Matthew Aucoin’s Crossing
BAM Next Wave Festival
Howard Gilman Opera House
October 5, 2017
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The lightning rod of a community of fallen soldiers as consummate optimist
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene |
Walt Whitman somehow always manages to remain pertinent. He comes
up even when you least expect it. Not only did he make a prominent cameo in Ben
Lerner’s last novel 10:04, for example, but a lost novel by the poet the
himself also recently emerged from the archives and has had us abuzz again
about this most American of wordsmiths. We just can’t stop talking about him.
The prodigiously talented young composer Matthew Aucoin’s magisterial opera, Crossing,
lends us yet another opportunity to reassess the omnipresence of this seemingly
measureless American figure.
Aucoin draws on the omnivorous diaries Whitman kept during his
volunteer years as a nurse in the Civil War and published under the title Memoranda
During the War. In a stroke of genius, a figure found therein named John
Wormley gets a fictionalized treatment; or rather he becomes a pivotal plot
device in the opera. He is the one who gives the story its main thrust and its
primary sense of drama.
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The poet finds himself in a cold, dark wood, lost to himself
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene |
The opera begins with an elderly, grey-bearded Whitman paraphrasing Dante in the throes of a midlife crisis: “In the middle of the journey of my
life, / I found myself a self I didn’t know.” When the show opens most of the
stage is walled off. Our hero is hedged in, blocked from life. He is surrounded
by projected images of an unsettling dark forest scene consisting of the
chiaroscuro shadows of gnarled leafless trees, animated by a jittery moving
camera, which sets the tone for the poet’s Dantesque moment of existential
doubt.
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The man who would never be the same again
Photo credit: Steven Pisano |
Much of what Aucoin has set out to dramatize is the effect that
the war had on Whitman’s creative spirit. The standard narrative of his career
casts the Civil War as a turning point. It’s not that he stopped writing in the
aftermath, but he never wrote again with quite the same verve. It’s almost like
a part of him died along with the country’s innocence. Which is maybe what
makes the story told here, not only timeless, but utterly timely for the world
we inhabit today, perhaps even more so today than in the pre-Trump era when it
was written.
We open on an iconically bearded, avuncular Whitman who expresses
his uncertainty about who he really is: “Known to the world as Everyman, / I
did not know who I was.” He is no longer content embodying the persona he
painstakingly constructed in his antebellum poetry, that of the Everyman who
“contains multitudes.” The very foundation of his claim to fame, the core of
his poetic and largely public identity, is in question.
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What is it, then, between us?
Photo credit: Steven Pisano |
“What is it, then, between us?” he ponders. A line from Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry is the first big quote to make a cameo from Leaves of
Grass. It provides a sort of thesis statement for the night. What is the
nature of the boundaries and borders that separate us. What does it take to
breach them? What is it about our shared humanity that unites us despite the
illusion of autonomy that limits and distances us from one another, as
individuals and as a nation?
At this point the partition that closed off much of the stage is
removed, revealing the Civil War hospital where Whitman served as a nurse
during the waning years of the conflict. He came to check on his wounded
brother, which is what brought him there, he recounts, but he continues to stay
and doesn’t know why. He must be looking for something, he muses.
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The poet as designated caregiver
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene |
His role at the hospital is an almost maternal. Whitman is not a
trained medic but he is the sole designated caregiver. The opera is basically a
portrait of this larger than life man. His most oversized characteristic is
consummate optimism. He is always there to cheer the men up, especially when a
particularly gloomy pessimistic adversary stumbles into the ward and is, quite
literally, on a mission to lay everybody’s spirits low.
Enter John Wormley, a minor figure who makes a cameo appearance in
Whitman’s wartime diaries and around which Aucoin has constructed a
fictionalized drama and love story. As it turns out Wormley’s mission is even
more insidious than merely raining on their already glum parade. He is a mole,
a confederate soldier in disguise who wants to leak information about the camp
hospital back to his rebel comrades.
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Enter Wormley, the negative to Whitman's purely positive valence
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene |
The tug of war between Whitman’s relentlessly positive outlook and
Wormley’s dismally negative one continues over the next several tableau that
constitute the body of the opera, until a relationship of some sort comes
suddenly, and rather shockingly, to fruition, despite the sketchy outlines we
are given. It is eventually also “consummated,” I suppose, in a scene that
concludes with the two men fully clothed and spooning on one of the beds in the
crowded group barracks.
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From bedside to bedside we go
Photo credit: Richard Termine |
The moment is the opera’s imagined climax of a scene that takes
its cues from the striking poem entitled The Sleepers: “I go from
bedside to bedside, I sleep close with the other sleepers each in turn, / I
dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, / And I become the
other dreamers.” Whitman’s uncanny aptitude for containing multitudes turns
voyeuristic in a sexually suggestive kind of way. “I roll myself upon you as
upon a bed, I resign myself to the dusk,” Whitman says at one point in the poem
that Aucoin brings to life on the stage, bestowing upon his confused characters
the fulfillment they crave, whether they acknowledge the craving or not.
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Love in the time of war knows no boundaries
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene |
Because the heightening of their intimacy only gets superficial
treatment at best, we don’t quite believe Whitman, in an otherwise tender and
moving moment, when he professes his love for the dying traitor, whom he
cradles in his arms later in the opera: “Oh my son, / I never loved another /
Till you.” The quintessential Whitmanesque sentiment of exalting the universal
in the particular and vice versa is nevertheless clear. It is the sentiment we
find upon the introduction of Wormley. Uncle Walt’s embrace of every man in his
inclusive utterance: “I am with you,” sums up his beautiful gesture of
friendship and acceptance. Dramatically, however, I was not particularly
convinced that the emotional finale of the opera in this penultimate scene hits
its mark, despite the fact that musically it was incredibly effective.
More intellectually than emotionally stirring is Wormley’s sudden
Whitmanesque epiphany about the earth’s welcome and release of his marching
feet when he felt that he was every soldier in the lead up to his passing in
the arms of his lover. Having won out in the end, Whitman’s positive outlook
seems to have sent the troubled young pessimist into a conniption fit of
appreciation for life in all its minuscule nuances. It is a stunning moment in
the score.
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Wormley sees the Whitmanesque light in a beatific vision of his own
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene |
On every other count, however, it would seem that Wormley gets the
least exciting writing both musically and otherwise to sing. In a subtle ploy
used by the composer, once Wormley reveals his true identity (after posing as a
Yankee soldier), his voice intentionally alters to reveal distinctively
southern cadences. It is a minor detail in the grand scheme of the texture of
the opera, which is why it hardly makes up for the fact that so much of the
rest of Wormley’s role is otherwise relatively bland.
Tenor Alexander Lewis played John Wormley as a bedraggled
soldier, a wounded vagrant with nothing to live for. Baritone Rod Gilfry
leant his embodiment of Walt Whitman a wise world-weariness.
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Freddie Stowers goes into a mystic trance
Photo credit: Steven Pisano |
The greatest highlight musically and the most thrilling and inventive
writing of the night went to Freddie Stowers, the fugitive slave who had fled
to the north on foot in search of his freedom only to march back to the south
as a soldier to fight for the freedom of others. The ineffably velvet-toned
bass-baritone Davóne Tines sang the role, which was composed explicitly
for him. His instrument is perfectly suited to the hybrid sounds that Aucoin
wrote for Stowers.
In his one big aria, just before the Sleepers segment,
Tines breaks into soaring story mode. He recounts a delirious vision he had
when he escaped to the north and claims to have glimpsed in his fever dream the
“future of humankind on the earth.” His otherworldly ecstasy has him singing in
soulful southern spiritual cadences.
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The herald arrives with a message of hope
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene |
This is the kind of thing that I personally look for in a
contemporary opera: the crossing of musical boundaries beyond traditional
operatic vocal expression. Depending on the story being told, composers today
have a whole universe of other traditions to draw upon in order to cross pollinate
and fruitfully contaminate their scores. Stowers’ old-timey spiritual was one
of these moments to savor.
In a world of male nurses and female messengers, soprano Jennifer
Zetlan sang the golden bearer of good news – the token female role – with sunshine
in her hair. At a particularly tense moment in the plot, Zetlan bounded into
the hospital in a pastoral cotton dress with bright locks of buoyant brunette curls tousled on her head, fresh as a daisy, relatively speaking, as though she
wandered out of an episode of Little House on the Prairie.
Not only does Zetlan provide our only glimpse of a world outside
the misery of the war and the wasteland it leaves in its wake, but she is the
only woman in an otherwise purely male, homosocial world.
Her arrival ignites Wormley’s fear. Would she reveal the true identity of the
treacherous guest? No! She comes in triumph, with news that the war is over.
The rebels have been defeated and the union of country remains strong.
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The men are spent come war's end
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene |
If that sounds like cause to celebrate you’d be wrong. All of the
poor wounded men feel used, spent like money to win the war. It is a dismal
climax, no matter that we’re on the winning side. It seems to serve as a
commentary that there are no winners in war, which would echo great classic war
epics like Homer’s Iliad. Instead of exulting in the victory of the
Union forces, the hospital is torn down and everybody saunters off with their
wounded bodies and their tattered pride.
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The world according to Whitman
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene |
Whitman’s prose in the Memoranda is an exciting
kaleidoscope through which the writer filters everything he experiences,
witnesses, thinks, feels, observes, contemplates. It reads like a diary though
– a fragmentary day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of a life lived in the moment.
I wasn’t sure how the libretto would manage to turn it into something with a
narrative.
Instead, the inspiration driving the opera forward is admirable
and feels more pertinent to the American experience than ever before. The
conceptual crossings that it addresses are many: between two individuals;
across enemy lines; from wartime to its aftermath; between life and death.
But what kind of world does Aucoin create musically? The
repetitive minimalism of Philip Glass most certainly makes a cameo appearance
or two over the course of the opera and it was most effectively used to
capture Whitman’s signature cosmic curiosity. For a writer who loved Donizetti,
Rossini and Verdi, is this the way we are to understand Whitman would have
heard the music of the world? I’m not sure that’s necessarily the case. But it
was nevertheless a uniquely well-rounded and profoundly human experiment in modern opera.
– Lui
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Memoranda during the war
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene |
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The post-war period is an even greater wasteland than before
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene |
