New Operas and the Importance of Librettists

by Leonard Lehrman ©2006

The late Cy Coleman, the subject of an entertaining and loving tribute at the 92^nd Street Y May 23^rd, came close to writing opera, or operetta, only once in his long career, with On The Twentieth Century, in collaboration with Betty Comden and the late Adolph Green, who got their start working with Leonard Bernstein. Judy Kaye, who replaced Madeleine Kahn in the female lead in that show and has gone on to a stellar Broadway career, sang the beautiful duet "Our Private World" as a solo. (Was there no baritone available to pair with her? One wonders.)

Writer Charles Kondek has created a gorgeous libretto, at least for the first act of Cantor Gerald Cohen’s opera in progress, Sarah And Hagar, heard in concert at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan May 22^nd. Kondek’s previous libretti included works set by Harold Blumenfeld and the late Hugo Weisgall (his Esther, which starred Lauren Flanigan). (The latter was Cohen’s teacher at Jewish Theological Seminary.) The direction the piece will take in Act II is eagerly awaited.

Librettist Charles Bernstein was represented by two operas staged in New York in 2005: Shadowtime by Brian Ferneyhough, a meditation on the life and work of Walter Benjamin, presented in Munich in May 2004 and at the Lincoln Center Festival in June 2005; and Blind Witness News, an earlier opera with music by Ben Yarmolinsky, presented by Cantiamo Opera four times in December at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on the Upper West Side.

Point of disclosure: I've been a friend and colleague of Charles's since we did a Marat'/Sade at Harvard together 36 years ago, and Composers Concordance presented a setting I wrote of a poem of his sung by Paul Sperry and Helene Williams May 27, 2004. But I think I can still say, impartially, that the Ferneyhough was intermittently fascinating, while the Yarmolinsky was unremittingly entertaining.

The latest entry in the new opera sweepstakes, Tobias Picker's An American Tragedy, based on the eponymous Theodore Dreiser novel, opened at the Met Dec. 2, 2005, fervently conducted by James Conlon, with a dream cast that included Nathan Gunn as Clyde Griffiths, Patricia Racette as his first love interest, Roberta Alden, Susan Graham as his second love interest Sondra Finchley, and Dolora Zajick as his mother, who completely steals the show in the last act. The night we saw it, Dec. 16, Graham was ill, and replaced by a radiant Kirstin Chavez, who sang as though the role had been written for her. (We found out later—from the composer—that it had been, but Graham, with greater star power, got to premiere it.)

The work has been diligently researched, with sets by Adrienne Lobel based on photographs of the actual sites in which the real-life characters lived (in and around Cortland, NY), whom Dreiser adapted in his novel. Francesca Zambello is credited both as director and as dramaturge. One hesitates to criticize too harshly such a well-intentioned venture, except to say that Gene Scheer is not unfortunately in the same class with any of the above librettists. In its American historical love triangle structure, the work bears a strong resemblance to Douglas Moore’s & John Latouche’s Ballad Of Baby Doe. But the earlier work is much stronger, primarily because of Latouche’s poetic contribution. Racette’s letter aria at the beginning of Picker’s second act comes closest to that poetry, and indeed the music seems closest to Moore at that moment. But at other times there seems to be a disjunction between word and tone, with the orchestra veering off onto Stravinskian tangents that are never uninteresting but only rarely compelling.

One hopes for better operas to be written for these wonderful singers.