The death of opera
Rupert Christiansen
The premiere of The Death of Kling- hoffer in Brussels last week was a tense and undiverting occasion, a sort of operatic summit conference. No glamour, no chit- chat, rather the unspoken injunction to make an epochal yea or nay and pin one's colours to an aesthetic mast. Of course, as in all such high-level diplomacy, the issues remain ambiguous: whether we were wit- nessing the way forward for music drama or the demise of a chic little line in mod- ernism was not at all clear. I thought the opera was fundamentally misconceived, but it was certainly a serious experiment, and I hope that Glyndebourne sticks to its com- mitment to stage the piece during its `closed' year of 1993.
What has raised the temperature to this millennial pitch was the immense success of Nixon in China, the previous opera by Klinghoffer's chief begetters — composer John Adams, librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars, working in a pecu- liarly intense all-American collaboration (dominated, I suspect, by the clamorous and exigent _ voice of Sellars). Nixon in China focused on the President's visit to Peking in 1972 and its attendant ironies. It was genuinely original, both as probably the first opera ever written about actual liv- ing people and in its brilliant re-imagining of the Baroque conventions. It was also jolly good fun. They could, I suppose, have capitalised on its triumph by turning out Thatcher in Bonn, casting a Queen of the Night coloratura as the Leaderene, but instead a more problematic confrontation was chosen: that of Leon Klinghoffer, the crippled American Jewish tourist killed by PLO terrorists on board the hijacked liner the Achille Lauro. It is not an easy subject, and fear of provoking reprisals from an offended party led to doubts about the par- turition of the project, which has been co- produced by a consortium of six European and American houses: in the event, its polemical content proved an undetectable trace element.
Prima la musica. In Nixon in China, Adams had the sounds of Chu-Chin- Chinoiserie to play with; here he has no such resource to hand (his claim to have been influenced by the Palestinian compos- er Abed Azrie is one I cannot judge), So Klinghoffer's musical atmosphere is intense
and austere, without exotic harmonies or volatile flashes of orchestral colour. It is often beautiful, sometimes powerfully evocative. People still associate Adams with the superficial charms and irritations of the minimalist school, but here he shows how decisively he has graduated out: the subtle use of synthesisers, the masterly modulations of texture, the wide frame of musical reference — Bach in the opening chorus, Debussy in the seascape painting — in all these respects, he transcends the horizons of Glass and Reich. The vocal line is sadly much less eloquent than the orchestral, but for this shortcoming Adams has, in the following circumstances, a rea- sonable excuse.
Dopo le parole. Alice Goodman has inflated Adams's gravitas with a text largely constituted of hot, gassy air. At no time beyond early adolescence could there be much point to lines as thunderously banal as 'Thought/The sailor's consolation, is/ Surely the night's analysis/Of the impres- sions of the day', but least of all should they exist in an opera libretto, where words should enable music, not vie with it for attention. It wouldn't matter a damn if there was a strong plot-line to hold one's interest, but there isn't. There is in fact no story at all, only a series of meditations on an invisible action, delivered by characters whom it is impossible to make any sense of, because (a) you can't hear more than ten per cent of what they're on about; (b) their costumes are all virtually identical; and (c) the auditorium is dark, so you can't consult the text. Through the smokescreen, the message seems to be that only Very Poetical Souls for whom Thought is the Night's Analysis of the Impressions of the Day need bother. In Nixon in China, they got away with this stuff because audiences had some preconceptions of the figures involved, but here one has nothing except vague memories of a horrible incident.
I had done my homework and tried not to expect the wrong, the vulgarly Puccinian things; but I ended up without much idea of what was going on or what I was meant to think about it. I resent the arrogance which leaves me in such bafflement. I find it neither stimulating nor pleasurable, and it does not encourage me to return.
Peter Sellars must shoulder a lot of the blame. Until the dress rehearsal he had planned some clarifying surtitles, but in a last-minute volte-face (cf. the panic over his production of Zaubetflote at Glynde- bourne last year) they were abandoned. What remained was a striking complex of scaffolding designed by George Tsypin and a series of inert tableaux, animated by odd hieratic gestures and some aimless dancing. `Think ritual drama,' Sellars urged in the programme note, 'think Persian Ta'ziyeh and the Javanese Wayang Wong.' Well, really — and is the Wayang Wong as jejune and cliched, as pretentious and self- important as this is? I bet it ain't.
The performance itself, conducted by
Kent Nagano, was excellent, and the evi- dent commitment of everyone on stage stands as tribute to the devotion that Sellars inspires. Yet nothing served to exalt my spirits or lift the fog. If I felt charitable, I might wonder whether it would work bet- ter unstaged as an oratorio. It might be bet- ter still sung to `la'. But in Brussels it left a nasty lingering stench: I dreamt that The Death of Klinghoffer spelt the death of opera too.
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