Santa Fe Opera Trip, August 2008
Day One - 8/11/2008 - Anne Berre Reporting
Day Two - 8/12/2008 - Bob Holloway Reporting
Last night's Adriana Mater was not a good start for an opera novice like me. The 2-act, 7-scene piece failed to engage, and a 3-hour entertainment that doesn't get you involved is not very entertaining.
I was prepped well, I think. The pre-opera lecture told me what to look for in terms of the music and the play. I knew the chorus would be unlike a Greek chorus, which restates and actually moves the production forward. Here it was in effect a musical instrument—providing sounds rather than words. The music, by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, was atmospheric and effective. The libretto, by Lebanese poet and journalist Amin Maalouf, alternately lushly soliloquized and conversed intensely. The setting, by American Peter Sellars, was inventive. The four singers performed wonderfully, at least to my unsophisticated ear. Notable was a stand-in for the lead Adriana (Theodora Henslow).
Prepared as I was for the parts, I was not for the whole. The horrors of war and its transforming effect on us is a common theme in art. New perspectives are welcome, but they must be distinctive to engage us. Adriana, raped by a drunken Tsargo, who excuses himself as a defender of the people, tells Yonas, offspring of that union, that "…we are not avenged, we are saved…." The rage of war is in Yonas, but he does not slay Tsargo. He is not a killer. Adriana's sister Refka is the voice of those who are resigned to the evil of war; she warns Adriana of Tsargo's evil to no avail. In the final scene, the four players take the stage together but we are to understand that they do not interact, except at the very end, when Adriana and Yonas embrace and relieve their grim futility.
I think that the difficulty with Adriana Mater is that it is far too abstract. There is not sufficient context for us to understand the characters and their motivations. It is as though they have no personalities except as they relate to the stark line of the narrative. Too incautious mother is warned by hardened sister, raped by drunken soldier, bears a son. Son wants to avenge mother, which would propagate the evil through another generation, but does not, leaving hope for the future.
We are awash with the horrors of war. We rinse away the horrors so that we may function. If we are to attend thoughts of war, they must have a concreteness that gets our attention. If we do not know the characters of the play, it might as well be the evening news.