Here's an opera based on Conrad's novel, which I have taught in the past, so I'm pretty familiar with, but kind of long in the past, so not as much as I could be. But it's a great, albeit coal-black, work of literature.
Do you know the story? Do you? Well, there's a dude named Mr. Verloc who's working with a group of anarchists but who is actually an agent provocateur employed by the embassy of an unknown European country but probably Russia (the opera makes it explicit here that they're Germans, but that doesn't seem quite right to me, and anyway, the ambiguity is the point). The anarchists he meets with are the benign but ineffectual Michaelis, the amoral womanizer Ossipon who's a big devotee of the racist pseudoscience of phrenology, and the frighteningly nihilistic one known only as "The Professor" who always wears a suicide vest in case the authorities try to take him (the book features a forth anarchist, Yundt). The secretary of the embassy, Mr. Vladimir, wants him to blow up Greenwich Observatory so it can be pinned on the anarchists, the questionable logic being that everyone is so big on science that this'll REALLY inflict a psychic blow. Verloc makes the extremely bad decision to enlist his mentally disabled brother-in-law Stevie to set the bomb. You see, Stevie--in an obvious bit of irony--is the only one in the book with a real sense of social justice, so Verloc's able to manipulate him into thinking he's punishing the people responsible for the world's cruelties. But on the way, Stevie stumbled and drops the bomb, causing a massive explosion that blows him to pieces. The police eventually figure out that this has something or other to do with Verloc, and that's how his wife, Winnie, learns what happened. Stevie was the only person in the world she loved, so she stabs her husband to death.
Now, up to now this has been pretty faithful to the novel, but in the end, it diverges in a big way. So in the book, what happens is that Winnie freaks out over what she's done, and when Ossipon shows up he gets her to agree to run away with her. But after she boards the ship, he takes all her money and scarpers, and she drowns herself in the ocean. Big laughs! But here it's...very different: she kills her husband and Ossipon shows up and it looks like it's going to be what you'd expect, but: then Chief Inspector Heat, one of the cops on the case, appears and Ossipon is arrested on suspicion of the murder. The Professor also shows up and they have a little confrontation. Meanwhile, Winnie is busy going mad (hey, opera), and suddenly she's the only one on stage--was all the previous post-murder stuff supposed to be taking place in her mind? Unclear. At any rate, then there's a tableau of the people from the party staring at her and...the end.
Seriously, man, that ending is fuckin' WEIRD. I don't know what else to say about it. What would you think the music in a piece like this would be like? Would you picture some shrieking atonality? That would be one way to play it, but this is more reminiscent of Janáček: a little bit clangy, kind of unnerving, but mostly traditionally musical. I liked it. A lot of reviews I've read have criticized the libretto, but I think it was basically fine, ending notwithstanding. Tells the story well, even if there isn't much room for anything crazy like arias.
But I was REALLY impressed by the cast here; I guess I never gave that much thought to what these people would look like, but this captures them very well. My favorites: Nicolas Rigas, vacantly handsome as the lazy, self-pitying Verloc; Jonathan Blalock as the heartbreakingly innocent Stevie; Matthew Garrett as a dimwitted Ossipon; and Nathaniel Baer, really scary as The Professor (he normally goes by Nathan Baer; you won't find much of anything if you search for Nathaniel).
I don't know; whatever weaknesses the piece itself might have, cast and production definitely elevate it, and I would check it out, were I you.
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