmosphere of Sargent's & Gardner's wealthy, cultured, Euro-American milieu (I don't know any of the composer's other music, so I don't know if this is his sound or the particular sound he chose for the particular period he is dramatizing). The scenes involving interactions among the Black characters are subtly different, with echoes of a jazz bass & horns (it's lightly done, though, without a gross distinction between the worlds, which interact & flow together). There's quite a lot of harp in the score. The harp is an interesting instrument. It has a fairly ethereal reputation – society girls plucking it as they hunt for husbands, chubby cherubim plinking away around the celestial throne, that sort of thing – but its sound has a surprising amount of tensile strength, & it can sound both glittery & strong, like sequins made out of steel. The final sound of the opera is one last spritz from the harp, vanishing into the silence.

Geter also insets Reynaldo Hahn's song À Chloris. It's a bold move, incorporating another composer's work, but it not only strengthens the period feel, it also resonates thematically here, in an opera about taking from different sources, different cultures, different ways, & shaping what you've taken into something of your own (even as you're adding to, being subsumed in, another tradition). It's worth looking at the lyrics & music of the song: setting a fairly banal celebration of triumphant & reciprocated love by Théophile de Viau (you can find the words here), Hahn's music (which is simpatico with the aura summoned by Geter's for this opera) is an exquisitely melancholy Bach-like tune, as if even in the moment of wild first joy the speaker knows that his love, this nacreous bubble, will soon vanish, its momentary beauty gone except for memory & concomitant regrets. Sargent sits down at the piano during a modeling session & starts playing & singing the song. McKeller doesn't know the piece, but he knows enough French & enough music to pick up the score & sing the rest of it. Sargent tells him he's full of surprises. The wistful song will ripple through the orchestra as the work proceeds.

The opera itself works with surprises & indirection. The story plays out on stage, but the more you know about the situation the more implications you see. McKeller has moved up north from Wilmington, North Carolina, a city which, when McKeller lived there, was the site of a White Supremacist coup against the elected local government. You don't have to know this to know about the racial prejudices & pressures that would cause a young Black man to move away, but it is one of those things that opens out the world of the opera, which begins with a group of Black men lamenting (angrily, despairingly, stubbornly, resignedly, factually: a lot is being conveyed) their racial status in the United States.

The racial difference is a running theme, & how could it not be, but so are differences in age & class & background & worldly experience between the two men. There is a real connection there, as we see when McKeller collaborates with Sargent during their sessions, which become like a director & an actor puzzling out a drama together, but how much of a chance would these two really have together, in their world or ours? A former valet / model (&, presumably, lover) of Sargent's shows up & threatens him & McKeller. He makes dismissive references to Sargent's taste for "exotics" (meaning men of color), as if the jaded aging man needed increasingly spicy dishes for his palate to taste anything, & as if this young American Black man were some sort of fancy foreign import instead of a refugee from North Carolina.

Given all the complicating factors, Sargent & McKeller do not have a steady affair. Reality intervenes, as reality does. Sometimes the intervention is tragic, as when the First World War convulses the globe; German bombs kill relatives of Sargent's; McKeller enlists in the American army. Sometimes the intervention is positive, as when Isabella Stewart Gardner brings the men back together, as she sees how powerfully McKeller has inspired her friend's art. (Even her commitment to art, though, has sadness underpinning it; she sings of how she dedicated herself to beauty after her little son, barely two years old, died.) With her keen eye & abundant spirit, she does with artist & model what she did with artworks in her museum: she arranges, she juxtaposes sometimes unlikely elements, creating out of existing elements something new, a vivid spark of the memorably gorgeous.

And don't artists always have the last, or at least the lasting, word? As the painter & his model go from "Mr Sargent" & "Mr McKeller" to "John" & "Tom", the model wants to be seen as himself: that is, not as a model. A model has an artistic function that often involves metamorphosis & erasure. McKeller knows what the deal is, of course; it's a wish to be in a different world, a different relation to Mr Sargent / John. In the very moving final scene, McKeller hears of the painter's death (by then he's left the hotel for a job as a postal carrier, & his close friend Ida Mae shows him the newspaper when he stops by on his route). He goes by his studio to pay his respects. That part is historical fact. What is perhaps speculative, but certainly compelling, even overwhelming, is that it's only then that McKeller discovers the portrait of him that Sargent did. He is overcome by this proof that the artist's transforming eye had in fact seen him for who & as he was.

This was a rich work. Like the Gardner museum, or Sargent's paintings, it would repay repeated visits. On the surface, it's a conventional story of an artist & his model. (Is the relationship exploitation or celebration? or both & something else besides?) But, as in the scene in which McKeller starts singing Hahn's art song, it's full of surprises. Sargent is now a celebrated figure, but his reputation has dipped & swooped over the years (too many portraits of rich society ladies, perhaps). But it's worth remembering that painting murals featuring Greek gods & heroes was a strangely, stubbornly old-fashioned artistic choice in the years between 1916 & 1925, when Sargent dedicated himself to what he saw as the capstone of his career. Matisse had painted Femme au Chapeau in 1905. Picasso had painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907. The western tradition was twisting & splintering under Sargent's feet (& in fact, the Gardner museum was the first American museum to own & display a work by Matisse). The ground is always shifting under us. Nothing here is as it seems.

You can't present a rich & subtle work without rich & subtle artistry. Kedrick Armstrong led a gorgeous performance of the gorgeous score, & Nataki Garrett molded it all on stage. Baritone Markel Reed performed Thomas McKeller; he doesn't particularly look like McKeller, outside of both being Black men, but he has a commanding stage presence & a rich, resonant, honeyed voice; this must be a really taxing role, given the length of the opera & the demands it places on him, but he had the strength & power to make his ending liebestod, in which he sees Sargent's portrait of him & realizes its implications, deeply moving. Tenor John Bellemer performs John Singer Sargent, with great beauty of tone & delicacy of touch. He makes the famous man both surprisingly tentative around his models & authoritative in his artistic vision. Isabella Stewart Gardner is not an easy role – there's always the danger of slipping into a caricatured Eccentric Rich Lady mode, sort of a haute monde Auntie Mame (I hate Auntie Mame, by the way), but soprano Marnie Breckenridge brought warmth, wit, & understanding to the performance. Alexandra Armantrading creates a warm, compassionate Ida Mae McDonald, indelible in her few appearances, as does Leberta Lorál as Thomas's mother (as well as another minor role). Matt Hidalgo brings cynical anger & some floating high notes to Nicola D’Inverno (the former valet / model / lover); he also portrays Mr Sparhawk.  Philip Harris, Wilford Kelly, Michael Belle, & Alex Taite are all memorable in small roles. Outstanding work all around.