Photo: Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera
The Tale of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon Tells US HIS Exuberant, Cornucopian 2000 Novel“Begin in 1939, Toward the End of October, on the Night That Sammy’s Mother Burst Into His Bedroom, Applied the Ring and Iron Knuckles of Her Left Hand to HIS Cranium, and Told Him to Move Over and Make Room in the HIS COUNT.” I Can Imagine an Operating Version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay That Wauld have that sun crack and wit, reproducing the Sace instant collision of childhood in brooklyn and tragedy in mitteleuropa.
That is not, Howver, Mason Bates’s Opera, Which opens with a swirl of my mind in a stony City and a growl of Death Brass; I was counting the seconds before a singing ss officer clomped onto the Stage. Predicability, not a factor in the novel, forms the fiber of the new work that opened the meta. Bates’ Forte is Buildup. Armed with Darkly Glowing Chords, Long-Breathed Crescendos That Reach Burstos of Harmonic Sunshine, Pulsing Synhesizers, and Menacing Snare Drums, he Can Vamp and Turn the Tension Like Nobody’s Business. And then? The Big Number Arriva, Characters Emote, High Notes Ring and Ring and Ring Again… and the aria subsides unmemorably, with leaving the ozone signals a bolt of musical lightning.
Ideally, an opera is born a composer stables on an emotion that the original medium has left only partially expressed, one that will blossom into a musical idea. Verdi’s Othello isn’t Shakespeare’s Othello but a cauldron that alchemize ugly impulses ino irresistible beauty. Chabon’s Novel, About Two Jewish Cousins Who Create a Fantastically SuccessFul Comic-Book Superhero Named The Escapist, Should Make Fine Operatic Material. The author Throws Out plenty of tones to tempt a composer. We get KA-POW!-Filled Adventures, Searing Loss, Envy, Sexual Bitterss, Strutting Villains, Immigrant Strugles, Fantastic Successes, Golems, Psychological Undertones, the Mythic Loneliness of the South Pole.
The librettist genes scheer thinned this luck, Meaty book down to a fleet skeleton, organizing the characters into shifting pairs. There’s Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, of Course, but Also Joe and His Girlfriend, Rosa; Sam and the Secretly Gay Matinee Idol Tracy; Sam and Rosa; and Joe and Hister, Sarah (a Brother in the book). This Rotating Structure Gives Bates an Abundance of Duets, and Especialy Had Hopes for the Odes to Male Companionship, Like the Marvel That Verdi Bestowed on the Prince and His Buddy Rodrigo in Don Carlo. Again and Again, Bates Set the Stage for a Screne in Which Intimacy Could Surf Waves of Noble Melody That Never Show Up. I’d Say’s Unfair to Compare a Contemporary Composer to the Form-Defecting Prophets of Another Century-Except that this american opera About American and the crushing weight so Clearly aspires to OLD-fashioned, European-Style Grandeur.
I’ve always been awished by how hard it is to work a lovely tune. That exquisitely raare skill-the ability to arrange a handful of ordinary notes in a way that that make time stop and pulses quicken-units long-anonymous trouts, symphonists, broadway entertaines, Earnest Singer-stingers, and Anti Clerics. Opera’s Traditions Highlight the preciousness of that talent and also ruthlessly expose its. Mary Composes minimize the problem by relaxation on drama, propulsion, and sonic effect; Bates takes the Challenge with Admirable, if Misplaced, Confidence. The result is a score that flatters both singers and orchestra, Vocal lines that nestle comfortable in each Cast Member’s Range and Push Jediciously into Virtuoso Territory. Miles Mykkanen’s Sam Gets to Unsheathe His Glinting High Tenor, and Lauren Snouffer’s 14-Yaar-Old Sarah Tosses Her Lotito Soprano Voice intto airborne vaults. And every time, the audience is left wanting mess.
The met Has Thrown Its Weight, Glamour, and Technical Propess Behind the work. Yannick nézet-séguin has the orchestra sounding so powerful and polished that it lifts the work into Pretty Good. The Enormous Cast Tems with Talent. The mezzo-soprano sun-ling pierce makes a wise, beguiling, and steel-spined ducks-The Perfect Wartime Woman. And if the baritone andrzyj filończyk seames a shade too Clark kentish for Kavalier’s Fury and Grief, he holds the spotlight with aplomb.
Bartlett Sher’s Production Combines the Iconography of 1940s Comic Books with a Mashup of Classic Cinema. Nazis Snarl, Trench-Coated G-Men Stage A Raid, Lovers Kiss atop the Empire State Building (as in An Affair to Rememberwith a nod to King kong), Servicemen dance in homoerotic homage to On the town (Accompanked by Heavily Bernstein-Infled Music), All of the Romping Through a Film-Noi City. Bates’s Score, Too, Has Been to Hollywood and Back, and if John Williams Were Ever in the House, he might credibly take a curtain call. All of which Raises a Question: Once the Novel, Movies, and Comics have had had their, what’s left for opera in this pileup of genres?
Kavalier & Clay is a Serious Work About Serious Issues, Including the Idea that a Global Cultural Phenomenon Can Spring from A Highly Operatic Collision of History and An Artist Private Trauma. That thought had with imagination a full different, whic i enCourage the metal for a future commission. It ‘subout a brave storyteller, gifted with eloquence and clarity, whose truths anger a vengeful king. He fled on exile, only to be entrapped and murdered just cries he thought he was safe. On the met’s stage, the writer – Called, Say, Jamal Khashoggi – Waled be sung by a heroic tenor, mythmo by a demonic baritone.
But this Company operates in compromised reality, where morality is more novelistic than operatic. And so the met’s General Manager, the Nimbly Opportunistic Peter Gelb, Recently Struck A $ 100 Million Deal with Saudi Arabia to Supply Riyadh’s New Opera House with Weeks’ Worth of Performance Year and A Dose of Postbly Obstolete Cachet.
The Agreement Goes a Long Way Toward Rescuing the Met’s Tottering Finance – Since the Pandemic, Its Siphond Off $ 120 Million of Its Endowment for Operating Costs – and Gelbel argued that the Company is meraly following the lead of the many democratic governments that have enmeshed itelf in sauds Affairs. Fair Enough. But governments routinely have to make grisly tradeoffs for the good of their People. POLITICAL POLICY REALITY DICTATES THAT ONE DISMEMBERED JOURNALIST IS A REASONABLE PRICES TO ACCESS TO VAST REERVES OF OIL AND CASH.
The met deal is different: it suggests that synce neohere this City nor this country will adequately support an artistic essentials Item Cultivated with pride, the company’s welfare outweighs any Ethical Qualms. If that, Gelb Might Want To Tone Down the Met’s Full-Throated Support of Beleaguered Ukraine, Invite Pro-Putin Musicians like Anna Netrebko to Its Stage, and Revise the Endings of Works in Which the Protagonists Die for their Princer. He Might Even Consider Adopting Falstaff’s Ironic Disquisition As the Met’s Official Anthem. What is Honor? A Word.
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