The asps are out for John Adams’ Cleopatra opera
NewsJohn Adams must have been aware of the risk when he composed an all-American Anthony and Cleopatra for San Francisco Opera.
Samuel Barber had done the same for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera in September 1966. It bombed.
Judging by the first review, Adams faces a tough time.
The New York Times straplines it as ‘his least inspired’ opera.
Zachary Woolfe writes: ‘The result is the clearest, most dramatically straightforward opera of his career — and the dullest. “Antony and Cleopatra” has the least idiosyncrasy of his nine stage works so far, and the least inspiration.
With almost three hours of music, it slumps to a subdued finish. It could be described in a line from the play that was cut for the opera: “She shows a body rather than a life, a statue than a breather.”
Nicholas Kenyon in the Telegraph describes it as ‘pacy (if not quite racy)’.
John Rockwell in the Financial Times: ‘The first act has too much stuttering, punchy parlando. There is a nice love duet in the first act, and the final death scenes are moving. But one misses the musical evocativeness of the third act of Adams’s Nixon in China, “The Aria of the Falling Body” in The Death of Klinghoffer and John Donne’s “Batter My Heart” in Doctor Atomic. As Adams said in a recent interview, when a successful composer reaches a certain age (he is 75), one stops being compared with predecessors and starts being compared with oneself.’
But Joshua Kosman on the San Francisco Chronicle strongly disagrees:’The music is rich, evocative and full of intricately crafted detail… This was an offering in which theatrical grandeur blended with expressive intimacy in perfectly judged proportions.’
More to follow.
photo: SFOpera
“The inoffensive staging … sets the opera not in ancient times but in the 1930s … loose association of Caesar with later authoritarian leaders”
It is astounding that even at a world premiere of an opera, even when the composer is very much alive, that the stage director is already given free rein to liberally re-adapt the setting of the opera to another time period, to re-adapt the story to be an allegory of something else other than what the composer had written.
Such is the culture of opera production these days. What the composer wrote cannot possibly be as compelling as the stage director’s reinterpretation.
Adams could’ve written “Antony and Cleopatra”, or he could’ve written “Two Ahistorical Generic Authoritarian Leaders”, and it wouldn’t have mattered to the stage director, nor apparently to Adams either.
Have you any clue how opera production works? If you think Adams wasn’t directly collaborating with the stage director on such decisions, you are mistaken. And frankly if you can’t take a modern production of a literally brand new opera, them I’m not sure what anyone could do for you.
Samuel Barber had done the same for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera in September 1966. It bombed.
The music is quite good but it failed at the Met largely due to the overblown production.
> The New York Times straplines it as ‘his least inspired’ opera.
It might be a valid sentiment shared by some first-night audience members. (I wasn’t there.) But do we need a literal nobody with no training in music or theatre or journalism to tell us what he thinks of the premiere of an opera by one of the most accomplished American composers?
That’s Woolfe for ya!
There were many more positive reviews that are not quoted here. I saw more positive than negative, Mr Wolfe was an outlier
Moron directors who think their audiences can’t find relevancy in a work of art unless it somehow “updated” and “improved”. OR they’re ARROGANT hacks who want to make it their OWN.
I have played long chunks of “Nixon” and heard “Klinghoffer”. John Adams is extraordinarily skillful, creating remarkably long musical paragraphs that never flag, and his orchestrations are miraculous. But I just don’t get his vocal writing. The text is all too often set in a manner that has absolutely nothing to do with the vocal rhythms with which they would be naturally spoken. I find this mannered and terminally distracting.
This is exactly done on purpose, that out of phase vocal, to add a new sort of tension and meaning.
I watched the livestream yesterday. It really was about 45 minutes too long and despite their condensing of characters and plot, more can be and needs to be done. The production was on the highest level, as was the playing. But there was little in the way of set pieces: arias, duets, etc…the chorus was infrequently used, and other than occasional upticks in volume to I dictate dramatic events, I’m not sure what to make of it. Also, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of thematic relationships, leitmotivic or otherwise.
It’s Adams so he’s got a lot of experience and there’s probably a lot of good music in there. It was just a lot to take in.
Maybe it will be revised or maybe not. It was certainly ambitious in its way. The oddest part was that the house looked about half full.