Opera Review: What Ever Happened to Happy Endings?

a prisoner of the state

Composed by David Lang

New York Philharmonic Orchestra

Conducted by Jaap von Sweeden

Starring Julie Mathevet, Eric Owens, Alan Oke, and Jerrett Ott

Geffen Theater, Lincoln Center, Manhattan

June 7, 2019

It’s rare to see a serious work of art express terminal joy these days. While popular culture still provides audiences with ample happy endings—fantasy-hero-terminator movies, Broadway musicals, women’s fiction, children’s literature—opera and straight plays rarely do. In opera this has an interesting evolution. In the classical period, Mozart consistently ended operas on an upbeat note, even when the opera portrays a sexually predatory sociopath like Don Giovanni—Mozart tacks on an upbeat morale sung at the end so we can all act better and remember that creeps get their just desserts. In contrast, the romantic composers favored unambiguous tragedy, with 1800s opera littered with dead brides, murdered spouses, tubercular death, and lovers suffocating in tombs.  These tragedies usually stemmed from primal psychological reasons—jealousy, revenge, hatred .The brutal wars and psychoanalysis of the twentieth century led to more ambiguous tragedies with an evil society at their root: the unstable Peter Grimes is banished to his death by intolerant townspeople, Wozzeck is tortured and kills himself because of the ills of society and his own instability, Lulu revels in her independence and prostitution but is killed by the sociopath Jack the Ripper nonetheless, Oppenheimer (Adams’ Doctor Atomic) succeeds in making the atom bomb but is tortured by his actions. This social tragedy has continued into our century, but endings are often ambiguous. Certainly operatic happy endings have fallen out of favor, and I would suggest that opera composers have not been trained or have figured out how to write them. There are certainly upbeat classical instrumental composers (e.g. Salonen’s LA Variations, much Adams and Reich), but give composers a charge to set words to music, and things get grim.

This brings us to New York composer David Lang’s a prisoner of the state, a retelling of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio. Lang (b. 1957), a professor at Yale, is hard to pin down stylistically. He has a gimmicky bent, writing crowd out for 1000 performers to sing in a massed gathering, and symphony for a broken orchestra, to be played on the broken instruments owned by the Philadelphia school district.  I enjoyed his chamber opera anatomy theater a couple years ago—it started off with a death procession through the audience in the lobby, leading to a hanging to begin the work; the opera was darkly intriguing and had some gloomy, pointed things to say about capital punishment. (Why, you may ask, the avoidance of capital letters in his titles? He says its to avoid the millennial sins of elitism and definitiveness that capital letters suggest). 

Beethoven's Fidelio is a problematic opera, with some magnificent music, a self-sacrificing wife, and gloomy imprisoned choruses of political prisoners, who finally emerge into the light (and freedom) in one of the great operatic scenes. But, perhaps to get the opera produced without censorship from a hypersensitive government, this poignancy is housed in a silly comic opera, ending with a lightweight chorus extolling wives who take care of their husbands (presumably including their masquerading as men and springing their husbands from dungeons, as happens in the plot). I liked Mr. Lang’s idea of updating Fidelio (he wrote both words and music, à la Wagner), dispensing with the comedy to focus on the themes of tragedy, political oppression, and selfless spousal devotion. In his update a brave wife still poses as a boy and tries to free her husband from brutal political imprisonment of unknown cause.  But I felt Mr. Lang compromised his work with an ambivalent ending that was neither happy nor tragic. After setting us up for some type of big resolution with gloomy music, evil jailers, a shooting, and The Prisoner (the excellent baritone Jarett Ott) mostly singing from a subterranean cage (we watched him on video for most of the performance—very millennial theater), the opera ends tepidly with the good and evil people singing an ensemble that asks “What will happen to me?” and states “We are born free, but everywhere we are in chains…we can be free”. So Lang creates yet another nebulous political metaphor-artwork, matching current trends; unfortunately he does not actually resolve his opera satisfyingly.

The NY Phil put a lot of work and expense into this production. The orchestra was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and many orchestra members wore menacing black stocking caps (the basses won that contest…7/8 wore the caps). The male prison chorus members wore dirty orange-yellow garb and performed from an elevated platform upstage. Audience seats were removed to allow a thrust stage to bring the actors closer to the audience. There were limited video projections behind the chorus, mostly not too helpful or evocative.

Mr. Lang’s music largely featured declamatory singing in quasi-recitative style, rarely verging into actual melodic arias or duets. I found this style tiresome after a while…it expressed the text clearly, but without much variety. Under this, the orchestra was mostly rhythmic without much lyricism, perhaps expressing the dark themes, but at times becoming monotonous. In addition, while Stravinsky could use rhythm as a dramatic character (think Rite of Spring), Lang’s rhythms are not so pointed or effective. There was one good emotional musical peak near the end, set off by offstage trumpet fanfares (like Fidelio) with real fortes and use of the whole orchestra with lots of percussion coloring. But otherwise the tone seemed consistently and oddly restrained, like a chamber opera using far fewer performers. This was especially true of the philosophical-political ending ensemble that left me neither uplifted nor crushed, as I think opera should try to do. Many modern artists seem to shy away from telling stories about compelling characters, instead making The World or All of Us into the lead characters. While this may match contemporary inclusive (narcissistic) temperament, it denies opera one of its primary strengths…to amplify human emotions. A similarly political work done earlier this year by the NY Phil in comparably big fashion, Julia Wolfe’s Fire in my Mouth, took more emotional risks, used the big orchestra more effectively, and was more human, and therefore more effective. So emotion can still be portrayed in opera-oratorio in 2019. Perhaps not by Mr. Lang, though.