West Edge Opera: Claude & Marcel preview concert

As an addition to its summer festival, West Edge Opera headed over to the Wattis Theater at SFMOMA to present a preview concert, minimally staged but with singers & orchestra, of next season's world premiere, Claude & Marcel, based on the lives of Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, two (not necessarily in this order): stepsisters, best friends, lesbian lovers, Jews, surrealists, poets, anti-Fascist resistance fighters, & general shapeshifters. For more information on their lives, check here (or buy a ticket next summer to the finished opera); in this space I will be talking about last Sunday's performance.

The preview lasted about an hour & though there was no official announcement of what portion we were seeing, I think, based on a closing surtitle saying it was the end of Act 1, that we were seeing the first half of the opera. Of course what we heard is contingent & in process & incomplete, but I found it powerfully persuasive & am very excited to experience the completed work next summer. Alyssa Weinberg is the composer, Stephanie Fleischmann the librettist, Jonathan Khuner the music director, Elkhanah Pulitzer the stage director, & Chris Steele the dramaturg; Nikola Printz is Claude, Laura Bohn is Marcel, Angela Yam is Charlotte, their maidservant, & there is a chorus made up of Samuel Faustine, Glenn Healy, Laurel Semerdijian, Kyle Tingzon, & Matthew Worth.

When I entered the nondescript grey & black of the Wattis Theater, I was a bit alarmed to note an amplifier on stage, but it is used mostly for what I'll call, for lack of a better term, sound effects used as music, which would not otherwise carry into even a small space: breathing, for example. We open with rhythmic breathing, which summons up not only (obviously) breath, but the sound of a heart beating (the basic things of life) & merges into natural sounds, the breeze & in particular the ocean. In the spirit of its protagonists, anything can be appropriated & turned into art, into music & drama. Even the conventional orchestral instruments take on new colors, often being played in extreme ways, with a skittering & flittering effect that sounds like the frayed edges of music & the natural world; it is a beautiful, liminal world, in an unworldly light – like Debussy on acid. You hear traditional forms being bent, stretched, transformed, making the music a mirror to the surrealist view of the world, & as such, this is the sound world of Claude & Marcel.

Charlotte has music that is much more flowing & melodic; I don't mean it to sound condescending or dismissive when I say her music is more conventional. It's quite beautiful, & mirrors Charlotte's attempts to understand the two strange mesdames who have hired her for a job she desperately needs. The class & social differences between the two artist-outsiders, both from wealthy backgrounds (which is why they can afford a big house on the Isle of Jersey), & their farmgirl helper are examined with subtlety & care. Charlotte clearly is a bit nonplussed by these odd birds, but willing to accept what might even be their scandalous ways (are they just stepsisters? who are very close? or something more?) & to defend them to overly curious villagers, sometimes by dismissing their accurate guesses as to what the two ladies are. The ladies in turn can be, with the authority of their class, peremptory towards servants, though there's also the defensive fear of revealing themselves too far to possibly traitorous outsiders, even if the outsiders are economically dependent subordinates.

The chorus is sometimes villagers, sometimes occupying soldiers from the German (Nazi) Army. The two blend together. The villagers are curious about the very strange women who have moved in. The Germans are as well. There is no sentimentality, either positive towards the villagers or negative towards the soldiers; both groups are shown convincingly as a mixed bag of ordinary people. The extended sound-effects continue, with stamping feet as one of the musical effects, & also much laughter among the soldiers, as another interesting musical effect. The soldiers are not overdone villains: they are bullies who can threaten & sneer & cause serious harm, but they're also boys far from home, in a place that isn't going to feed them the propaganda they grew up on. I'm not suggesting that the presentation of the Germans is sympathetic, but it is nuanced, which is a good thing. Given their presentation as in many ways ordinary young people, you can see why & how Claude & Marcel's subversive acts could sway them; these are not convinced members of an alleged Master Race, but ignorant boys forced into positions of power they aren't suited for.

The relationship between Claude & Marcel is deftly handled: their low-level squabbles, their uncertainty in the face of the looming Nazi threat, their abiding love of each other & commitment to each other & their mutually-made art. I listed the singers above, & if you are familiar with those names, you know the very high level of singing & acting & commitment we were given. There were indications in the surtitles that the staging will involve some surrealist-dream-style dissolves between locations, & as I mentioned earlier the music flows between the natural world (particularly the sea) & the psychological / social reality of the characters. This was a preview performance, so the piece is in flux, & more no doubt can & will be said about the finished product. What I say here is even more provisional than usual. But I found the hour quite absorbing, with many intriguing possibilities; it will be very exciting to see how they play out in the completed work.

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 resolved 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 exhibit 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 the Renaissance poet Théophile de Viau (you can find the words here), Hahn transforms the text into something new & deeper with his music (a sound which is simpatico with the aura summoned by Geter's for this opera), providing an exquisitely melancholy Bach-like tune, adding a deeper dimension to the words, 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. He explicitly compares what Hahn is doing to what he (& McKeller) are creating: a new twist on old, very old, themes. McKeller doesn't know the song, 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, with its sense of a blissful love lost, 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 objects 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 outmoded 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 (a work openly, assertively, famously influenced by African art) 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. If artists have the last word, as Sargent did viewing McKeller, here are some of the artists who had the last, or at least latest, word with their viewing of Sargent viewing McKeller: 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.

Opera Parallèle & Cal Performances: La Belle et la Bête

Several years ago, coming out of the pandemic, Opera Parallèle presented Philip Glass's operatic take on Cocteau's magical fairy-tale film from 1946, La Belle et la Bête; I missed that production but fortunately a revised version was given a two-day run in Zellerbach Hall (I saw it last night) under the auspices of Cal Performances. Opera Parallèle has now performed all three of Glass's Cocteau operas (the other two are Orphée & Les Enfants Terribles); La Belle et la Bête is a bit different from the other two in that rather than a stand-alone stage recreation of the film, it is meant to run alongside the original as an alternative soundtrack (& in fact it is available as such on the Criterion blu-ray release of the film).

The Zellerbach stage was set with six different screens, three on top & three below. Their sizes & the line-up were balanced but not symmetrical; the middle screen on the top, the largest of the six, showed Cocteau's film. The smaller screen below usually showed the film as re-shot with OP's personnel (chiefly baritone Hadleigh Adams as the Beast/Prince & Avenant & soprano Chea Kang as Belle). The two screens flanking the top screen showed fragments & close-ups of the Cocteau film & the two flanking screens on the bottom showed other OP performers (chiefly mezzo-soprano Sophie Delphis as the stepsisters & baritone Aurelien Mangwa as Belle's father, her brother Ludovic, & the moneylender) or appropriate scenes related to the mood or setting of the scene (such as re-creations of the stone faces with blinking eyes from Beast's castle). The screens each had an ornate frame, as if around an artwork, while the top center screen, the movie screen, had none, making it look like a regular movie screen, while the others with their fancy frames reminded us of the artistic eye & placement guiding everything we were seeing, a note of the artificial & aesthetic which reinforced Cocteau's plea, at the beginning of his film, that we have the conscious sophistication to watch it with the unsophisticated but therefore farther-seeing eyes of a child open to magic.

In addition to the action being shown on the screens, the performers also enacted some of the scenes on stage, often alongside their filmed selves or Cocteau's originals. One of the beauties of the staging was how it reflected the film's intentions; in the scene in which Belle first enters the Beast's castle, in which she floats weightlessly down dim & eerie halls, Kang somehow managed to recreate the effect without camera tricks, moving with incredible dancer-like lightness down the stage along with Josette Day's original on the screen above. The interplay between the original film, the OP re-creations, & the physical performers was so seamlessly done that it seemed inevitable; it's only later, when the inevitable noise & distractions of the after-theater world start to rub away at the enchantment, that you realize how incredibly difficult it must have been to pull all of this off, how much work & organization it takes to get so many different components both mechanical & human (the different sets of films, the lighting, the singers, the orchestra) to click into place with dream-like inevitability.

It has been years since I last heard a recording of this opera or last saw the movie (that happens when you're overloaded with movies & music). I had forgotten how marvelous the score is. As is well known by both those who love & those who dislike this composer (I'm in the former camp, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have gone to this performance, particularly with its ridiculous 8:00 PM start time), his music has a very distinctive & even unmistakable sound; but though the whole opera "sounds like" Philip Glass, each scene reflects an appropriate, often strikingly distinct, mood: uncanny, yearning, threatening, frightening, touching, elevating. The segments of the score move along with cinematic speed, like camera cuts. Certain melodies that are on the border of big Romantic tunes regularly appear & float off before they develop too far, reminding me of the unresolved musical longing in Tristan without ever echoing or parodying that distinctive score. (One of these tunes in particular, one that lent a touch of the "exotic" to the score, reminded me of one of the Borodin tunes used in the musical Kismet). Glass has written a number of fairy-tale chamber operas (The Juniper Tree, The Fall of the House of Usher – the latter is of course based on Poe's "horror" story, but is a sibling of the fairy-tale world) & he is adept at creating memorably unworldly worlds. There is a wide range of moods produced from a relatively small orchestra, one that is mostly keyboards, percussion, & wind instruments (no strings! as a friend in the mezzanine reported to those of us below). The final moments, with the transformation of Beast into Prince, are accompanied by what sounded to me like an organ, offering that instrument's sacred & otherworldly aura for his apotheosis with Belle.

As usual with Opera Parallèle, Nicole Paiement conducted, & as usual, she led a clear & beautifully judged rendition; Brian Staufenbiel was, again as usual for OP, the director & the guiding hand behind the production concept, &, again as usual, thought & care had gone into a visually arresting & creative presentation (aided by the production design & film work by David Murakami). Delphis & Mangwa brought distinctive edge & depth to each of their characters. Kang & Adams were both superb. Her clear & lovely voice echoed & reinforced the distinctively innocent & loving Belle. Adams was a virile & anguished Beast, his voice skillfully softening as Beast is tamed by love or raging up as he is threatened. You realize how insightful & controlled his performance is at the end, when he resumes human form as the Prince, & though the handsome Adams looks appropriately princely there is a very slight, very subtly & astutely judged, sense of self-pleased placidity, a touch of royal entitlement, that reminded me of the story that when Garbo first saw Cocteau's film, she is said to have slumped down in her chair & murmured, "Give me back my Beast."

I also have to note the astonishing work by Sharon Peng & Natalie Barshow in recreating respectively Beast's make-up & his & Belle's sumptuous costumes for the stage & OP film scenes.

The audience . . . they were generally attentive, though I could hear some whispering & someone down the row from me kept pulling out his or her phone & flashing some light (checking the time?). Those were relatively minor things; the opera, done without intermission, was about an hour & forty-five minutes, which is not a long time in a movie theater but which for some reason seems like a long time for people at a live performance (it doesn't help that Zellerbach is an uncomfortable hall). But though the audience seemed appreciative, giving the performers well-deserved & hearty applause at the end, they also seemed, as a whole, & I realize I'm sliding out onto some thinnish ice here, not quite to get the mood & therefore the meaning of the piece. There was quite a bit of laughter at various points that struck me as appreciative but uncomprehending, starting with the scene in which Belle's Father, who has wandered into Beast's castle, sits down to dinner & is unnerved by the disembodied hands that hold the candelabras down the hall & that serve him at the table. Cinematically these are fairly simple tricks, but effective nonetheless, if you enter into the unreal enchantments of the tale. (I will say that I find such tricks, not just from Cocteau but even more so in the films of Méliès, far more beautiful, moving, & effective than the shiny plastic fakery of computer-generated effects in current films.)

Maybe the audience laughed because they were expecting Mrs Potts, Lumiere, & Co to launch into Be Our Guest? I don't say this to be dismissive of the wonderful Disney version of the story, but though the animators clearly studied their Cocteau, their film has a different mode & mood. There was also quite a bit of laughter, not quite mocking but also not quite comprehending, of various love-story lines at the end, & I was at a loss to figure out what was supposed to be funny. This is a fairy tale, not a sitcom or a Hallmark "romance". During the scene in which the guileless Belle is led into giving her siblings some of the Beast's magic secrets, a woman in the row in front of me whispered (very loudly whispered) that Belle was . . . she said either stupid, or a fool, or a word to that effect. Reading innocence & trustfulness & guilelessness as stupidity is exactly the attitude Cocteau asks us to consciously though perhaps only temporarily renounce while watching his enchantments. He is very clear in his statement at the beginning of his film that he wants the audience to approach this story with an openness that draws on a purity & innocence usually crushed out by or at least hidden away from the social & adult world. We are certainly meant to appreciate the sophistication of all the artists involved, the silvery cinematography, the lovely surrealist touches, the artificiality of our suspension, which is perhaps only temporary, of our usual civilized skepticism. But it is only by doing so that we can truly grasp the anguish of Beast's dark & deliquescent heart, & the beauty of Beauty coming to love him.

San Francisco Opera: The Monkey King

I was in a packed Opera House for the third performance of San Francisco Opera's world-premiere run of The Monkey King, a kaleidoscopic new work by Huang Ruo (music) & David Henry Hwang (libretto), directed by Diane Paulus. This opera is wildly inventive, wildly colorful, wildly wild, & also substantial enough to be thought-provoking in a number of directions & well worth repeated viewings (I hope it will be revived soon, as I believe the run is pretty much sold out).

The storyline is based on the opening chapters of the very long & episodic Chinese classic novel, Journey to the West; the portion we are given is basically the Monkey King origin story. Sun Wukong, the monkey who makes himself the Monkey King & then a disciple of the Buddha, is, despite his spiritual trajectory, a rambunctious & brassy character, a variant of the Trickster God, but since he is also a King, he has some inherent responsibilities towards others that can lead him into more altruistic directions. The story of the opera is the story of his discovery of some level of selflessness & spiritual enlightenment, as he is guided through adventures & suffering by the compassionate bodhisattva Guanyin & the teachings of the Buddha.

It all makes for an emotionally & dramatically complete work, though (perhaps this is just my enjoyment speaking), as in any superhero-based tale, there is room for sequels. It was several scenes into the work, after seeing the Monkey King go underwater to gain his great weapon, & then ascend to the heavens to see the glittering, corrupt world of the powerful gods, when I started to think of The Monkey King as potentially part of a Chinese-American Ring cycle, an impression strengthened by later hopes expressed by his Buddhist teacher that the Monkey King will function as some sort of redeemer of a corrupt world. As with many of our insights, I realized this one was not unique to me: while reading the program-book on the train afterwards I found in one of the articles this very subject being discussed by the composer & librettist.

The clever & frequently ingenious production owes a lot to the brilliantly eye-catching costumes of Anita Yavich & the puppetry & design work of Basil Twist. Great stretches of iridescent silks turn into waves, or horses, or the clouds supporting heaven; the Monkey King himself is sometimes a puppet, sometimes a dancer (Huiwang Zhang), & mainly & notably a tenor, Kang Wang, who does an appropriately heroic turn in what must be a strenuous role (even with leaping & flying done by dancer or puppet), sounding as fresh & spunky at the end as at the beginning. His lines frequently end with a blazoning note, which I thought was an excellent indication of his character (though I should note a friend of mine, a singer, sympathetically found this aspect of the vocal writing exhausting). There is precedent in the novel for the Monkey King dividing himself, but the staging is seamless, with a leap giving way to a puppet, flying with the aid of black-clad puppeteers, in the style of Japanese theater.  There are scenes in which singer & dancer are both in action, in particular a fight scene with representative of the gods Lord Erland (also portrayed by a singer & dancer: Joo Won Kong & Marcos Vedovetto, respectively), but it's always clear what is going on. I have to give credit to the nerves of our Guanyin, the soprano Mei Gui Zhang, most of whose role is sung while she is suspended on (or, even more nerve-wrackingly, moving on) a golden platform a bit like a lozenge or flame-shaped halo, high, very high, above the stage. The entire cast is very strong (I particularly liked the deep bass of Peixin Chen as Supreme Sage Laojun) & the chorus does astonishingly versatile work.

The visuals (the costumes, &, in particular, the make-up of the Monkey King) & the action (the acrobatics, the choreographed fights) are very influenced by Asian theater, particularly Peking Opera; the music also crosses traditional east-west borders. Though the orchestra (led with assurance by Carolyn Kuan) is largely a traditional European opera orchestra, the percussion battery includes large & medium Indonesian button gongs, a Chinese opera gong, & small Chinese crash symbols, & there is a prominent role for pipa (played by Shenshen Zhang), including a rock-god-guitar-type battle between the Monkey King & one of his heavenly opponents. But the music, though permeated by traditional Chinese sounds, is not aggressively "other" or even "exotic" to non-Chinese ears, which is why I earlier referred to it as a Chinese-American work.

This hybridization of times & cultures applies to the libretto as well, which is often agreeably slangy, a helpful reminder to those dazzled by the fairy-tale qualities of the work that there is a contemporary point underneath the dazzle. "Awesome, JE!" announces the warrior nephew of the Jade Emperor, sent by him with Heaven's latest scheme for controlling the Sun Wukong. The gods sing in chorus of how no one knows how to party the way they do. There isn't much individuality there, or dissent. A corrupt & decadent ruling caste, not only on heaven but, clearly though implicitly, here on the political earth as well. The Monkey King gathers his beleaguered monkey-subjects (or brethren) around him & announces that they will no longer be shoved aside by the powerful; joining together has made them stronger. Suffering increases the strength of the Monkey King. It's a point that applies not only to the racist approaches to Chinese & Chinese-Americans through US history, but to other disenfranchised groups.

But the political suggestions of this opera are secondary to its religious & philosophical explorations. How are we to live? is the main theme, the central & too frequently silenced question of our lives. The work opens & closes with choruses singing Buddhist sutras – the chorus, a collective, expressing poetic, spiritual thoughts in a way that suggests universalism. But during the course of the action, sutra sections are usually expressed in the powerful soprano of Guanyin, that is, not only an individual, but one removed both spiritually (by her status as an immortal bodhisattva) & physically (by her elevation above the stage) from what is happening below. She functions as a sort of musical conscience to the Monkey King. Does he truly understand, & accept, & live by, what she is expressing? Or is he just looking to her as a sort of deus ex machina to get him out of various scrapes? We have gone from the choral universalism of the opening to the individual struggle, in the toils of a baffling & illusory world, to understand, accept, & act on profound sentiments in a profound & meaningful way. As they keep saying in the Journey to the West, Splendid Monkey King! Handsome Monkey King! But after the gorgeous stage-pictures have faded, the unsettling underlying message remains: How are we to live in the world we are given?

San Francisco Opera: Dead Man Walking

Last week I went to the second production of San Francisco Opera's season, Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie & Terrence McNally, based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean about her work as a spiritual advisor to a convict on death row in Louisiana, & how that work changed both of them. The opera had its world premiere here 25 years ago. I saw it then & was impressed by it; a quarter of a century & many, many operas later, I remain impressed by it. It's an especially impressive piece of work when you consider that it was the first opera Heggie wrote. You don't just stumble into such power, though it took considerable insight for those who put the commission together to realize it was implicit in the pleasant young man who had written some pleasing songs.

I think there's often a tendency to be a bit dismissive of Heggie; I have found his music consistently interesting & appealing, elegant though also strong & forceful as needed. I haven't always liked the texts he has set, but although I have some (mild) reservations about McNally's libretto for Dead Man Walking, it is a perfect subject for Heggie (& how did they realize it would be? these are the mysteries of art). He often deals with dark subjects, but I think Heggie is not essentially drawn to darkness, but to the movement from darkness to light. That is why the portrayal of the journey (a key word in this opera) of Sister Helen & the convict Joseph De Rocher seems to me an artistic triumph, whereas Heggie's Moby-Dick left me unsatisfied. I will be the face of love for you is a Heggie sentiment; From Hell's heart I stab at thee! is not.

Interestingly, there are a couple of spots in the opera when the music is muted or silent; the first is in the opening scene, depicting the brutal rape & murder of two teenagers by the De Rocher brothers. After an uneasy trembling opening, the music sort of drops out & what we hear is what's playing on the teenagers' car radio. The silence adds to the tension & horror of the scene; we expect music, but there isn't any.(The orchestra resumes full force in the second scene, showing Sister Helen & Sister Rose (Brittany Renee, a bright & strong presence throughout) singing a hymn with a group of the children they serve at Hope House.) The second time, when we are given not intermittent but complete silence, is during the execution itself. It's an interesting choice, to leave this key moment in silence (not exactly silence, of course, as there really is no such thing; we hear the ominous mechanical metronome-like beeping of the death machinery). It was a controversial choice at the premiere. The musical shock of silence increases our awareness of what is happening. It sets it apart. Perhaps the music is the enveloping social & emotional & psychological bonds of this world, something apart from the cold & silent hand of state-administered death. Perhaps it is only the portrayal of life, not death, that interests the composer.

Heggie's music for this work is strong & encompassing, with distinctive regional touches – old-school hymns, delta blues, some Elvis Presley when the nun & the killer bond over a shared love of the King. Patrick Summers was back to lead the orchestra (he also led the premiere), & led a committed & rousing performance, though he does still have his tendency in moments of high drama to let the orchestra cover the singers a bit.

My reservation about the libretto is the very prominent role given to De Rocher's mother. My views are perhaps colored a bit by a those of a friend who went to the premiere production with me; the mother, a struggling but, in her own mind, well-meaning character, struck some family chimes with my friend, who found her not only weak but emotionally manipulative. (I'm not sure I would go quite that far.) Mrs De Rocher was the role taken at the premiere by Frederica von Stade, & of course if you have the opportunity to write for such an artist you're going to seize it, but I felt then & again now that the part could be trimmed back a little. This is no reflection on von Stade or on Susan Graham, who created the role of Sister Helen 25 years ago & has returned to give a touching & truthful portrayal of the mother. But I think we discover what she has to say fairly quickly & some of her time & space would maybe be better spent with the parents of the two victims, who, outside of one powerful ensemble, have little to say or do (with the partial exception of the murdered girl's father, in a complex portrayal by Rod Gilfry).

There really is no answer to the opera's debate, which officially is about justice versus vengeance versus mercy, but really is a surging emotion-driven whirlwind of helpless pain on the part of everyone: the mother who cannot believe the beloved little boy she raised committed such horrible acts, the parents who know their children were cruelly robbed of life, the nun who is trying to figure out a way, guided by her understanding of the teachings of Christ & the Catholic Church, to move them all to a place of understanding, forgiveness, & love. These are impossible tasks, &, as with the John Adams / Alice Goodman The Death of Klinghoffer, no matter where you think you stand on the people & issues portrayed, you're going to feel a bit discomfited, which of course is the point.

I don't see this as an "issue opera" about the death penalty; it's pretty clear, from what we're shown, that it is unjust & inequitable. The drama is more about the struggle to understand & to connect along the way. We the audience have seen what De Rocher did, but he denies it, blaming his brother (who had a better lawyer & got off with a life sentence). But is he simply withholding the truth to avoid giving a justification to those who want to kill him in turn? Was he too drugged out to remember what exactly happened? How far should Sister Helen believe him? And has she, as the victims' parents charged, ignored them in favor of a sentimental identification with an evil man? (She realizes she has made a mistake in not reaching out to them, but, as I noted earlier, I think the opera makes the same mistake in not giving them more prominent voices.)

So here's a little sidelight on the struggle for community & connection & understanding: the couple seated behind me were, at least initially, awful. They kept whispering loudly back & forth; one of them snickered at Sister Helen's description of a nun as "the bride of Christ" (perhaps they had never heard this common metaphor? in any case, it's part of the strange power, illustrated also in the opera, that the celibate hold over the imaginations of people). I gave them The Glare during the whispering, & finally turned around & briefly shushed them, which I am very reluctant to do (if the problem is noise, the solution is not more noise, but I could not face having to listen to their inane chatter for the next three hours). The guy exploded at me. I think he told me to fuck myself; he definitely called me a prick (which struck me as an odd, almost charming word, one not heard much these days). After that they did both shut up for the rest of the opera, fortunately, but there you sit pondering connection & community & forgiveness while being attacked in a theater for letting people know you are there to hear the performers & not some random clown in the audience. Such is the strange interplay between theater & life. Why is life so much more trivial?

Back to the drama on stage. I have already mentioned some of the performers, though not the leads.  Jamie Barton gave us a strong Sister Helen, whose struggles with others (notably the prison's recalcitrant chaplain, skillfully portrayed by Chad Shelton as both smooth & gruff) & with herself provide the heart of the drama. She was matched by the Joseph De Rocher of Ryan McKinny, whose strong physical presence masked a recessive & evasive persona that finally gives way, under Sister Helen's influence, to a place of humility & compassion. I've mentioned Rod Gilfry as the murdered girl's father; Caroline Corrales played her mother, & Nikola Printz & Samuel White the parents of the murdered boy, & as mentioned I would have liked to have heard more from them. The entire cast was strong, & the multi-level, cage-like set is extremely effective. Dead Man Walking is, I believe, the most-performed of contemporary operas; this production was a powerful reminder of why this work has already held the stage for a quarter century, & is likely to continue doing so for many more.

West Edge Opera: Dolores

I went to all three operas at this year's West Edge Opera festival, seeing each one twice. First up is Dolores, centered on labor leader Dolores Huerta, with music by Nicolás Lell Benavides & libretto by Marella Martin Koch. I heard West Edge's preview of part of the opera two years ago (my post on that event is here, &, while I have your attention, here is my post on a New Century Chamber Orchestra concert with a different premiere from Benavides). I was very enthusiastic about the work then & after seeing it complete & fully staged I am even more enthusiastic; a few elements that gave me (minor) pause in the preview, particularly the extended victory speech for Senator Robert Kennedy. made sense to me once I saw the whole design. I go to as many new operas as I can & few of them have struck me as so musically & dramatically complete as Dolores. This is a meaty work that audiences will be pondering for quite a while.

I won't repeat (most of) the points I made in my earlier post, so I'll start by discussing the attention given to RFK in the second half of the opera. The day after the premiere, before the first performance of the festival's second opera, I ended up discussing this aspect of the work with someone who objected to the RFK material, wanting more Dolores. First, it's a tribute to the character that the audience wants more of her – much better than wanting less. It's in the spirit of Huerta to be collaborative & to share the spotlight with others, so the opera, by shifting focus, is enacting her personality. And the focus on RFK is necessary because you can't understand why his assassination was such a blow to the farmworkers' movement & to Huerta herself unless you understand the hope he offered: the sincerity, the compassion, the charisma. Though many in the audience clearly remembered the historical events, we are far enough from them so that you can't take for granted that people will grasp who RFK was & what he meant (especially when the name is now associated with the idiot destroying America's public health). When RFK is first mentioned, I heard in the brass subtle echoes of that Virgil Thomson / Aaron Copland "Americana" sound, giving an aural democratic halo to his arrival (though at the first performance – at this point, do I only hear with ironic ears? – I thought I detected a very subtle criticism in this music of the whole concept of "Americana" & political heroes).

References to RFK increase during the first half, but we need to see, hear, & feel him in person, & that's why we need the extended victory speech, in which, along with random little jokes & banalities, you hear him reaching out to what we'd now call marginalized groups (the immigrant farmworkers, mainly Mexican & Filipino; the Black populace) with charm, grace, & inclusiveness. I'm old enough to remember the grape boycott that is a major feature of the opera (my family boycotted grapes, as my mother was a long-time subscriber to Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker paper), but I do not remember RFK & his assassination, or many of the participants in the story other than Cesar Chavez & Nixon. Before the audience can weigh the magnitude of the loss, we have to feel the weight of RFK's presence.

But there is some irony in the treatment of RFK & what is now called the mainstream media. We, attending an opera titled Dolores, know that she is the story here: Huerta, & Itliong, & Chavez, & the workers they fight for.  We learn that they've been struggling for years, getting traction only slowly. When does the press show up? When a glamorous politician, a handsome man from a powerful family, shows up & teases running for the Presidency. That's the story the press cares about: the top levels of power, who's in, who's out, & not those toiling anonymously at the bottom of the pyramid. (There was a bit of this going on at the second performance, when State Attorney General Rob Bonta made an appearance, to much buzzing.)

So the events around the grape strike & the RFK assassination are clearly laid out, as prior knowledge cannot be assumed, but there is a certain memory-play aspect to the opera which works powerfully, freeing it from a documentary / straight narrative style into something more suggestively dreamlike, even, at moments, surreal. The dead RFK will appear to Huerta. There are elliptical suggestions of the lives going on out of view while the work gets done. The repeated choruses of No grapes / strike (in both English & Spanish) are a powerful way of suggesting the passage of time. And the on-goingnesss of any lengthy effort – the boycott has been underway for three years when the opera opens – is a difficult thing to convey theatrically, where activities that last for years, whose essence is their grinding, relentless dailiness, must necessarily be compressed into the two hours' traffic of the stage (this is a problem with pretty much every work-related drama I've seen). These chants rise fluidly from the music & action, from the emotions at play, rather than from specific situations; they echo throughout the action.

A good example of what I mean by the almost dreamlike aspect is the treatment of Tricky Dick. His scenes arrive like great slabs of weirdness in between the scenes of the union struggles. Initially he doesn't directly attack the Union or the boycott. Instead, he sings, in sinuous, insinuating tones, about the lovely tastiness of grapes. As he sings, the projection screens behind him show gloriously lit, sparkling, nearly erotic shots of green grapes. Maybe because of that imagery I kept picturing Tricky Dick as the snake in the garden. His music is sprightly, appealing, with a little touch of Weimar cabaret, & a bit of a lounge singer's louche seductiveness. It is indicative of what a powerful, disturbing creation he is that both times I saw the opera the audience, though clearly all-in for Huerta & the farmworkers, burst into applause at the end of his first scene.

Tricky Dick is on a platform, raised above the action. With each reappearance, his message gets a little more sardonic, a little more direct in attacking the Union, though he remains physically above the fray (he does have one appearance on "the floor" during the first act, but he is alone, spotlit on a darkened stage). By the end of the first act, he has grown more direct; he practically snarls in support of "the squares" & the "silent majority" & speaks with increasing stridency about the need for Order & Discipline. So when there is a moment in the second act, after RFK's assassination, when Tricky Dick & Huerta finally confront each other, face to face, down on the floor of the stage & we see what the opera has been building up to, the moment is breathtaking. She defies him with continued calls for a strike. And though we see him go on to become President, we see that she will continue to fight. As she says, the fight isn't over until we win.

The irony, of course, is that Tricky Dick uses words like Order & Discipline as code words for keeping down the people who are already down. They are, in fact, the ones who live lives of discipline & order: we've seen Huerta, a single mother of a large brood, struggling to support her family, pinching pennies, stretching dollars, continuing to work hard every day in the face of injustice & cruelty. That's real discipline, of a kind the politically scheming climber Tricky Dick doesn't understand, or appreciate despite his political success.

Calling the character Tricky Dick rather than Richard Nixon emphasizes the archetypal, recurring nature of the character: he's practically a trickster god, though on the side of complacency & evil. No matter what he does, the ultimate beneficiary is always meant to be himself (I've read Paradise Lost, I recognize the type.) The naming also allows for the freedom to add some Trumpery touches to the characterization: he holds a Bible, but upside down, as in the infamous Bible photo-op, & along with documentary photographs from 1968 we see video from recent No Kings rallies (just in case anyone was missing the sad fact that this opera, set in 1968, is frighteningly relevant now, in 2025).

Let me spring back to the beginning of the opera to look at the character of Dolores. The opera opens with quiet but tense music, as she is being driven (her car is in the shop & she can't afford to get it out until payday) by fellow labor leader Larry Itliong. She refers to her children, & says that her divorce has been hard on them. It's a normal, workaday conversation, & the only other (possible) reference we hear to the divorce is her passing comment later that her children have seen the effects of farm work, & the way farmworkers are treated, on their father. The opera does not give a Wikipedia-style bio of Huerta, but you will get a clear sense of who she is as a person: strong, resourceful, resilient. And very much a person who is about "people power": the power of unions, of uniting, of forming alliances & coalitions.

Her approach is subtly contrasted with that of her fellow leaders, Itliong & Chavez. Itliong is very much about his own ethnic group (the Filipino workers) & has a short fuse, which is sometimes amusing & satirical (as in his sarcastically chipper number about the politicians who talk-talk-talk, while on the screens behind him the jaws of various politicians waggle back & forth in time) & sometimes short-sighted (as in his angry explosions at Huerta & Chavez when things don't go the way he thinks they should). Chavez is a bit messianic, a bit of a loner (he decides on his hunger strike without consulting the others), very much immersed in Catholic ideas of redemption through self-sacrifice (there is an interesting Catholic undercurrent in the opera: as a link between Kennedy & Chavez, as the source of understanding & strength – Huerta calls on Our Lady of Guadalupe as well as Our Lady of Sorrows, for whom she is named).

Huerta is the one who sees the need to keep the workers going with something more light-hearted than self-sacrifice & righteous anger. She suggests a mariachi band, which leads to some lively music & a contrast in dramatic mood, as well as to a lilting & extremely catchy setting of "Are you registered to vote?" It's very danceable; in face we see the three labor leaders dancing to it. It's so catchy that some political group ought to license the rights before the next election.

But there are also drawbacks to Huerta's collaborative approach: is it wise to put all the eggs in the Kennedy basket? There is a bleak chorus before RFK appears warning her not to count on him, that he will be killed the way his brother was. We hear the news of Dr Martin Luther King Jr's assassination, with a somber chorus to Aeschylus's words from Agamemnon about suffering into wisdom through the grace of God. This chorus will be repeated to powerful effect when RFK is shot (the reference to the great Greek tragedian deepens the sense of world-historical suffering & sorrow here).. After he has been shot but is not yet officially dead, Itliong already wants to come up with a new strategy. This is the sort of cold-blooded calculation politicians need. Huerta, though, cannot bring herself to recalibrate so soon. She is dealing with a deep personal as well as political blow – the loss of the first major politician who seemed genuinely willing to listen to them, include them, & help them with actions as well as words.

We get the social / political / community view of things, but there is also a powerful scene of Huerta's inward reckoning. As she prepares for bed, praying, she reflects, thinking of her children, wishing she were with them, knowing that she needs to keep fighting for them & others. The brass instruments  have been commenting throughout the opera, sometimes inspirationally, sometimes satirically. But for this scene, they recede, & we have a string-heavy section, interior & searching, with a lovely solo violin floating above. Then as Huerta sleeps, the music changes as Tricky Dick appears again, looming on the platform directly above her, as in an evil dream.

There is another string-heavy scene with violin solo: the aria of the busboy Juan Romero, who cradled RFK right after the shooting. He sings of his recent arrival in America, & of how rare it was for him to be treated with the respect with which Kennedy had treated him the night before, when he delivered room service to him & his wife. This scene shows us the genuine empathy of RFK, the ability to connect with people (or just to notice people) that most others ignore. As with Dolores's nighttime reverie, it is meditative, complex, beautiful: the real life of people, as opposed to what the politicians say or the media report. It is in a generous spirit that this moving aria is given to someone who could be seen in the wider sweep of things as a minor character.

(from the second performance: Huerta in black in the center; to her right is Mark Streshinsky, General Director of West Edge Opera)

The entire cast is strong & deserved the enthusiastic cheers they received; I'm just going to list names (I discuss the main performers more specifically in the preview post mentioned above): Kelly Guerra as Dolores Huerta, Phillip Lopez as Cesar Chavez, Rolfe Dauz as Larry Itliong, Alex Boyer as Senator Kennedy, Sam Faustine as Tricky Dick, Chelsea Hollow as Helen Chavez / Ethel Kennedy, Sergio Gonzalez as Juan / a Journalist, Caleb Alexander as Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers: all superb, all memorable. The staging by Octavio Cardenas was masterly & Mary Chun conducted the score with power & tenderness. Dolores Huerta herself was there in person, & spoke after the two performances I saw. She is still powerful, still fighting; the opera ends with her resolution to continue fighting despite the loss of their great ally RFK, & the communal cries of Sí ,se puede ring out so bravely that I felt sure the audience was about to join in (maybe they did, it was hard to tell); the cries end somewhat suddenly, but with the feeling that they are actually still sounding around us. What a memorable event this was! Congratulations to all involved, to West Edge Opera for midwifing, & to Benavides & Martin Koch for producing such a powerful work.

San Francisco Opera: Innocence

(Catching up on last June's offerings at San Francisco Opera, part 3. . . .)

I was at San Francisco Opera for the American premiere of Innocence, Kaija Saariaho's final opera (libretto by Sofi Oksanen & Aleksi Barrière). I realized right away that I needed to see it again, so I was also at the final performance. I don't generally go to the same production twice, due to my preference for expensive seats & my low tolerance for audiences, but this performance was clearly something special, like seeing a modern classic emerging newborn but already complete, & it was worth seeing not only twice but multiple times; in a work as subtle & detailed as this one, each viewing brings you in deeper.

We begin at a wedding reception in Finland; the bride & groom met as students abroad. Strange things begin to emerge about the wedding – why is it so small? where are the family & friends? is the groom's father drinking maybe a little too much, & why are his mother's vocal lines so consistently in an almost hysterically high tessitura? We learn that the groom's brother, ten years before, shot up the town's International School. A waitress assigned to the reception at the last minute turns out to know the family, from the time before. Her daughter was one of the shooter's victims. As we move forward in time with the reception (will the bride be told the family secret? will the family finally pull together, or fly apart?) we also move backwards, through flashbacks, to the day of the shooting, what led up to it, & its ongoing repercussions.

It was an astute move setting this opera somewhere other than the homeland of school shootings, the United States. Setting it here would make the story inevitably about the sickness of American culture (guns & money over children's safety, every time) & a corrupt & ineffective political situation that bars the obviously essential reforms. Instead, it is a deeper examination of what humans anywhere & anytime do to each other.

The story is fragmented; initially we hear from many of the victims (not all of them still living); they speak in a Babel-like cloud of different languages, describing everyday things, like going for a run or meeting people in public, & how they now struggle with them. Gradually we realize they are describing the aftereffects of the decade-old shooting at their school. But about halfway through, the libretto takes a twist; we start to hear the background of the shooter, his emotional oddities, the early warning signs that were ignored, the ridicule of his classmates & even a horrifying example of a sexually humiliating incident they perpetrated on him. None of this excuses the murders, of course, but as we go in deeper we gradually realize the terrible irony of the title: no one here is innocent. Innocence may be a thing that simply doesn't exist among humans, though they pretend it does, mostly to excuse themselves & condemn others.

A particularly striking character in this regard is Marketa (Vilma Jää), the waitress' murdered daughter, a talented musician. She is a tall, attractive blonde. We first see her through her mourning mother's eyes, as a wonderful, talented person cruelly cut off from the life she might have led. And that remains true. But we also hear from the groom's mother that the wonderful Marketa had a cruel edge, & made up a song mocking the future shooter for his ugly frog face, which she sang to the students repeatedly, because they enjoyed it & it made them laugh. The phantom Marketa appears & mostly shrugs off the song & how it affected its object of ridicule. I wonder if she isn't in some way meant as an image of the Artist in the world, following her own path (her music is distinctly different, with a sort of Nordic folk-song sound that is striking & memorable) but also eager for applause & the spotlight, even at the cost of someone else's feelings: a creator, yes, but also a destroyer; an indifferent, & therefore morally compromised or compromisable, figure.

The shooter himself never appears on stage, though he dominates the proceedings, nor do we see violence so much as its emotionally violent after-effects. [A correction: my memory was faulty & the shooter does appear on stage in this production; see Lisa Hirsch's comment below.] We do meet the shooter's accomplices, though both dropped out before the actual shooting. One I won't mention, as it's one of the more startling revelations, but another is a young woman who befriends the shooter & has some problems of her own, including a creepy stepfather. It's a mark of the libretto's deft touch that his creepiness is presented only through her perceptions; there's something there, but how much? We are not given easy or obvious explanations. There is the family priest, but he does not have much comfort to dispense; instead, he is haunted by the sense that he should have acted on warning signs he noticed & by the inadequacy of any counseling or comfort he can offer. The opera closes with the phantom Marketa urging her mother to stop some of her obsessive mourning rituals; you could take this as some sort of healing or closure, or perhaps simply as time moving on, & memory moving on, though the sorrow is embedded soul-deep until one also passes away.

A summary does not do justice to the libretto, which struck me as comparable to late Ibsen in its psychological nuance & mythopoetic power. It could stand on its own without the music, though the music adds a richness, a depth & complexity, that only opera can achieve. Saariaho's score is muscular & crepuscular; the tension is sustained throughout & all handled with great subtlety. At my second performance, when I was seated in front of the brass & percussion – I was on the other side for my first performance – I noticed how skillfully certain lines were highlighted by a trumpet. (Much as I love Britten & Billy Budd, I wince every time Claggart snarls Let him crawl to that isn't-he-evil orchestration – there's none of that here). This score is a magnificent final addition to Saariaho's rich legacy. [a correction: this was Saariaho's last work for the stage, but there's a trumpet concerto she composed after it; see Lisa Hirsch's comment below]

Another reason I wanted to have a second experience of this magnificent work is that, even though it felt as if I were watching the emergence of a full-blown masterpiece, a piece that seemed both already set among the classics & yet also completely new, it also seemed like something that might not get revived that often: the unsparing vision that gives it force also makes it difficult, even at times horrifying, to experience. I heard a few people compare it to Elektra, but that has a big star role. There's none of that here. Innocence is very much an ensemble piece. There are no detachable arias. The emotions it gives rise to are complicated & haunting. I very much hope I'm wrong about this, as this opera deserves many revivals. New operas are always a risk, & San Francisco Opera deserves all praise for co-commissioning this bold work.

I feel I've just scratched the surface of what should be said here. But let me salute the ensemble: conductor Clément Mao-Takacs, Lilian Farahani as the Bride, Miles Mykkanen as the Groom, Rod Gilfry as his Father, Claire de Sévigné as his Mother, Ruxandra Donose as the substitute Waitress, Lucy Shelton as the Teacher, Kristinn Sigmundsson as the family Priest, Rowan Klevits as the Student Anton, Camilo Delgado Díaz as the Student Jeronimo, Beate Mordal as the Student Lily, Marina Dumont as the Student Alexia, Vilma Jää as the Student Marketa, Julie Hega as the Student Iris, & the actors Oksana Barrios, Jordan Covington, Victoria Fong, Sam Hannum, Jalen Justice, Rachael Richman, Brian Soutner, Kevin Walton.

If I ever pull together a list of the greatest opera performances I've ever seen, Innocence will have to be on that list.

San Francisco Opera: The Handmaid's Tale

Last Saturday night, I was at the Opera House for the west coast premiere of The Handmaid's Tale, with music by Poul Ruders & libretto by Paul Bentley based, of course, on Margaret Atwood's famous novel. I was tired when I went in (these things do affect our perceptions; the physical weighs us down, which is one of the themes of the Handmaid's Tale), I was skeptical for several reasons of what I was about to see, but I found myself overpowered by a work I'm still processing several days later.

I don't need to go into why I was tired, but I will broadly sketch my skepticism. The idea felt maybe a bit too obvious, even hackneyed, given the political situation in the United States (the mere fact that anyone, let alone a substantial minority, could still think of voting for Trump tells you everything you need to know about how morally & intellectually & spiritually bankrupt this country is). And the way this material is usually described struck me as self-indulgent: women as perpetual victims, men as oppressors. It's well known that over half the white women who voted in 2016 voted for Trump, & most men I know (including myself, of course) are far from profiting from the current gendered set-up. We've all seen those memes that appeared post-Dobbs about how the wrath of women had been aroused, but all I can think when I see them is Where have they been for the past 45 years? Nothing, & I mean nothing, that has happened has been a surprise. The reactionaries have been announcing for decades to cheering crowds (which included many women, of course) that they were going to pack the courts & overturn Roe v Wade, which is exactly what they did. When Trump was elected, owing to the anti-democratic Electoral College, there was grand talk about "the Resistance", a word which was also highlighted in the publicity for this opera. I dislike the self-glorifying term; it makes it sound as if we're all wearing berets & blowing up supply trains under cover of darkness. Opposing Trump mostly calls for the same boring grind as any other political work, including talking to – &, more to the point, listening to – people who are, in the delicate & lovely euphemism of political writers, "low information".

I just deleted several lines there, because, you know, people care about my political opinions as little as I care about theirs & let's get to the opera. But, for this opera in particular, the political situation is relevant, & our self-deceptions & assumptions are relevant. This opera knows this, & no matter what you go in thinking – & this is the mark of a great political opera, like The Death of Klinghoffer – you will come out a bit shaken in your certainties.

I read Atwood's novel around the time it was published, 1985, & found it strong & convincing – Atwood, of course, is too clear-sighted & complex a writer to produce a simple tale of victimization, & I'm happy to say the adaptation respects that. There is ambiguity & complicity all over in the action & characterization. I did not re-read the novel before the opera (lack of time, mostly) but it came back to me as I watched. The action, which is complicated & not presented in a linear manner, can be followed even without having read the book. The story told in the novel itself is fragmentary, a journal kept irregularly by someone whose fate we never learn, but in the opera the story, until the end, seems less fragmentary than fractured: the pieces are there, just not in chronological order.

Both narrative & music have a lot to accomplish here, & mostly they both succeed brilliantly, though at times I did wish for the expansion possible in a novel – in particular, I wanted to hear more from & about Serena Joy, the wife of the Commander, & Aunt Lydia, the woman in charge of training the handmaidens in their beliefs & duties. They are true believers in Gilead (though I started to wonder about Serena Joy); what are they seeing in it or hoping for from it? But compression & omission are required to convey everything that needs to be conveyed: the violent founding & strictures of the Republic of Gilead, the sporadic concern & opposition before & during the founding, the environmental depredations that make fertility & healthy infants such prized commodities, what life is like under Gilead, & the life (both before & after Gilead) & the tentative moves towards liberation of Offred (the titular Handmaid; her Commander is named Fred, as she is now Of Fred, but also, of course there's the pun on Offered).

The spare, very brightly lit set (designed by Chloe Lamford) & the color-coded costumes (designed by Christina Cunninham) tell a clear story about the relentless surveillance & regimentation of Gilead, & its Spartan lack of softness or luxury, or any kind of sensuality or romance. The time is moved forward a bit from the novel, so it's now happening a few years from our present time (though the surprising amount of cigarette smoking made me think it was still set a few years after 1985). The scenes of life in Gilead are sharply drawn, full of confusion, suspicion, & disappointment. So why would anyone think such a place was a good idea? The music conveys that very well: whenever there's a hymn or prayer or some sort of religious ceremony, the music takes on a gentleness, a harmonious beauty, an ascendance, that is not found elsewhere in the score (in which even Amazing Grace comes across in frantic, fractured distortions). This quality is subtly done; these moments don't jump out from the score, but they do mark a difference in tone from the violent percussion of Gilead's enforcers & the agonizingly high tessiture of the corralled handmaidens. In those early scenes of the handmaidens especially, I was very reliant on the surtitles.

Every aspect of this production is strong: the agile conducting by Karen Kamensek, the sensitive direction by John Fulljames, &, especially, the powerhouse cast: just to mention some of the major roles, Sarah Cambidge as a commanding Aunt Lydia; Lindsay Ammann as the bitter wife, Serena Joy; John Relyea as the opaque Commander; Katrina Galka as Janine/Ofwarren, a friend & ally of Offred; Brenton Ryan as an ambiguous servant of, or enemy of, the Commander & Serena Joy; &, in particular, Irene Roberts as Offred. I realize it's part of the narrative strategy that Offred is not a particularly interesting character: she is a fairly average person, with average interests & concerns, trying to make sense of a horrible situation she is aught up in. Roberts makes her vivid & convincing.

Do you need a spoiler alert if the key plot revelation to be discussed is that there is nothing to reveal? The opera ends, as did the novel, with an abrupt disappearance from the historical record. We do not learn Offred's ultimate fate: freedom, capture, the Colonies? Life, death, imprisonment? Does she reunite with the daughter who was taken from her? The final notes ring out, but the narrative hangs suspended. The point, of course, is that we can try to write the ending for our own time, as best we may, insofar as we can.

San Francisco Opera: Omar

I was at the San Francisco Opera's second performance of Omar, the new & recently Pulitzer-Prize winning opera by Rhiannon Giddens & Michael Abels (my understanding is that Giddens, who is best known as a banjo/violin player of Roots music, brought Abel in to help her with orchestration & similar matters; so despite the two composers I believe Omar is very much driven by Giddens, who also wrote the libretto). I found it a very powerful work. But despite its resonant emotional power, there is also something distanced about it; though there are plenty of characters – Omar himself (the heroic Jamez McCorkle), his Mother Fatima (an authoritative Taylor Raven), an enslaved woman named Julie who befriends him (the warmly generous Brittany Renee), Omar's first, sadistic "owner" & his second, more considerately paternalistic "owner" (both played with finesse by Daniel Okulitch), as well as others – & plenty of action (capture, deportation through the Middle Passage, enslavement, escape) – the opera is not really driven by either character or narrative. It is instead a contemplation & a summoning.

Some of this quality is inherent in the material. The opera is based on what we know about Omar ibn Said, an Islamic scholar from what is now Senegal who was kidnapped & sold into slavery in 1807, ending up at a plantation in North Carolina, where he wrote an account of his life; because he wrote the account in Arabic, which of course most Americans can't read, it is one of the few such narratives not mediated through a white editor or amanuensis. The libretto sticks mostly to the fragmentary historical record; at the end of Act 1, we see Omar run off, but there are no dramatic incidents along the way (no Eliza-style leaping across the ice floes); when we see him at the beginning of Act 2, he is in jail in Fayetteville, where they're trying to figure out who this oddly literate but barely English-speaking man is. There is a suggestion that he & Julie are emotionally involved, but it doesn't proceed past a suggestion; there is no love duet or anything like that. There is a scrupulous respect throughout for what we can know about the past, particularly regarding people who were not much recorded or regarded in their own time. And though the arc of the material is upward, it's not quite as far upward as we might like – the enslaved Omar escapes the plantation of the sadistic Johnson, but ends his life still enslaved, only under the comparatively benign though condescending paternalism of Owen. (The difficulties of escaping to freedom are made clear; Julie, captured by Johnson, escapes only to make her way back to Owen; as she says to her friend, the enslaved woman Katie Ellen (a robust & down-to-earth Rehanna Thelwell), the danger of traveling all the way North, particularly as a woman alone, in danger of capture & rape, was too risky). Omar & Julie end up on a more kindly run plantation, so while they're better off than they were, this is still not exactly a happy ending. But that's the historical record.

But in addition to the limits of what we know about Omar's life, the distanced approach seems to be a deliberate choice. In addition to the unwillingness to speculate too widely away from the known facts, & perhaps ending up with conventional tropes that don't do justice to these vanished individuals, there is an aspect of ritual to much of the opera. The work begins with McCorkle walking on stage from the side of the orchestra, dressed in contemporary street clothes (shorts, sneakers, a graphic t-shirt); then he is draped in the long white robes & assumes the role of Omar, singing a prayer in Arabic to Allah the Merciful. This establishes him as a Muslim & a man of learning, but it's an extended sequence & does not really push the dramatic action forward; what it does do is frame the action in spiritual & philosophical terms: how can an all-Merciful & all-Powerful Deity allow what we are about to see? At the end of the opera, similar actions unfold in reverse: Omar sings a prayer calling on those around him to follow the tenets of their faith in God, only this time he sings in English, rather than Arabic: he is communicating directly to those around him, & also to us in the audience; then McCorkle disrobes, revealing his street gear, leaving his Omar a powerful memory. Again, this isn't about dramatic action or a rousing finale; it's a call to inward searching & acknowledgement of continuing, residual injustice & a meditation on the mutations of history.

Strengthening the ritualistic aspect is Giddens's use of rhyme in the libretto, which is mostly in rhyming couplets. This was a risky choice, as such couplets can sound forced or jingly, especially over the course of almost three hours, & rhyme in the English-speaking theater often sounds comic. I was initially concerned that the rhyming would make things seem "folk-opera-ish", but it works surprisingly well as an elevated & stylized form of speech.

Omar is clearly a specific person with an unusual story, but he is also a representative of the millions of kidnapped & enslaved Africans, about whom we generally know even less than we know of Omar. So the opera's focus often goes off Omar himself onto others: during the scene depicting the Middle Passage, individuals, some of them dead by the time they sing to us, give us their experiences or emotions or histories. The dead appear throughout the evening. Omar's mother Fatima, murdered in Africa, joins with Julie in Fayetteville to urge Omar to write down his life story; she also appears to him in a dream to urge him to flee Johnson's cruelty. Disrupted but persistent family connections, particularly with mothers, haunt the opera; disrupted but continuous strands between the previous lives of the enslaved & their current lives are emphasized throughout. Julie is drawn to Omar because her own father also wore a cap, a kufi, as Omar does; he also avoided some of the same foods; though Julie wasn't raised with a knowledge of Islam, she recognizes its signs. This is one of many threads snapped by enslavement that are rewoven in the new world. There is a dance (choreography by Kiara Benn) among the enslaved at Owen's plantation; there is a caller (Katie Ellen) as in barn dancing, & the elaborate figures & lines made by the groups are clearly reminiscent of dances from some ancestral homeland (the African-style drumming in the orchestra reinforces these associations, as does the presence of a heavily costumed & masked African dancer, performed by Jermaine McGhee, whom we see throughout the show). The dancing is a moment of joy (& hearkens back to the use of ballet interludes throughout the history of opera), a sign of individuals resisting the dehumanizing mechanism of slavery, but for Owen it only reinforces his superiority: he sees his enslaved workers as childlike people, given to singing & dancing, better off under his firm but kindly guidance than on their own. Ambiguity & dual perspectives haunt everything we see in this opera.

Well, almost everything. The white people don't come off very well (but then, how could they?) The essential similarity between the sadistic Johnson & the well-meaning Owen is emphasized by having the same singer play both. I did sometimes feel their portrayal verged a bit on caricature (but then, how could it not?) But I don't see any other way to handle them; you don't want to risk making excuses or, more to the point, shifting the focus; the opera is about the experience of the enslaved, not those who enslaved them. Perhaps I was simply feeling pangs of collective racial guilt. Owen's daughter Eliza (a charmingly bird-like Laura Krumm) is the one who in a sense rescues Omar; she sees the prayers in Arabic he has inscribed on the walls of his Fayetteville jail, & though she cannot read them, she is convinced this beautiful unknown script is how God would write, & she persuades her pious father to buy Omar. It is ironic that the Islamic prayers appealed to her, as her father, a firm Christian, is convinced that though Omar is clearly a knowledgeable man, he is following a false god. Owen later is sure that he has managed to convert Omar to Christianity. The historical record, & perhaps Omar himself, is unclear on this point. But Owen's Christian faith, co-existing with (& even reinforcing) his ownership of fellow human beings, connects with the prayers in the opening & closing of the opera & is part of the work's interrogation of religious beliefs compared to actual behavior. Late in Act 2 Omar gives a reading of & commentary on the 23rd Psalm that, again, resonates ambiguously; when he speaks of what the "Lord" has done, he might be referring to the deity, or his white overseers.

The brilliant production design (Christopher Myers, I assume in collaboration with director Kaneza Schaal) is suggestive & stylized. When we walk in, a giant photo of the actual Omar appears on the golden curtain. The first scene takes place in front of tall ambiguously domed pale tan cloth shapes: they look like the buildings of Omar's native city, but also suggest headstones, a reminder of time & impending tragedy & death. Banners & draperies, often covered with flowing Arabic script, are frequently used, as are ropes, shaped into suggestions of other forms: for example, towards the end, on the Owens plantation, there is a giant branching tree, made out of knotted ropes; this suggests not only the rigging of a Middle Passage ship, but also the long history of lynching, as well as the ropes used to hold the enslaved captive, or during their labor. During the Middle Passage scene, there is a projection of a woodcut showing how the captives are laid out tightly in the hold of a ship; the same image appears later printed on the fabric worn by some of the enslaved women. Other costumes are covered with Arabic script or other images. The silhouettes are period-appropriate, but, in keeping with the style of the work, they are stylized & layered with symbolism. 

During the intermission the man beside me turned to me & after we both agreed we were impressed with the opera he said his ex-wife was attending it next week & he was trying to figure out how to describe the music to her. Well, music is notoriously difficult to convey in words. It is, like the rest of the production, richly layered: there are reminiscences of African drumming, Black spirituals (particularly in a mournful work song from those suffering at Johnson's plantation), American folk music, minimalism, & more, but all these influences, in a very American way, syncretically create something new & captivating. The music also flowed in a convincing way, rather than breaking down into discrete sections. I assume Giddens has never worked on this large scale before, but she brings it off, so credit to her (& also Michael Abels, & to her for realizing she could use his assistance, & also to conductor John Kennedy for leading the orchestra).

Omar formed a provocative contrast with the other new opera on SF Opera's fall schedule, Mason Bates's The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. Both center on a single man, but that's about as far as the resemblance goes. A friend of mine was surprised by my boredom at the Jobs opera, as the music is quite sprightly. But that opera is relentlessly focused on Jobs, in a mostly positive light, & to me the effect was like a lengthy commercial for a product I'm not interested in buying, & even if the jingle is extremely catchy, after a while that gets to be part of the problem. I also felt that the Jobs opera already felt a bit dated: hadn't the time passed when "we" looked up to our tech overlords, & admired rather than questioned their approach & methods? Haven't we heard enough from & about them? By contrast, Omar gives us a whole world previously barely hinted at in the Opera House, & despite or because of its ritualistic, somewhat withheld quality, this opera is profoundly moving in its exploration of the historically disappeared. Sometimes going backward is the way forward.