Opera's movers and shakers keep it from museums: Littler
By William LittlerMusic Columnist
Sat., June 4, 2016timer3 min. read
MONTREAL—The world's first overtly gay opera? Well, not necessarily, but has any previous opera premiered in Canada taken as its subject the love of two men, complete with a nude scene?
The story itself may be vaguely familiar, even to uptight Torontonians, since Tarragon Theatre once staged Michel Marc Bouchard's play in English as Lilies or The Revival of a Romantic Drama.
This time, meaning last month, the Quebec playwright turned his 1967 play into the libretto for a new opera commissioned and premiered by L'Opéra de Montréal, with music by the American-Australian composer Kevin March, once again under its original French title, Les Feluettes (The Lilies).
The title is Quebec slang for weak or effeminate men and, to the provincial society of early 20th-century Quebec, the young Simon Doucet and Count Vallier de Tilly certainly seemed to qualify.
Their tragic tale as fellow students in a Catholic college, thwarted in their love by parental and church interference, has lost none of its poignancy in its operatic transformation, with Kevin March's score very much on the libretto's wavelength, by turns lyrical and dramatic, written in a musical language accessible to a wide audience. By no means surprisingly, its opening night performance received a standing ovation.
To its credit, L'Opéra de Montréal produced the opera handsomely, with sets by Guillaume Lord, costumes by François Barbeau, Serge Denoncourt and Dominique Gruerdon, direction by Denoncourt and an effective cast headed by Étienne Dupuis as Simon, Jean-Michel Richer as Vallier and Gordon Gietz as the in-the-closet bishop forced to watch a re-enactment of their betrayal. The veteran opera star Gino Quilico even appeared in the supporting role of Simon in old age.
The Orchestre Métropolitain appeared on the rear stage rather than in the pit, behind the prison bars framing the action, with the able, underused Timothy Vernon conducting.
As director of Pacific Opera Victoria, co-producer of Les Feluettes, Timothy Vernon can look forward to a West Coast second-run of performances of the new score and, unlike the other recent operas seen the same week in whole or part in Montreal, this one clearly merits a future.
The occasion for all this activity was the annual conference of Opera America, the service organization serving virtually all the major and most of the minor opera producers in North America. At its opening session, president and CEO Marc A. Scorca facetiously pledged as a future candidate for president of the United States to raise taxes 1 per cent to make opera free to everyone.
In an era in which Donald Trump can be chosen as Republican candidate for the presidency, the notion may not be as laughable as his audience found it and yet, one of the persistent problems of opera continues to be its high and rising production costs, hence its high and rising ticket prices.
The Opera America conference addressed a variety of strategies to develop opera's audience, one of the more enterprising being Opera Memphis's Thirty Days of Opera, through which members of the Tennessee company turn up every day each September in different non-traditional venues to perform operatic excerpts, some of them from specially written new works directly related to the community.
To remain relevant, Perryn Leech, managing director of Houston Grand Opera, pointed out that opera companies have to reflect the stories of their communities, which is why his company has developed an opera on the space tragedy of the Columbia and a Mariachi opera of interest to its large Hispanic population.
Closer to home, Pierre Dufour, executive director of L'Opéra de Montréal, pointed to his company's coOpera project in which school students collaborate on developing an opera themselves "from scratch."
To an outside viewer, what characterized so many of these comments was an unapologetic idealism, a belief in opera as more than a high-priced entertainment. For as Larry Desrochers, general director of Manitoba Opera put it, "Our mission is to change people's lives through the art of opera."
A tall order, surely. And yet, when a new opera such as Les Feluettes comes along, treating a socially relevant subject with understanding, compassion and skill, the supposedly conservative opera audience can be seen to respond enthusiastically. If this Opera America conference demonstrated anything, it was the eagerness of today's operatic movers and shakers to rescue their art from internment in a museum.