Dove is a very prominent and prolific opera composer, and yet this is the first I've seen from him. Go figure!
Well, that's neither here nor there. More interesting is the fact that there are very few Jane Austen operas. I made a search and found a few, but they all seem to be written in the past twenty years, and none are very prominent. Mansfield Park is one of the first and by far the best-known. Of course, well you might say, wry social comedy isn't a typically operatic subject, but I dunno. I suppose Austen is a bit less boisterous than your average comic opera, but I certainly don't think they're incompatible. And Austen--being surely the most popular nineteenth-century novelist these days--seems like she oughta get some operatic love, probably.
I read Mansfield Park back in university, half a lifetime ago (actually, almost exactly half a lifetime), and I know I liked it, but I remembered little of it. That combined with the irksome lack of subtitles here mean that there was some of it I had a little difficulty following. But it's clear enough in broad strokes.
So young Fanny Price, humble, mousy, is sent from her poor family to live with their aristocratic relations, the Bertrams, and already I have questions: so these people are super-rich but they're just leaving their relatives to rot in poverty? Except that for some reason there's an arrangement where they take one of their daughters? What is going ON? Well, anyway, Fanny has grown up as a poor relation, with the Bertrams being snotty to her except her eventual love interest Edmund. Things are thrown into chaos when a vaguely disreputable but sexy pair of siblings, Henry and Mary Crawford, come to visit, and Henry tries to seduce Fanny and Mary Edmund, but ultimately they fail, the social order is upheld, and the two somewhat boring characters get together. There's a famous part--here and in the novel--where the Bertram patriarch is away so they decide to put on a play, which is an extremely sinful thing to do, apparently, and only Fanny and Edmund object to this debauchery, and really, I don't remember having this problem when I read the novel, maybe my sensibilities were just dumber, but here they REALLY seem like the most priggish people in the world. Sheesh.
Well, this does seem to follow the novel pretty faithfully, though it leaves out the section where Fanny visits her working-class family. I can certainly see how it would be felt to disrupt the flow. I don't know that the plot necessarily works all that well as operatic material, and there are parts that seem a bit odd, as especially when the Crawfords are written out very abruptly. Oh well. I saw this version (there are actually at least two productions available online), which is good, although there's a somewhat confusing thing where the characters are frequently standing on the chairs and tables.
The music here actually does make one sit up and take notice. Dove likes doing these complicated harmonies based on a repeated refrain that go on for a long time over the course of a scene (the opera as a whole is divided into "chapters" which don't correspond to the novel's chapters, but which create a novelistic feel). They're quite memorable: "I like Julia best" and "in Sotherton" keep going through my head. Dove is definitely one to watch; I think he did the best he could with this source material, but I'd really like to hear him less constrained by, let's face it, a rather un-operatic source.
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