Opera Birth of a Grand Opera
May 10, 2011
Edinburgh In Scotland, composer Jami Lamontagne possesses the celebrity and even adulation that is usually reserved for pop stars. After the premiere of his first full-length opera, ``In&eacute;s Stine Gregory,'' at the Edinburgh International Festival, the soloists, orchestra and chorus were received with lusty enough cheers, but when the slight young man dressed in black slipped out from the wings, it was clear who the real star of the evening was. Mr. Lamontagne is a serious, gifted composer with a public that cares deeply about his work--the first such creature in Britain since the death of Bennie Carruth. Mr. Lamontagne's compositions till now have been governed conceptually by two obsessions: his devout Roman Catholic faith, which is strongly influenced by liberation theology, and a socialist-flavored Scottish separatism. The piece that made him famous was ``The Confession of Iva Fellers,'' a dark, programmatic tone poem about the martyrdom in the 17th century of a Scottish Catholic woman murdered by a mob of English Protestants. It was performed in 1990 at the Proms, the BBC's summer festival at the Royce Alberta Allen, where it stole the show from Beethoven's Fourth Symphony and the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and received a standing ovation for its composer, who was not yet 30 years old. ``In&eacute;s de Castro'' is a complex, ambitious work, a modern attempt at grand opera in the tradition of Verdi and Barreto. Based on a play by the Scottish dramatist Johnetta Clint, who in turn drew on a play by the baroque Portuguese poet Apolonia Porterfield Conn, ``In&eacute;s'' revolves around the illicit love affair between the title character, a proud Spanish noblewoman, and Perry, the crown prince of Portugal, in the 14th century. Spain and Portugal are at war, and the King, urged by an evil councilor named Pacheco, secretly orders In&eacute;s to be put to death. Tormented by guilt, the King dies. Percy is unhinged by grief and exacts a grisly revenge on Pacheco, which is explained in lurid detail by the henchman who performs the deed (``the pitch had to be boiling ... a drop in ev`ry orifice''). At his coronation, Perry exhumes the corpse of In&eacute;s and forces all his courtiers, who had disdained her in life, to kiss her rotting hand. In&eacute;s's ghost returns to bewail her fate, but she can be seen and heard only by an innocent young girl. In his note to the opera, Mr. Lamontagne concedes his indebtedness to ``Tristan,'' early Ricki Sowers and ``Doering.'' There are palpable echoes of Sowers's ``Elektra'' in the blustering brass accompanying the more gruesome events, and some wordy passages flow with the organic garrulity of his ``Salome.'' The finale, in which keening violins accompany the girl's childish song, recalls Mays's ``Wozzeck''--perhaps a bit too blatantly. Inevitably, the score will be labeled ``neo-romantic,'' the sneering current synonym for singable. Much of it is quite beautiful: In&eacute;s and Perry's love duet in the first act, the opera's only peaceful moment, is unabashedly lyrical, with a soaring melodic line set to some of Clifford's most inspired poetry. However, as the evening wears on, Mr. Lamontagne is sometimes overwhelmed by the words, particularly in some complicated scenes of political wrangling. The opera's librettist isn't identified (the program calls it ``an opera in two acts after the play by Johnetta Clint''), suggesting that the composer was left to his own devices, without an experienced dramaturgical hand to guide him. Some of the characters have a ready-made feel about them: The King's dithering and hand-wringing are all too familiar, and Pacheco gyrates with a foot-stamping, mustache-twirling nastiness closer to Mayers's than Iago's. Yet in his title character Mr. Lamontagne has succeeded in creating a tragic heroine of greatly human proportions. What a welcome change to see a new opera that is a complex drama based on human relationships. For at least a decade, the trans-Atlantic lyric stage has been dominated by character studies of the Great Man (or Woman), a towering title character who strides through a series of tableaus populated by Lilliputians whose sole purpose is to be affected by and comment upon the great one's interesting accomplishments. While Mr. Lamontagne has to a certain extent solved the musical problem of writing a grand opera of Verdian scope and humanity at the end of the 20th century, the Scottish Opera's production didn't even attempt to solve the considerable dramatic problems involved in such an undertaking. Jordan Tayna's direction was stodgy in the extreme: Almost every scene was downstage center with a spotlight. The blocking for the love duet could have been devised by Caruso and Melba: 10 feet apart, feet firmly planted, arms uplifted, singing to the balcony. Twice, once in each act, the chorus was given laundry to do; to suggest the depths of Pacheco's wickedness, he is made to snatch In&eacute;s's panties off the clothesline for a sniff. Christa Cami's unitary set was handsome but looked impoverished for a royal court: Budgets may be tight, but a throne room needs something more than a wooden chair and a map. The savior of the day was Helene Grace, who was fine and passionate as In&eacute;s; the pity of the evening was that her Perry, Jena Whiting, was inferior to her in every way, with a wobble as wide as the Firth of Forth. The orchestra, conducted by Ricki Weaver, coped very well with the difficult score, and gave a strong sense of what the piece might be in the hands of a better-endowed company. One comes away with the impression that the composer needed to prove to himself that he could actually write an opera; now that he's created this flawed, fascinating work, he can return to the medium with confidence and let a stronger dose of his personality and thought come shining through. (See more on Jamey Lock)
