A Quiet Place
Nov. 24th, 2010 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI went to see Leonard Bernstein's opera "A Quiet Place" a few weeks ago at New York City Opera with a college classmate. I'd taken him to the Met's "Der Rosenkavalier" last year, his first real introduction to opera, so expectations were perhaps set unfortunately high. I sometimes think "Der Rosenkavalier" is the most beautiful, brilliant, all-encompassing opera ever written, and while I think the Met's staging has serious flaws (wtf are you doing with Mahomet, Met? It's the 21st century!!!!!), it's still Renee Fleming and Susan Graham singing unbelievable music.
But then, I love Bernstein, so it didn't occur to me that someone might struggle to follow his music. This is a periodic blind spot of mine, and unfortunately my friend's familiarity with West Side Story led him going in to think this would be an accessible, clean and modern opera. In truth, it was a lot messier than we'd both expected.
It's a quasi-sequel and quasi-adaptation of Bernstein's "Trouble in Tahiti". I gather the production history was complicated and dramatic, but what was originally intended to be a sequel ultimately had significant parts of "Trouble in Tahiti" folded in as flashbacks in the new second act. This only added to the sense that "A Quiet Place" lacked a certain sort of musical wholeness.
Things were out of place all over the place. Only the third act had a traditional orchestral overture- the first act swapped it out for a beautiful orchestral postlude, Junior silently contemplating his mother's death while the music tells us what he's thinking. There were the expected incongruous jazz tunes one gets in a Leonard Bernstein opera, but there were moments in the recitative where the bass line also swung. There were times when Bernstein strung three vocal lines together so that they perfectly amplified and clarified each other. And there were times when the overlapping music became incomprehensible gibberish, people talking over each other until all meaning was lost. Messy, like I said. Intentionally so, but still, not the sort of messiness people always want to confront at the opera.
The first act was the easiest to come to terms with. Characters are at the funeral of a sixtyish woman. Her husband, friends, and children struggle to develop an adequate response to the drunk driving car accident that killed her. It's a funny funeral scene, and the audience's biggest response was to the chorus singing "What a fucked up family" The music is Modernist, very focused, with only a small number of themes serving as the building blocks. It reminded me of Stravinsky more than anything, but the storytelling was more like Britten. (And I'm not just saying that to piquenaraht's interest. Britten was an undeniable influence here, one of the key musical thinkers Bernstein is appealing to in trying to construct the 20th century opera tradition.)
The second act, the one adapted from Trouble in Tahiti, feels much more like Bernstein. "There's A Law" and "What A Movie" are elaborate and extraordinary but essentially structured as musical theater pieces. A wry harmonized pop tune about life in suburbia wraps around everything. The orchestrations are genius, flashing Bernstein's trademark feel for color and tone. It's a story about a marriage on the rocks, bleak and unrelenting yet filled with unsettlingly comic moments.
The third act is the hard one to follow. Much of the libretto is advertising slogans and trite witticisms, as one of the characters tells another that the reason she can't say "I love you" is that she's afraid it's become like a slogan, totally without meaning. The attempt to tell a story in meaningless gibberish is interesting but hard to grab onto. I will say, though, that I admire Bernstein's sense of endings tremendously. He begins hinting at a happy ending early in the third act, but then introduces an almost arbitrary conflict before resolving on an optimistic note. That arbitrary conflict makes the ending weigh so much heavier, because it makes the optimism a lot more tenuous. It's a very clever way of having your cake and eating it too.
Overall, I'm not sure what to say about it. It was one of those massive projects opera can be so good at producing, works so full of subtle nuance that they feel like content bombs that explode in your head afterward. I left the theater feeling puzzled, like there was too much information in my head. And usually I think that's a good thing. In an abstract sense, I do think that's a good thing. But here, I think it's better to just slot this opera into my favorite category of glorious failure: an intriguing effort that works on many levels but doesn't deliver the artistic achievement it promises.
But then, I love Bernstein, so it didn't occur to me that someone might struggle to follow his music. This is a periodic blind spot of mine, and unfortunately my friend's familiarity with West Side Story led him going in to think this would be an accessible, clean and modern opera. In truth, it was a lot messier than we'd both expected.
It's a quasi-sequel and quasi-adaptation of Bernstein's "Trouble in Tahiti". I gather the production history was complicated and dramatic, but what was originally intended to be a sequel ultimately had significant parts of "Trouble in Tahiti" folded in as flashbacks in the new second act. This only added to the sense that "A Quiet Place" lacked a certain sort of musical wholeness.
Things were out of place all over the place. Only the third act had a traditional orchestral overture- the first act swapped it out for a beautiful orchestral postlude, Junior silently contemplating his mother's death while the music tells us what he's thinking. There were the expected incongruous jazz tunes one gets in a Leonard Bernstein opera, but there were moments in the recitative where the bass line also swung. There were times when Bernstein strung three vocal lines together so that they perfectly amplified and clarified each other. And there were times when the overlapping music became incomprehensible gibberish, people talking over each other until all meaning was lost. Messy, like I said. Intentionally so, but still, not the sort of messiness people always want to confront at the opera.
The first act was the easiest to come to terms with. Characters are at the funeral of a sixtyish woman. Her husband, friends, and children struggle to develop an adequate response to the drunk driving car accident that killed her. It's a funny funeral scene, and the audience's biggest response was to the chorus singing "What a fucked up family" The music is Modernist, very focused, with only a small number of themes serving as the building blocks. It reminded me of Stravinsky more than anything, but the storytelling was more like Britten. (And I'm not just saying that to pique
naraht's interest. Britten was an undeniable influence here, one of the key musical thinkers Bernstein is appealing to in trying to construct the 20th century opera tradition.)The second act, the one adapted from Trouble in Tahiti, feels much more like Bernstein. "There's A Law" and "What A Movie" are elaborate and extraordinary but essentially structured as musical theater pieces. A wry harmonized pop tune about life in suburbia wraps around everything. The orchestrations are genius, flashing Bernstein's trademark feel for color and tone. It's a story about a marriage on the rocks, bleak and unrelenting yet filled with unsettlingly comic moments.
The third act is the hard one to follow. Much of the libretto is advertising slogans and trite witticisms, as one of the characters tells another that the reason she can't say "I love you" is that she's afraid it's become like a slogan, totally without meaning. The attempt to tell a story in meaningless gibberish is interesting but hard to grab onto. I will say, though, that I admire Bernstein's sense of endings tremendously. He begins hinting at a happy ending early in the third act, but then introduces an almost arbitrary conflict before resolving on an optimistic note. That arbitrary conflict makes the ending weigh so much heavier, because it makes the optimism a lot more tenuous. It's a very clever way of having your cake and eating it too.
Overall, I'm not sure what to say about it. It was one of those massive projects opera can be so good at producing, works so full of subtle nuance that they feel like content bombs that explode in your head afterward. I left the theater feeling puzzled, like there was too much information in my head. And usually I think that's a good thing. In an abstract sense, I do think that's a good thing. But here, I think it's better to just slot this opera into my favorite category of glorious failure: an intriguing effort that works on many levels but doesn't deliver the artistic achievement it promises.