Omar's Brainwashing (and the Death of Klinghoffer)

The Death of Klinghoffer

John Coolidge Adams

Met Opera

November 1, 2014

Photo credit: Met

“The Brainwashing of Omar” is what John Coolidge Adams’ controversial opera could have been called, at least in Tom Morris’ production of it. Omar, the youngest and most impressionable of the terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise liner in 1984, is the glue between the first and second act. The Klinghoffers aren’t even introduced until act two. Played by the dancer Jesse Kovarsky, Omar provides not only the continuity, but he also occupies the center of the dramatic tension. His initially reluctant journey toward terrorist training and violence is recounted over a series of intensely choreographed dance interludes that are interspersed throughout the opera, which amount to many of the most exhilarating passages in the piece. He is also the glue between the sequence of three scenes in which the opera reaches its climax that this production stages so elegantly. The build up to the murder takes us from Omar approaching poor Leon Klinghoffer in his wheelchair from behind. Then we cut to an ecstatic chorus in which, according to the synopsis, “Omar remembers the day he was inspired to die for his beliefs.” 

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

In the next scene, our perspective has suddenly shifted, a move unprecedented in most staged entertainment. We get a cinematic reverse shot. Klinghoffer is now facing us and so Omar’s approach is now toward the audience. As theater, it was an utterly unique sequence. And bang, just like that, the deed is done. Klinghoffer dies right before us.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

And so the eponymous victim of the story is not even necessarily the star of the show. The captain has the most vocal airtime and Tom Morris and his choreographer Arthur Pita privilege Omar’s trajectory through the event. But what is really striking about this opera is its ensemble cast structure. Like a Robert Altman film, before the Klinghoffers are even introduced, the international reality of the many passengers who remained on board the cruise ship during the hijacking is brought to the fore. There are several non-sequitur moments as the tensions heighten in Act I, like the Austrian woman who locked herself in her room during the whole fiasco and managed to survive on the fruit basket that happened to be in her room and the chocolates she bought as a souvenir at a previous port of call in Greece. We also get the story of a Swiss grandmother who is almost caught in the crossfire with her frightened grandson in the dining room when the terrorists first strike. Rather than focus on just one perspective, we are given a multiplicity of perspectives on the action.

Photo credit: Met

This kind of narrative experimentation is not necessarily unique in opera. One of the great things about classic operas is that you will often find multiple characters all singing their feelings, all at the same time, in multi-layered harmonies. Such experimentation is made possible in this piece by the fact that many passages of the opera are told in flashback, which to me simply does not work in opera. If a character steps up and simply declaims a long-winded story to the audience without acting it out in real time much of the emotional impact is lost. What the operatic stage demands is an immediacy of emotion and action. If you distance the music from the action, the emotions will inevitably suffer. Only by putting the singing into context are the emotions most effectively heightened.

 

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

So, the opera does several things that are unique to the art form. One is the fragmentary way in which the story is told. But fragmenting the story through these multiple perspectives only helps to thematize the fact that Leon Klinghoffer was killed not because he was Jewish, but because he was American. In the opera, as it seems to have been even in reality, the fact that the victim was Jewish only seems to come up tangentially, if at all. He was singled out with the Americans, Brits and Israelis because of the nationality on his passport. It was pure chance that he just also happened to be Jewish. That was beside the point for this rag-tag group of terrorists that is portrayed as little more than a gang of amateurs who kind of botch the whole thing, even though they apparently get off scot-free eventually in the end as supertitles told us after the opera as we filed out of the house at the end of the show.

Photo credit: Sarah Krulwich / New York Times

(What was with the terrorists disembarking and smiling and waving goodbye to their captives like they were saying goodbye to a group of old friends? Is this a commentary on how most of them got away with little or no punishment? As the supertitles at the end of the opera remind us?)

Photo credit: Met

The music is, nevertheless, extremely beautiful throughout, and conductor David Robertson did an excellent job in leading the Met Orchestra through a score that, for a number of reasons, is not performed very often. But still, you just can’t have people singing certain things. In the captain’s opening monologue, poor Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot has to sing awkwardly phrased abstractions like “comprehensive solitude.” What does that even mean and do people even talk like that, and if not why should they sing such multi-syllabled nonsense? I began to wonder if it wasn’t a slightly fumbled translation of something from the captain’s diary like “solitudine completa” or something to that effect, since he is after all Italian and the libretto was supposed to be based at least in part on the historical record.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

With the score as beautiful as it so often is, I began to wonder why librettist Alice Goodman and even the composer in his setting of the text both insisted on going out their way to give the singers such ugly and awkward lines to sing. Is it that this is a symptom of modernity? Do we have late Verdi and Wagner to thank for giving us the gift of the sung-through opera score? Now it would seem that nobody on stage can dare open their mouth and have a something poetic to say or a melody to sing, let alone a rhetorical flourish. Instead they struggle to put two words together that even an ordinary person would speak. This was the case with last year’s Two Boys. In Klinghoffer, however, even if one of the characters does rise to the occasion and is given the musical wings to break out into poetic flights of song, the poetry somehow gets bogged down. Why is it that Mamoud’s famous bird aria (here delivered with a slight tingle of beauty by bass-baritone Aubrey Allicock) devolves into a long list of bird species? “The eagle, the falcon, / The crow, and the raven, / The sparrow, the wren, / The dove, the pigeon, / The stork, and the heron, / Alike being clean / In the sight of Heaven.” Who talks like this? Where is the poetry in such taxonomic flights of fancy? And what about Mrs. Klinghoffer prattling on about modern medicine and joints and artificial limbs? It was just weird and felt like such tangential discussions were included out of bad taste.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

With all the polemic surrounding this event, one would expect the opera to delve a little deeper into the trenches. Instead much of the opera is really quite dull. Some of the captain’s loquacity is pretty useless, a bit like the distracting bits with the detective and her mother in Two Boys. I guess the ditzy British dancer serves her function as the offensive western philistine, who is pretty clueless and has none of the convictions that the terrorists or even Mr. and Mrs. Klinghoffer have, but that’s about it. She adds only minor irritation to the opera, which is a shame because at its heart are in fact human concerns of the highest order, no matter how quotidian and banal they might be expressed. There is certainly a subtle critique of the West in the mix. 

Photo credit: Tristram Kenton

And there is something to be said for the fact that the most intense, exciting and easily the most thrilling music is found in the choruses of the angry Palestinian exiles and in the solo by a Palestinian woman (mezzo-soprano Maya Lahyani) who seems to represent Omar’s alter ego in the climactic “Desert Chorus.” The opening and closing numbers of Act One are easily the most exhilarating moments in the whole piece. Otherwise, this is one of those modern operas with virtually no arias worth of such name that left me desperately craving for melody. One would expect that at least the character of Leon Klinghoffer would express some sort of tragic tension through voice but we were not so lucky: baritone Alan Opie mostly angrily declaimed his lines in an operatic voice with no real musicality to it, not even when he was about to die.

Photo credit: Dylan Martinez

Photo credit: Met

Nevertheless, the opera concludes on a somber and, for once, lyrical note and the last word is given to mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens as the mourning Mrs. Klinghoffer who is distraught but also full of regret because they didn’t pick her. She hints the fact that she herself is already afflicted with the fatal illness that would take her life just a short time later, and her husband, though wheelchair bound, nevertheless always managed against all odds to keep a great attitude about life. She was the one who should have died she says. Because this way he would not have died in vain. Because the world did not take note and his death did not make the world sit up and notice what was going on since it really elicited so little attention from the international community. She sings:

“If a hundred / People were murdered / And their blood / Flowed in the wake / Of this ship like / Oil, only then / Would the world intervene. / They should have killed me. / I wanted to die.”

Only if more people had been killed would anybody bother to notice, she sings at the end. Ultimately, this is the gift that the opera gives. It is a monument to one of the many innocent and virtually forgotten victims of a conflict that continues to rage on leaving countless unidentified and publicly unmemorialized victims like Leon Klighoffers in its wake. This is the story of one whose name will indelibly remain.

- Lui & Lei

 

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

Photo credit: Met

Photo credit: Met

Being There: LaDoMA

The Life and Death of Marina Abramović

Directed by Robert Wilson
Park Avenue Armory, December 14, 2013

Marina Abramovic and funeral mask. 
Photo credit: BAM

Biography is not a genre that typically ends up getting played out on the stage. Yet, over the last year several biographical pieces have found their way to New York theaters. In early 2013, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times: Volumes 1-4 brought to the Public Theater a 10-hour musical epic, based on the verbatim transcripts of a series of phone interviews with an ordinary Williamsburg resident, one Kristin Worrall, that recounts her journey through youth and young adulthood in minute detail, unabridged of all the likes, ums and ahs of colloquial speech. Over the summer 2013, biography on the stage came in the form of a dense and stimulating one-woman show, Sontag: Reborn, based on the early journals of Susan Sontag, that chronicles her creative, intellectual and sexual coming-of-age. New York City Opera staged the lives of two salacious female subjects: Margaret Campbell, the dirty Duchess of Argyll in Powder Her Face, late last winter; and the notorious centerfold in the eponymous Anna Nicole, this fall. Finally, by the end of the calendar year, the Park Avenue Armory brought us Robert Wilson’s magisterial The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (LaDoMA), which purports to give us a biographical sketch of its eponymous protagonist, but, nevertheless, winds up delivering that and so much more.

Billed variously as a free form or “quasi-opera” in the manner of Robert Wilson, under the spell of whose Einstein on the Beach I fell earlier this year as well, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (LaDoMA) was most thrilling for its musical eclecticism. Experiencing it live, I was reminded of the fact that there is no reason why opera has to maintain slavish attitudes towards its traditional roots. Like so many of his theatrical collaborations, Wilson and his collaborators draw on just some of the many musical vernaculars that are available to a contemporary opera composer. In the case of this avant-opera, the soundscape consists of an intermingling of pop music, the rock ballad, Balkan folk music, electronica, modern minimalism, simulated orchestral music, and an assortment of other Dadaist noise experiments, like the sound of a snare drum rolling through the woods down a steep hill. As ever, Wilson runs the gamut.

The Balkan folk singer Svetlana Spajić. 
Photo credit: Robert Wilson website

Collaborators on the project are listed as Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons); the experimental electronic duo, Matmos; the Balkan folk singer Svetlana Spajić and her group of traditional singers; and three other musicians performing live from the orchestra pit; with additional musical elaboration credited to Nico Muhly, among his myriad projects, of recent Two Boys fame.

Against such a variegated musical texture, Svetlana Spajić’s Balkan folkloristic singing really stood out. Her exotic Eastern European-tinged chants were phenomenal. The closing number of the first act – Scene A8, “The Green Apple” – featured a seemingly endless repetitive call-and-response arrangement of a traditional Balkan folk song that droned on beautifully with a small chorus of gypsy-looking women dotting the stage, standing virtually motionless, who sang with such feeling. I could have listened to them forever. They stood so still within Wilson’s choreography that it was hard to tell if the voices we were hearing were actually emanating from the bodies adorning the stark minimalist composition of Robert Wilson’s signature staging.

Robert Wilson's signature staging.
Photo credit: Joan Marcus

In classic Robert Wilson fashion, the lighting effects were immaculate from the moment you arrived. As the audience filed in to take their seats the stage was already impeccably illuminated and on full view. Three gorgeous long-legged dogs were seen wandering languidly between a trinity of bodies laid out on coffins as though at a wake, with their funereal-masked faces brightly lit. Patterns of three, as well as other Christological imagery, run through the show from beginning to end. Life, Death, Resurrection is the basic trajectory that it follows, as it proceeds in trinities and recurring trios of Marina Abramović figures.

After the show opened with Marina’s funeral times three, it became clear that this was not going to be your typical biographical stage show, but rather biography done Robert Wilson’s idiosyncratic way – the song sung by Antony in the first Kneeplay is, in fact, entitled Your Story, My Way. The life of the great performance artist, who also stars in the show, is broken up in his treatment. Rather than a monolithic chronicle of a “great woman,” he gives us the fragments of a life with its daily trials, doubts, insecurities, its familial struggles, phases of youthful rebellion and tireless search for selfhood amidst the domestic din of a life really lived like any other.

A chorus of ghoulish hospital patients. 
Photo credit: Lucie Jansch

“The Story of the Big Nose,” Scene A2, is just one such moment that elevates the particular to the universal. While Marina Abramović’s nose does play a particularly prominent role in her unique beauty, it is precisely this kind of formative memory that most of us have to carry around with us as part of our baggage. Part of growing up and finding ourselves includes an ongoing process of recognizing and accepting the idiosyncratic imperfections that make each of us unique. An intentional head injury is how Marina went about tricking her mother into finally seeking out a medical solution to her insecurities, though her plan was foiled. She winds up in an eerie bureaucratic hospital room, which is staged by Wilson as a hauntingly systematic game of leapfrog over lines of miniature hospital beds played by a gaggle of ghoulish in-patients, but her broken nose never procures the plastic surgery her heart so desired, much to her chagrin. The story is at once devastating, heartwarming and humorous.

The devilish MC.
Photo credit: Lucie Jansch

There were other moments of humor too, like the first full-fledged narrative reminiscence in Scene A1, “The Story of the Washing Machine.” Narrated by the demonic Willem Dafoe who played the overlord and MC for the entire evening, the scene was acted out with the exaggerated gestural visual language of mime, like many of the rest of the acting performances – that is, anytime the actors were not just standing still, or rolling down the stairs naked, backwards, and in slow motion, the dominant acting style was mime. In “The Story of the Washing Machine,” we are given a glimpse of a surreal domestic world from the point of view a child who is intrigued by the magical activity of the one big household appliance that spins and spins. She loves watching it spin until one day she gets stuck in it. Beyond the initial shock of the adults who were present for the accident, she only really seems to remember how her mother scolded her for her carelessness – a big theme in this portrait of an artist is the problematic and tension-driven relationship she had with her mother.

Close encounters with a washing machine. 
Photo credit: Robert Wilson website

Much of the show has an artifice heavy self-consciousness to it, a signature Bob Wilson stiffness to it that bespeaks the great master’s attention to detail, his perfectionism, his indulgence in the illusion of theatrical experience. There are moments where Mr. Wilson’s theater of endurance for his actors comes vividly into contact with the Abramović method – in one incarnation or another. At least that’s what I made of the highly meditative, though physically exhausting exercise Willem Dafoe put himself through in Scene B3, the disintegration loop, as he runs back and forth at an angle on the stage while counting out the rhythm of his actions, referring to himself in the third person. It was intense though uniquely imprecise in its choreography and so the fatigue of the human body shined through, the fallibility of the flesh. This seems to be an approximation of just some of what Abramović has put herself and her pupils through over the last several decades in order to achieve the incredible feats of endurance she has accomplished.

Willem Dafoe singing Willem's Song. 
Photo credit: Robert Wilson website

This brief repetitive running interlude then served as a transition into the series of scenes that set up for her death. What came next – in this my experiment in “being there,” namely, my attempt at conjuring in writing an experience I lived in the flesh – was the scene in which Marina was rolled out on her pedestal, lying recumbent on something like an elevated Roman triclinium. As she reached the center of the stage, a glorious low-lying layer of smoke seeped majestically out from either side of the proscenium. At first the layer of smoke looked like the sea flowing violently with all the force of Mother Ocean onto the stage to engulf our fearless freak of a narrator, Willem Dafoe. Then as the two sides of the fog cover collided and combined into one uniform but still dynamic undulating body of smoke, it looked like a view of the clouds from above, as though we had somehow ascended with Marina up above into some level of the heavens. The effect seemed so simple yet it was so profoundly perfect, so neat, so clean, so beautiful. It was a glorious moment of repose, despite the slightly grating off-key singing of our narrator. This is his big musical number, where he gets to sing Willem’s Song. Needless to say, he’s not a great singer, though it too does have a haunting off-kilter beauty to it. 

And then there’s the seeming non-sequitur interlude about the Wolf Rat.

The cold detachment of the surreal surface of Robert Wilson’s abstraction cracks dramatically when Antony comes out in the show’s emotional climax, and sings with such feeling: “My skin is a surface to push to extremes... But when will I turn and cut the world.” The sensation is a tingle that pierces the soles of your feet, runs through the body and up the spine leaving in its wake a trail of goose bumps on your arms and down your neck.

Sorting through the scattered fragments of a life. 
Photo credit: Robert Wilson website

The narrative thrust of the fragmentary piece, which builds in fits and starts according to the familiar Wilsonian alternation of “Scenes” and what he calls “Kneeplays,” slowly falls apart over the course of its nearly three-hour run time. Dates and facts are eventually presented out of order as Willem Dafoe’s surreal narrator figure begins to give up even trying to keep things in order by the end. Death and resurrection take over, universal biography is subsumed by the hagiographic impulse, and everything is swept away by the transcendent musical image of a volcano of snow. Antony’s angelic voice taking us into the snowy ether, as those three familiar Abramović figures hover over his head, like a trinity of transubstantiated Virgin Mary statuettes, and he sings: “I want white breath. I won’t ever rest. I’ve become a volcano of snow.”

Marina's funeral prologue (times three).
Photo credit: Park Ave. Armory

The assumption of a trinity of Marinas. 
Photo credit: Joan Marcus

It was a cold and blustery night when we were released from the show’s spell. Back out on streets of the city the gorgeous volcano of snow that had been erupting all afternoon to the tune of some six inches of accumulation had given way to a more unpleasant sleety rain that was threatening to transform prematurely all that snowy white crystal powder into big puddles of messy, wet slush. Fortunately we had the depth of vision and perfectionism of Robert Wilson’s genius to keep us warm even as we struggled to keep dry. The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, if nothing else, is a reminder of the variety of musical vernaculars available to the composer of contemporary opera: folkloristic singing, pop music, minimalist modernism. And that is a lesson that I cannot emphasize enough. Robert Wilson and his variegated team of collaborators told her story, his way.

– Lui

Two Boys, a Detective and her Mother

Muhly’s Two Boys 
The Met - November 9, 2013

Photo credit: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Lei: Nico Muhly’s new opera, Two Boys, is based on the real criminal case of a disturbed British 14-year old who choreographed his own (attempted) murder by inducing a 16-year old to stab him. The murder/suicide is staged through a scheme where the younger boy assumes more than two dozen different web chat room identities, including a flirty girl, an M5 spy and a rapist, who enact all sorts of sexual and psychological harassment on the older boy before finally commissioning him the stabbing. The opera begins in the aftermath of the action, when we meet up with the detective who has been assigned the case, and we uncover the story as she does. Much of the plot details, including its framing devices, are lifted directly out of a 2005 Vanity Fair investigative article. While this source material is modern and promisingly intriguing, its Muhly-Lucas adaptation fell short on virtually all levels that to me are the necessary components of a great opera, namely, enthralling music serving a cohesive plot, strong dramatic tensions, a meaningful libretto, outstanding singing and a clever and incisive production.



Photo credit: Ken Howard / The Metropolitan Opera

Lui: To me it fell into the trap of trying to opera-ify what can’t be opera-ified. Craig Lucas’ libretto had little grasp of what makes for an effective opera and instead presented too much exposition in the mouth of its singers, an issue that reminded me of symptoms that plague other modern operas like Steven Schwartz’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon (2009). Under no circumstances do we need to hear the female lead sing repeatedly (I counted at least three times) that she is “Detective Lieutenant Anne Strawson.” First of all, it sounds ridiculous. And second, even if you have to insert it once in good faith just to maintain that Law & Order television police drama trope for reasons of genre, then just do it once. We got it the first time. She is, after all, the only middle-aged female square on stage dressed vaguely like a private eye, who does detective-like things behind an archetypal film-noir, detective-like desk.
 

Photo credit: Ken Howard / The Metropolitan Opera

Characterization in the narrative economy of opera is generally conveyed by means of a whole series of signs and signals other than explicitly holding the hand of the audience as if they were incapable of reading those signs. Can you imagine if the evil chief of police in Puccini’s Tosca came out and repeatedly sang that he was chief of police Scarpia? It would be ludicrous. In fact, his name is hardly even pronounced once, let alone his title. Yet we still know exactly who he is and precisely what role he plays in the drama. Nevertheless, operas like Two Boys and Schwartz’s Séance relentlessly bombard the audience with an unnatural reiteration of the characters names in ridiculous ways. Over and over again in Séance do we hear Mr. Johnson’s name repeated – there is even an aria with a relentless Mr. Johnson refrain. The operatic intoning of names like Mr. Johnson and Detective Lieutenant Strawson sounds foreign not only to the lexical stylings but also to the narrative technique of opera. 

The most unfortunate thing about this tactless flaunting of the conventions of the form in these recent English-language productions is that people who, for example, don’t understand Italian come away from these shows thinking that this must be what the experience of understanding one of the classic operas in Italian must be like. And this couldn’t be further from the truth, especially since Schwartz and Muhly and his librettist lack the pure musical, dramatic and literary artistry that the iconic composers of the past possess. 

Photo credit: The Metropolitan Opera

Lei: The meaning and poetry of sung words cannot be overlooked. Libretti and the nuances of the language do matter. Rigoletto could address the Duke’s court saying “Cortigiani, siete dei disonesti” (“Courtiers, you are dishonest”) but it will never sound as good as “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata” (“Courtiers, vile cursed kind”). This is why I personally cannot have a complete operatic experience if I don’t understand the language of the work that’s being performed, without the muffling and streamlining filter of a subtitled translation. And that's precisely what irritates me when Craig Lucas' libretto has the poor singers dramatically declaim stuff like "Even senseless crimes make sense" or else "I am only sixteen / I wake up ang go to school / come home do my homework / have dinner / watch TV".  Ordinary language like this may be fine on TV but just sounds stupid when sung in an opera. 

Lui: All the buzz around Nico Muhly’s mélange-of-modern-music did not seem to promise the kind of pedantic narrative singing his opera actually delivered. I was expecting to be completely swept away by an avalanche of polyphonic sound approximating the multitude of voices active at any given moment on the Internet. At least this is what the bait-and-switch promotional material emphasized. Though these choral “voices of the Internet” moments were few and far between, this was precisely when I felt the opera had a pulse, that it was most alive. 



Photo credit: The Metropolitan Opera

Despite all the talk about his multiplicity of musical models and influences, I really wished he would have just gone back to study his Philip Glass playbook. He could have framed the whole thing through a simple series of impressionistic musical tableaux, like Satyagraha. The Glassian narrative musical texture Muhly achieves from time to time could be employed to convey a kind of meditative Internet droning background against which this otherwise compelling story could have played out. Rather than follow its Vanity Fair source material so doggedly, we could have experienced the story as it actually unfolded, with all of its mystery and intrigue revealed through impressions.

 

Photo credit: Ken Howard / The Metropolitan Opera

There’s no harm in wearing your influences on your sleeve and Philip Glass’ minimalism with its infinite layering of nuance and complexity is exactly what this story called for with its boy genius conjuring up layer after layer of phony characters and fake avatars to dupe a poor unexpecting soul into strange sexual encounters and eventually murder. It seems to me that Muhly could have built layer upon layer of musical deception and intrigue, until the whole orchestration climaxes with the narrative and its ambiguous but unequivocally tragic denouement. In short, anything to avoid the prattling on of the detective and her mother, who only serve to muddy the thrust of the real drama and dilute the soundscape.

Lei: For the most part there was no real singing but rather unnecessary dramatic declamations that sounded forced and stupid. English is not the most musical language, even more so when it’s used in this way. I counted too few exceptions to this anti-melodic singing pattern, starting with the “bait-and-switch” choral Internet scenes with their tense chaotic and daunting musicality. Additionally, mezzo-soprano Alice Coote did not have much to work with throughout the opera, since she mostly proclaimed in operatic voice lines like “Do you speak chat?” or “People in ether, where do I find them?” However, when her character has a breakthrough moment in the final scene, Muhly finally gives her a musical aria worthy of such name, and she sang it beautifully. Although the most impressive true singing was performed by treble Andrew Pulver performing the “real” boy (as opposed to his chat room fake identities) orchestrating his own murder.



Photo credit: The Metropolitan Opera

The purity, musicality and piercing strength of Pulver’s voice made me immediately think of Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato (and the only one who made it to live recording). I’ve always been puzzled by why castrati were the ultimate operatic phenomenon back in the 1700s, never really understanding what was so hot in a grown man singing with a little boy’s voice. After hearing Andrew Pulver and imagining his voice transposed in an adult male with extraordinary lungpower and mature artistic expressivity, I realized for the first time why castrati were the Netrebkos of their time. A singer like Farinelli was the rare phenomenon of a delicate voice capable of tackling gender-bending roles with incredible power and agility (castrati portrayed both sexes on stage), delivering experiences that were both unsettling and inexplicably viscerally beautiful.

Lui: I wonder if the beautifully ambiguous voice of the boy wasn’t part of the point. Even though the little boy is only a kid of something like twelve or thirteen, one theme of the multifaceted story seems to be the difficulties one faces, not so much as they accept, but rather as they attempt to impose their sexuality on someone else. Though the homosexual issues of the pre-teen sexual predator are never really made explicit, since he remains a ghostly figure and his characterization both musically and in terms of casting, remains so deceptively naive, not only to the audience, but also to his parents, we are nevertheless not sure what to make of him. He is a haunting specter, extremely effective.

Lei: The plot stressed the wrong issues. It could have been about the perverse anonymity of the Internet allowing multiple identities, pre-pubescent sexual confusion and disconnect between virtual and real world. All these themes, however, were just in the background and not really fleshed out. The driving force and connecting narrative thread was instead the detective, with her inability to understand web dynamics, her personal drama of having chosen a career over a child she gave up for adoption, her commiserating over unsupervised troubled adolescents and her live-in petulant old mother (who offers some unnecessary comic relief).  
 

Photo credit: The Metropolitan Opera

Lui: Though it is billed as a story about the pitfalls of human connection in the time of the early Internet, my impression is that they opted to tell a sociological parable about the importance of family values. Sure the murder plot line revolves around the unbridled fantasy land of the World Wide Web, but most of the characters in the story hardly even know what a computer is. What links all three or four of the main story lines is the disintegration of family values, the inevitable oversights of working class parents, the choice of career over parenthood, the trials and tribulations of caring for the family you do have, the alienation of the younger generation from their inattentive parents, and the hands-off parenting styles of well-meaning mothers who have no particular knack for raising children. More than the Internet it’s a story about the current state of family life in the modern working class suburbs. 

 

Photo credit: Ken Howard / The Metropolitan Opera

Lei: Staging was boring and looked cheap. It was all-grey floors and movable walls with scarce tiny little furniture. If the idea was to have a plain and understated “real” world, it should have been contrasted with a bustling and hyper-lively virtual parallel world, which this production was not successful in bringing to life. While some of the Internet scenes were visually interesting with projections conveying the chaos of information overload and the chorus members perched on different levels on either side of the stage, it was just not enough to counter the blandness of the sets. 

Photo credit: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Lui: Why was there no attempt to deconstruct and play with all the chat room shorthand that is peppered throughout the libretto? Muhly’s style seems to be perfectly suited to defamiliarizing Internet abbreviations by turning them into the code language they appear to be: reading out the letters or riffing on the pure sounds of them. Instead what he gave us, both in terms of the text and his treatment of it, was an overly sincere attempt to sound “young” and “fresh” to millennials and an all too earnest use of slang, directly declaiming the Internet lingo for exactly what it means. The result is that both the libretto and the music’s embodiment of it felt flat and came across too often as just silly. Despite my frustration with the surface of the show, I could feel the seriousness of the underlying story, as well as the overarching sense that a thriller packing a fourth quarter payoff was boiling just beneath that surface. So I was absolutely willing to give it credit and I most certainly did not write it off beforehand. In fact, I wanted it to redeem my faith in contemporary opera. I was ready to be wowed by modernity at the Met. I wanted to see the stodgy institution that I love so much taken by storm. Nothing would make me happier!

Lei: All in all underwhelming, boring and at times also plain irritating, I had to make an effort to sit through to the end. While Muhly proved himself an impressive composer, an opera needs much more than just great music to be truly complete and worth seeing.  

Photo credit: Ángel Franco/The New York Times