Who is Henry Mollicone? Well...he's a guy who's written five operas, obviously. More than five, actually; these are just the ones I could find video of. I don't remember how I even heard about him, but I just decided for no reason to see as much of his operatic oeuvre as was available. It wasn't THAT much of a commitment; four out of the five are one-act pieces. Anyway, let's go through them in chronological order.
The Face on the Barroom Floor (1978)
This is based on a poem about a guy who, upon losing his amour, turned to drink; he visits this bar and offers to draw a picture of his lost love on the floor but dies before finishing. That's it. It's a weird poem with no apparent point and serious scansion issues. The opera is an extremely free adaptation, as it would almost have to be, even at only twenty-five minutes. Here we have two pals, Larry and Isabel, who in the present-day visit a bar, and ask the bartender about the face on the floor. So he tells them: in the past, there was a bartender, Matt, (played by the present bartender) who was in love with a barmaid, Madeleine (played by Isabel). A traveler (played by Larry) arrives and tells about his lost love, only when he goes to draw her face, it turns out it's Madeleine, so--naturally--the men fight and Madeleine gets shot. A WHOLE BUNCH OF TIMES in this production--it's a bit silly. Then we're back in the present and it turns out that the bartender was previously in love with Isabel and once again she is fatally shot. Jeez, people.
It's all right, actually, in spite of this production being less than ideal. It's a college production, so you can't complain too much, but boy: all the characters are just dressed in black tights and baggy t-shirts. Also, Matt/Larry is a trouser role, and giving the singer no signifiers of masculinity lead to needless confusion. IN SPITE OF WHICH, I want to chastise the Brown University student body for turning out to support their opera company in such pathetic numbers--granted, I wouldn't have either at that age unless I'd had a crush on one of the singers, but THAT IS NEITHER HERE NOR THERE. Anyway, the piece itself, as far as I can judge, is pretty solid, with some cool sort of movie-Western-ish music. It was commissioned by Central City Opera in Colorado (who also commissioned The Ballad of Baby Doe--it all comes together!), and per Mollicone's website, they've performed it every year since its debut. You'd think there'd be a better video out there. Oh well! Not a terrible place to start!
Starbird (1980)
This is a children's opera. Or so I am told. Children like super-weird stuff, is apparently the premise. There are a dog, a cat, and a donkey who, due to mechanization, have lost their jobs (the donkey was previously the Democratic Party's mascot--okay). So when a spaceship lands, they decide to go to space, in spite of this...starbird who tells them its a bad idea. But some robots emerge from the ship and try to MAKE them go. Oh no! But the animals use their qualities to escape. The starbird wants to live on Earth, but she is built such that she can't survive here and has to go back to space. Who is she? What relationship does she have with the aliens? What is HAPPENING here?
Seriously, I found this pretty inscrutable. I don't know what to say about the music; I saw it a week ago, and it seems to have escaped from my mind. Kids might like it, but I found it a bit dull.
Emperor Norton (1981)
You know Emperor Norton, that guy in nineteenth-century San Francisco who declared himself Emperor of the United States and issued his own currency and everyone was charmed by him. You have to admit, it's a good story. This opera starts in the present, where actors are auditioning for a play about Norton. But then some dude--who may or may not be Norton himself; it's kind of intentionally ambiguous--who complains that the play isn't accurate and that it treats Norton as just an eccentric rather than the noble figure he was (sort of like the arguments about Don Quixote). Then we see a few--very few--episodes from Norton's life: his death and then, moving backwards, the episode that allegedly made him go crazy, where he cornered the market on rice only to have it fall out from under him.
The thing is, I find the libretto here ineffably dumb. We're clearly meant to come down on the "what a noble guy this was!" side, but to me either extreme is reductive and silly, and in any case, we see so little of Norton's life that it would be impossible to judge just based on the evidence of our eyes. I dunno...also, in spite of all these reviews talking about how dang tuneful it is, I didn't find that to be the case at all. It may be that it requires time to grow on one, or it may be that the instrumentation here wasn't that great, but either way, I found this forgettable at best.
Hotel Eden (1989)
Hey, can we get some positivity going here? Okay, here is the best of the five by an extremely wide margin--and also the only multi-act piece, so that works out. We have three vignettes, each of which takes place at the titular hotel at twenty-year intervals (1930, 50, and 70), and each riffing on a story from Genesis, featuring the hotel staff as angels. In the first act, it's Adam and Eve, all lovey-dovey until Lilith shows up and causes chaos. Eve gets mad and is going to leave, but the staff intervene, leading to an ambiguous but hopeful ending. Next, it's a middle-aged couple, Noah and his wife, Mrs. Noah. They're at the hotel for a vacation, but there is friction: Noah is a retired sailor and alcoholic who misses the sea. His wife is sick of being called "Mrs. Noah" all the time, and cuts loose with the staff. A disaster is averted, and they seem to have fixed things up. Finally, it's Abraham and Sara, an older couple, sad that they never had a child together--there's just Abraham's son with Hagar, Ishmael. But then some stuff happens, and Isaac is born and everyone's happy. Apparently.
The big problem with this is that I found the final act substantially less interesting than the other two, while also being as long as the both of them put together. Look, I know I'm not shocking anyone by suggesting that Bible stories are often kind of fucked up, but the whole Abraham/Sara/Hagar triangle is kind of fucked up, only the libretto is unwilling to really deal with that, so we just have this weird...thing. First two acts are great, though, especially the second. There's a lot of musical variety that I really appreciated; along with traditional romantic music, some kind of music-hall material and even disco--for the first time, Mollicone really comes alive for me, and I would gladly watch this again.
Lady Bird: First Lady of the Land (2016)
Only now is the foolishness of having decided to write about these in chronological order impressed upon me, because now I can't end on a positive note. And it's all the libretto's fault, because actually, the music here is really good, with some great gospel and bluesy elements. But my god, where to start with the text. This may actually be the elusive "so bad it's good" opera I've been looking for, but I'm not quite willing to call something this dumb "good" in any sense.
During LBJ's 1964 campaign, his wife went on a speaking tour. That's more or less what this is about, I suppose, although that takes up less than half the run-time. Basically, she goes to racist towns in the South and quotes "all men are created equal at them," a phrase which is well known for making racists immediately stop being racist. Nice. There's also a lot with LBJ himself, and deciding whether he should run for President. Mollicone or his librettist absolutely worship the man to an embarrassing extent, and it feels pretty fundamentally dishonest to do that without even mentioning Vietnam.
However, I think that description does not give you an adequate idea of how godawful ungainly and amateurish the libretto really is.
Truly cringe-inducing stuff. How did this happen?
Sorry! Sorry for ending that way! Mollicone definitely has talent, but on the evidence here presented, he's a pretty terrible judge of text.
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