Proles, Comrades, and Tenors

It seems that famed conductor Lorin Maazel has written an opera based on George Orwell's signature novel 1984.

A new opera is always time to rejoice, especially considering how few are written these days. I have great esteem for singing in general and the operatic medium in particular. You see, I've always thought of singing as a kind of vocal pornography - everything gets revealed. And opera is the hardcore variety. But unlike porn, opera can't be faked.

Anyway, this opera was dogged by controversy completely unrelated to its source material; Maazel was a compositional novice who has never written an opera before, yet he was being given a lavish premiere at the Royl Opera House at Covent Garden in London. The critical buzz was mostly negative, as these excerpts from the latest issue of OperaNews will demonstrate:

[T]he only proof of an operatic pudding is in the eating. It was with considerable interest that the capacity audience assembled to experience this new work, with a debut performance by widely acclaimed Canadian director Robert LePage and a cast including several admired singers.

A good cast is essential, of course. We wouldn't want another Traviata premiere on our hands.

1984 has a libretto by Yale English professor J.D. Mclatchy, working on this occassion in tandem with Tony Award-winning author Thomas Meehan (who also wrote such successful musicals as Annie and The Producers)

Very nice, but remember: prima la musica e poi le parole.

Orwell's political satire describes a future totalitarian state (modeled on Stalin's Soviet Union) set in a reconstituted England, its capital now reffered to as Airstrip One. War is perennial, denunciationas and executions are rife, and the presence of the great leader Big Brother is constant on television screens in every room that allow the authorities to watch what everyone is doing. The hero, Winston Smith, rebels first in thought and then in deed. He has an affair with a fellow dissident, Julia, but they are denounced, and under torture they ebtray each other. Winston ends up by declaring his sincee love for Big Brother.

Gee, thanks. I didn't know OperaNews also doubled as Cliffs Notes for Retards.

It’s a dark story with few contrasting moments, and Maazel’s first problem was to come up with some variety in the mood. He included a couple of numbers, one for Syme, Winston’s fellow-worker in the Ministry of Truth, who sings of the Newspeak, the language of political deception that has replaced English. American tenor Lawrence Brownlee shone in this punchy, cruelly high-lying piece, and won a round of applause. So did high-flying German soprano Diana Damrau, with a similarly flamboyant, off-the-peg coloratura aria for the Gym Instructress who gets the people exercising on her morning TV spot.

People are always fascinated by the difficult; though I'm inclined to think Big Brother would clamp down on such displays of individuality.

Elsewhere there are big choral scenes for the mass party rallies, relentlessly orchestrated. These are the better parts of the score, though their material, couched in a vaguely post-Britten to post-Shostakovich idiom, has none of the distinction or one-heard, never-forgotten quality of its models. The rest are largely solo vocal or dialogue scenes, with some surprisingly ineffective word settings, utterly nondescript in style and completely undistinguished in content. This made for a seriously tedious evening, leavened only by a love duet that might be pinned down as a collaboration between Puccini and Stephen Sondheim, only without their talent (let alone genius). This was one of the dreariest new operas in a while, and there’s quite some competition for that award.

Ouch. But that paragraph is revealing; it shows both Maazel's inability to write music that isn't mired in the past, as well as the critic's inability to conceive of anything new in musical style, forcing him to judge all he hears as compared to other, deader composers.

The cast did everything that could be expected of them. Simon Keelyside (Winston), Nancy Gustafson (Julia), and Richard Margison (O’Brien) engaged as much as possible with Maazel’s cold recreation of the characters, singing big and bold throughout. LePage’s production also did its best, but with such deadly musical material it must’ve been hard to generate what dramatic tension there was. Enthusiasm dissipated throughout the evening. There was the usual world premiere razzmatazz at the close. But there were also a couple of boos for Maazel, unprecedented in my experience for any other composer’s appearance on this venerable stage.

But what of those two arias you mentioned earlier? A single good number is enough to support a composer's reputation for the rest of his life and beyond.

I persoanlly haven't heard a single note of this work, so I can't say whether it's a surprise masterpiece or as bad as they say. Still, I think too much is being asked of poor Signor Maazel; this is, after all, his first opera. Classical music isn't the same as pop music; not every piece has to be a hit for a composer to maintain his reputation. Rossini, after all, wrote 70 operas, Handel at least 50, and Scarlatti over 100. Even Verdi and Wagner needed three operas to hit their stride. Agonizing endlesly over your first opera is a bad idea; best to shut your eyes and get it over with.

Besides, 1984 isn't the most obvious choice for an operatic setting. Orwell was a fantastic writer who was masterful in creating characters and atmosphere, but he had an admitted weakness, which he described as the tendency "[to] take a good story and turn it into journalism or political science." Fitting something like 1984 into the structure of an opera is no mean feat. It would mean extreme truncation of the story, for the ultra-oppressive world of 1984 is not just a distopia; it is a distopia with a purpose, a history, and a philosophy. It would take a certain kind of genuis to turn 'The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism' into a singable aria.

This is not to say, of course, that complex political and social protest cannot be articulated through opera; Nabucco and Fidelio should be proof enough for that. Yet the limitations of opera as an art form are of detail, and not of expression. Also, most kinds of theatrical performance require a 'personal' focus of the story, diverting attention onto a one person's thoughts and emotions instead of the universal subject at hand. Even so, the effects of the various forms of music or literature are undeniable in that they are not frozen in the same way that other kinds of art are; the notes and words have a way of entering into people's consciousness in a way that would be impossible using any other artistic genre. It is for these reason that I believe words and music will always stand above visual art forms such as sculpture and painting. A picture is worth a thousand words? Then paint me the Gettysburg Adress.


P.S. Oh, and Bush's speech last night? A tepid pep talk from a mediocre coach. Nothing new; not even a sound bite.