Music|New Opera? Great Idea. Good Luck!
Music | Music
New Opera? Great Idea. Good Luck!
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI OCT. 10, 2008
The world premiere of "The Bonesetter's Daughter" last month at the San Francisco Opera, with a libretto by Amy Tan and music by Stewart Wallace. The opera is based on Ms. Tan's 2001 novel. Credit Terrence McCarthy
I HAVE seldom been as rattled by a question as I was last month, when I visited an arts criticism class at the University of Southern California. A thoughtful student asked me why I dislike most new operas.
What? I consider myself a proselytizer for new opera, I said, someone who has urged companies to commission works and attended every premiere I could get to, always with hopeful anticipation. I rattled off a list of significant operas from recent years, including Thomas Adès's audacious adaptation of Shakespeare's "Tempest," Poul Ruders's fantastical and harrowing "Kafka's Trial" and John Adams's grimly humane and musically intricate "Doctor Atomic," which comes to the Metropolitan Opera in a new production on Monday.
Still, I had to concede that many — make that most — new operas are disappointing, ineffective or just plain bad. Why should that be? It's an especially urgent question now, when more resources than ever are being spent to attract new, younger audiences with productions that try to meld traditional operatic virtues with theatrical dazzle.
An operatic project can go wrong in many ways, of course, since it demands a complex collaborative process in which music, singing, text, drama, dancing and design are somehow brought into balance. Still, two recent West Coast productions exemplify common pitfalls facing the creators of any contemporary opera.
"The Fly," which had its American premiere at the Los Angeles Opera on Sept. 7, a co-production with the Théâtre du Châtelet of Paris, illustrates the perils of trying to turn a commercially successful property into a musically substantive opera. Here we have another opera company angling for a hip crowd pleaser.
Determined to entice Hollywood directors into the opera house, Plácido Domingo, the general director of the Los Angeles Opera, approached David Cronenberg and his frequent collaborator, the film composer Howard Shore, to write a new work. They suggested an operatic version of their 1986 science-fiction hit, "The Fly." When he heard the idea, Mr. Domingo told The Los Angeles Times, he said: "Oh, God, of all things. 'The Fly'?"
He was right to have trepidation, but not necessarily about the subject, which he soon embraced. The problem was Mr. Shore, who was simply not up to the task of composing a full-length opera. How could the man who wrote the intensely dramatic music for the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy have composed such a blandly somber score for "The Fly"? His vocal writing is awkward and pointlessly angular, and he seems to have consciously tried to avoid cinematic flourishes, striving instead to compose a dutifully serious contemporary opera, complete with whiffs of pointillist atonality.
The other new work, "The Bonesetter's Daughter," based on Amy Tan's 2001 novel, had its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera on Sept. 13. This project was emblematic of a more elusive, frustrating pitfall: that in the search for profundity, otherwise skillful creators may succumb to the temptation of milking music for its nonverbal, elemental power, rather than heeding the specifics of good storytelling. The resulting opera, with music by Stewart Wallace and a libretto by Ms. Tan, too often listed into abstract episodes of musical and dramatic vacuity.
Music is indeed handy for tapping into the subliminal, as that proto-Freudian Debussy showed in "Pelléas et Mélisande." But this is not the same as striving for the cosmic. If in a new film or play the characters stepped out of character to deliver mystical ruminations on the big themes of life, audiences would laugh. Why do we put up with this in the opera house?
"The Bonesetter's Daughter" was all the more disappointing because there were engrossing aspects to the work. Here was a worthy project based on an intriguing novel, involving an immense effort from the creative team, full of good intentions and talented artists.
Mr. Wallace, whose best known previous opera is "Harvey Milk," is a capable and professional composer, though rather derivative. Slipping into a common trap for the creators of new operas, he, Ms. Tan and the director Chen Shi-Zheng overly mythologize this richly detailed story about three generations of Chinese women, producing long, hazy and hokey scenes.
From my reading of a book by the music critic Ken Smith about the making of "The Bonesetter's Daughter," one warning sign came early in the creative process. After a nine-month campaign by Mr. Wallace to persuade Ms. Tan to adapt her novel for the stage, Mr. Smith writes, Mr. Wallace was convinced that "as far as personal themes and dramatic structure were concerned," he and Ms. Tan "were already on the same page." But there was one major problem: The composer "had no idea what the opera should sound like."
Productions of operas with premieres in the past few years include "Adriana Mater," top, at Santa Fe Opera; "The Fly," center, at Los Angeles Opera; and "The Bonesetter's Daughter," at San Francisco Opera, above. Credit From top, Ken Howard; Robert Millard; Terrence McCarthy
Whoops. Most opera composers, from the moment they consider a subject, are seized with ideas about the kind of music called for. From my perspective Mr. Wallace and Ms. Tan were not well served when Mr. Chen joined the team. Many New Yorkers will know Mr. Chen from his acclaimed production of the 19-hour Ming dynasty opera "The Peony Pavilion," performed at Lincoln Center in 1999.
As Mr. Smith reports in the book, which includes transcriptions of the creators' conversations, Mr. Chen argued that the structure for "The Bonesetter's Daughter" as initially conceived was too small-scale and intimate. The story needed a "truly vast landscape"; it "needed abstraction."
Ms. Tan was sold. "The personal always comes out of the epic," she said. "So right away we started building to mythic." Within a week, Mr. Wallace recalled, the show "had been blown up and completely reassembled."
Could it not be argued that the epic comes out of the personal? I would have been intrigued to see the show as they had first envisioned it. The richness of Ms. Tan's novel, filled with autobiographic strands, comes from the poignant specificity of the storytelling, focusing on three women, each searching for her voice.
In the novel the American-born Ruth Young, a ghostwriter, lives in San Francisco with her longtime boyfriend and routinely copes with his two adolescent daughters. Ruth's volatile immigrant mother, LuLing, harboring painful secrets, had worked as a child laborer in an ink-making studio outside Beijing. Hovering over the tensely bonded mother and daughter is the memory of Precious Auntie, LuLing's nursemaid, though it turns out that the bossy, tough-skinned and essentially mute Precious Auntie was actually LuLing's mother.
Ruth learns the truth in the novel by reading LuLing's diary. In the opera Precious Auntie appears as an awesome ghost, sometimes suspended by wires. Ruth, metaphorically becoming her mother, travels back in time to relive LuLing's youth in 1930s China, a reasonable if highly melodramatic solution to getting the flashbacks onstage.
But the most ineffective scenes come when things turn abstract. The opera begins in a timeless void, with the three main characters appearing together in a cosmic trio. Echoing the novel, which begins with LuLing's awkwardly written and disarming diary, they sing, "These are the things I know are true," "pain and regret and sorrow," "desire and hope and love."
Finding a way to dramatize the diary in an opera cannot have been easy. Still, the trio comes across as self-consciously transcendent. The music is vague and faceless. The vocal lines meander, and the orchestra gets stuck on ostinato patterns with whooshy, tremulous background harmonies. You can almost hear the creators saying, "Ah, this is what opera can uniquely do, reach the ethereal and beyond."
But the great operas that explore mysticism keep the focus on narrative specifics. The characters in Wagner's "Ring," as the critic and composer Virgil Thomson once quipped, spend a lot of time "predicting doom, describing weather, soul states and ecstatic experiences." But has there ever been a more inventively detailed generational drama? And because of Wagner's intricate use of interconnected leitmotifs that are linked to each character, curse and whatnot in this epic, every moment of the "Ring," no matter how metaphysical, seems grounded in rich musico-dramatic specificity.
A composer cannot put three women in an ensemble, as Mr. Wallace does several times with his main characters in "The Bonesetter's Daughter," without inviting a comparison with the most renowned trio for female voices in all of opera, from the final scene of Strauss's "Rosenkavalier." Yes, Strauss's lyrically soaring, lushly harmonic music strives to express ultimate feelings of love, regret and aging. What prevents this trio from turning mawkish is that Strauss marries magisterial music to the poignant specificity of the dramatic situation. The aristocratic Marschallin; her impulsive young lover, Octavian, sung by a woman; and the girlish love-struck Sophie each express very particular sentiments about the strange positions they find themselves in.
For a model of how to write a richly detailed opera about the specific travails of very real characters yet still create a work that taps music's capacity to evoke the timeless, I recommend "Adriana Mater" by the Finnish-born composer Kaija Saariaho, introduced in Paris in 2006. I saw the American premiere at the Santa Fe Opera this summer. With a libretto by the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, the opera is a gritty, modern exploration of how differences among people can provoke violence and fanaticism. The creators focus on Adriana, a strong-minded woman in an unnamed country at war, who is raped by a drunken neighbor turned soldier in a ragtag militia. But the ingenious music elevates and ennobles her story.
Every time "The Bonesetter's Daughter" similarly focuses on the story's specifics — as in the tender, wistful aria for Ruth, after she presents her mother, who is slipping into dementia, with a fine mink coat during a scene at a Chinese restaurant — Mr. Wallace's music becomes more direct, subtle and affecting. Even the ethereal scenes might have worked better had the music had more character. But a distinctive musical voice has never been Mr. Wallace's strong point. For this project he immersed himself in Chinese music on trips to China with Ms. Tan, to explore the rituals of village weddings and funerals. The use of Chinese singers and instrumentalists gives Mr. Wallace's evocative music freshness. The ceremonial scenes are the strongest in the opera.
Responding to that student in California, I emphasized than even when a new opera disappoints, a premiere is always an event. There is a growing, younger audience for new opera. You could not get a ticket for Tan Dun's "First Emperor" when the Metropolitan Opera introduced it two years ago. That the reviews were poor and the music so ponderous did not lessen the public's curiosity. And talk about an opera that gets bogged down in mystical effusions!
It's a healthy sign that "The Bonesetter's Daughter" was a box office success and drew encouraging reviews over all. I just wish that Mr. Wallace and Ms. Tan had listened less to their director and more to David Gockley, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, who had one persistent word of advice: "Simplify."
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: New Opera? Great Idea. Good Luck!. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe