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Where was man?

London
Covent Garden
12/07/2002 -  10, 16, 19, 21 December 2001
Nicholas Maw: Sophie's Choice
Dale Duesing (Narrator), Gordon Gietz (Stingo), Angelika Kirchschlager (Sophie), Rodney Gilfry (Nathan), Adrian Clarke (Librarian), Frances McCafferty (Yetta Zimmerman), Stafford Dean (Zbigniew Bieganski), Stephanie Friede (Wanda), Abigail Browne (Eva), Billy Clerkin (Jan), Gillian Knight (Old woman on train), Neil Gillespie (Young man on train), Jorma Silvastri (Rudolf Franz Höss), Alan Opie (Doctor), Darren Jeffrey (Bartender), Quentin Hayes (Larry Landau)

Royal Opera Chorus, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Simon Rattle (conductor), Trevor Nunn (director)

Nicholas Maw's Sophie's Choice is rightly being treated as a major event by the Royal Opera, which has hired the best possible team for a high-end new work of music theatre (Simon Rattle, Trevor Nunn) and cut no visible corners in the production. Maw, although he usually has a commission to work on, has until recently been regarded as an interesting outsider in British music. His best known works are Scenes and Arias, his 1962 breakthrough work for three female voices and orchestra, the massive symphonic Odyssey, completed in 1987 and championed by Rattle, and his romantic 1993 violin concerto, written for Joshua Bell. (His two previous operas were written more than thirty years ago, and were both comic.) But with Sophie's Choice, unquestionably a substantial work as well as "proper" opera, Maw seems now to be recognised as a grand old man, a mellow peer of Harrison Birtwistle.

Yet Sophie's Choice also risks being more of the same, another American classic turned into a grandly produced opera for people who don't like new music, and often don't much like opera. It has been accompanied by puffery comparable to the San Francisco Opera's for André Previn's A Streetcar Name Desire (another work by an established composer who was also an operatic unknown quantity). And it is an adaptation of a novel that covers much of the same thematic ground as The Great Gatsby, uncomfortably adapted by John Harbison for the Met. Streetcar was doomed by the play's already operatic character (the text already did what the music should have), but Gatsby and other adaptations of modern American fiction (like Argenta's The Aspern Papers) struggle with the fact that their sources are essentially about what it is to be a writer, and in particular, what an American writer should write about. This is explicitly the case with William Styron's Sophie's Choice, which among other things represents a powerful statement that American writers should address the Holocaust.

Maw's treatment of Sophie's story, though, finds far more that is conventionally "operatic" than these other works. By and large, he has produced an elegant and effective through-composed drama with seamlessly integrated voices and orchestral parts, played with complete confidence by the Royal Opera House orchestra. He is helped by that fact that the central character is a beautiful woman with whom everyone falls in love, and for whom love is more important than politics, life or death. In addition, Sophie's choice is among other things between Stingo, a sweet but ineffectual young man (a natural tenor role) and charismatic, passionate Nathan, who is totally deranged (baritone). There is also a full-strength villain in Höoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, a ringer for Scarpia in Maw's third act, in which Sophie tries to manipulate Höoss's desire for her to rescue her son. Tosca, with its bohemian characters embroiled in cataclysmic historical events that Verdi or Meyerbeer could have tackled, is perhaps an underlying model.

Sophie's Tosca scene, and the gut-wrenching ending where Stingo and the narrator, his older self, mourn Sophie and Nathan, and all lost humanity, in a plangent setting of a verse of Emily Dickinson, are the most successful segments of the opera, and also those where the emotion is most thoroughly detached from the text, which is almost all Styron's. This suggests that, although his own libretto is generally well made, Maw would have benefited from working with a librettist who had the detachment to throw out even more of the complex structure of flash-backs, from Brooklyn in 1947 to Poland before the war and to Auschwitz, which slowly reveal the specific choice that Sophie has to make, and which destroys her. Another librettist might also have chosen to rework discursive text as speech. Maw has tried to preserve the rich texture of nostalgia and mourning for lost youth from the novel, as well as the narrative frame, by means of the narrator (sung hoarsely but movingly by Dale Duesing, looking a lot like Styron) who fills out and responds to the story. The narrator more or less works as a kind of Bach evangelist, appropriate enough in a work that questions the possibility of redemption. But Maw seems to feel the need to narrate things that he ought to show. Puccini would have given Sophie a monologue lamenting Wanda's death, and removed the scene where Nathan's brother tells Stingo that Nathan is barking mad to make room for it. At well over four hours, the opera is too long whatever its other merits, and moves too slowly in its first two acts at least.

The character of Nathan is both absolutely central to the story as the embodiment of the appeal of passion and death for Sophie and almost intractable. Kevin Kline, in his first film, created his charming psycho persona in the role. Rodney Gilfry is handsome and sang beautifully as Nathan, but he lacked, alas, any hint of danger, just as he did as Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar. This was not only because Maw's music didn't really give it to him, except in a couple of febrile comic numbers (one about iron in the diet, the other a Yiddisher schtick that ends the second act), where he was boisterous rather than manic, but also because he didn't seem to have the nastiness in him. Gilfry was apparently cast because Maw insisted, understandably, on north Americans in the major American roles, but not all Americans are alike. Gordon Gietz is Canadian, but was rather more plausible as Stingo, a young man from rural Virginia, although again we were told he was in love with Sophie rather than even getting to see or hear it.

Casting Angelika Kirchschlager as Sophie was a good move on the part of the Royal Opera. Her slight (Austrian) accent when singing in English was about right for the German-speaking Polish Sophie, and, although naturally brown-haired when the plot requires a blond, she is very beautiful and looks both strong and vulnerable. Her performance was a theatrical tour-de-force, not only in her deft transitions in costume and mood from damaged present to cataclysmic past, but also in the stirring intensity of her singing. Kirchschlager has diva credentials, but she performed the role in depth and without ego, leaving no crumbs of stardom for any worshippers to latch on to.

The smaller roles were also expertly filled. Frances McCafferty was amusing and consummately theatrical in Yetta Zimmerman's brief comic scene where she tells Stingo that she wants her lodgers to have fun. Stephanie Friede was striking as Wanda, the Krakow resistance leader who tries and fails to engage Sophie in her work, adding force and substance to rather contorted language that at times forced her music into aimlessness. Jorma Silvastri was suitably Scarpia-like and nasty as Höoss, and Alan Opie was scary as the numb and drunken Nazi doctor who forces on Sophie the fatal choice that makes no real difference.

Sophie's Choice is more successful than any comparable recent English-language opera, except possibly Mark Anthony Turnage's The Silver Tassie, and it certainly deserves to be revived and to travel. You probably need to hear it several times to get a grasp on how much or how little is really in it, which for the moment means that you need to record it from BBC Radio 3 at 7.00 on 10 December or from BBC 4 on 21 December, since all four remaining performances are sold out.


H.E. Elsom

 

 

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