Reviews

In this era of universal dramatic entertainment, at the drop of the hat, on your phone even, with superbly high technical values, the opera is so expensive and has such a limited audience that the art form has had to cast about for what to do, and what to do is usually the same thing we did last time. There is a tiny portion of the repertoire that can be done again and again, put butts in seats almost always, and still turn the red to black in the budget. Almost. Those fifty or so operas, the “chestnuts,” are approached with the expectation that, if well-executed, what will surprise us is the SET DESIGN.

Hence the impetus to find some new stuff to do.

So we have to cultivate young composers and librettists and occasionally produce, if even in a limited way, new work.

I am a playwright and have been tapped for the opera. I wrote two opera pastiche plays (operetta skeleton plays with the “greatest hits” arias performed by the singers) that were performed in the Young Artist Program here at Seattle Opera in the 1990s, and one youth opera with composer David Hanlon produced by Houston Grand Opera’s Opera to Go program in 2013 that was subsequently performed in many youth venues in Texas.

Most traditional opera follows the “boy meets girl” format for physiological reasons. The operatic voice is a glorious artificiality that most of us can listen to for only so long without howling.

There are distinct excellences in range for males and females, called the “fach,” and they can be reasonably enjoyed for a few numbers, but to listen to all one thing for two and a half hours doesn’t usually keep the audience. 

What subjects are suitable to sing about? An opera is, after all, a play, and needs to be about something with a story.

Given that the art form flourished and had its greatest peak in the 17th to late 19th centuries, up until the invention of the gramophone, then the radio, and up to today’s music-on-demand wherein people no longer had to assemble in a concert hall to have the music but could have it at home on a machine, we must consider the lifestyle available for all these songs.

What did women do in those eras? Mostly they were wives and mothers, occasionally nannies, servants and shop women of some sort, nuns, as well as the unmentionable, courtesans. 

In order to get the female voice on the stage at all -- and some of the most glorious opera repertoire is for females — it was necessary to construct stories that would accommodate reasonable portrayals of their lives.

Usually love stories!

So here we are, at the beginning of the fifth century of opera-making, and we have the possibility of writing operas that are not mostly love stories. 

And these young artists have all done exactly that! It is a brilliant approach to the art form, and such great inventiveness to concoct dramatic narratives that could well employ the heightened reality of this style of vocal performance.

Caccini’s Ghost, Music by Jeremy Berdin, Libretto by Grace Ward

Opera is a natural theme for meta-opera. Here the creative team explores the story of a woman composer and her aging father, a court composer for the Medici family, for whom, in the end, she apparently ghostwrote, as well as her daughter, who history records entered a convent. What that was about we cannot tell from the scant historical record, but she is brought in as a voice. It left me wanting more. 

This is a perfect subject for an opera, in that Caccini was one of the greatest composers of 17th century art song. Every young singer has to go through this repertoire, so we knew who the composer was. Here is one of my favorite recordings of  a song that was in the top 40s of published art song hot off the press, sung in drawing rooms all over Europe as soon as the ships from Italy could dock elsewhere.

The Meeting House, Music by Carolyn Quick, Libretto by Raya Tuffaha

Here a woman who witnessed the Salem Witch trials as a child, and saw her twelve-year-old best friend executed for being a witch, returns to the court room and interacts with her younger self. It was poignant.

Celestial Bodies, Music by Max Mary, Libretto by Ozzy Wagner

Something goes wrong on a space flight, and as the astronaut experiences his last moments, descending into madness before death, a person appears in the space capsule with him and helps him through these final moments. 

A Spring Like This, Music by Nehemiah Jones, Libretto by Gabriella Garcia

In the 1950s, a blight killed about 90% of American chestnut trees. Here a young tree awakens from the winter to find herself almost the sole survivor of her species and mourns the loss of everything. Here is a nice article about the trees:

https://mossyoakgamekeeper.com/wildlife-conservation/wildlife-habitat-management/the-american-chestnut-is-there-hope-this-giant-will-return/

It was a brilliant summer day at the Seattle Center, and it was hard to coax myself into letting go of such perfection for two hours in the gloom of a windowless building. But these artists made it worth while.