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Not all black and white
Scott Wheeler’s Democracy premieres in Washington; Boston Baroque/Opera Boston’s Alceste; the BSO and Collage New Music
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Some contemporary composers won’t write an opera because it’s too hard to get a new opera produced. But composer Scott Wheeler, director of Dinosaur Annex, one of Boston’s premier contemporary-music groups, has had unusual success in this respect. His witty, inventive one-act stage fantasy from 1988, The Construction of Boston, using a poem by the late Kenneth Koch as text, has had two Boston productions (one passable, one not). A native of Washington, DC, Wheeler has recently had the good fortune of a commission from Plácido Domingo’s Washington National Opera for his latest operatic work, the ambitious full-length Democracy: An American Comedy, which uses as a libretto senior playwright Romulus Linney’s 1968 dramatization of two novels by Henry Adams, Esther and Democracy, along with information about post–Civil War political scandals in the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. Last weekend, it had its premiere.

As you might guess from the title, Democracy, which deals with the betrayal of idealism, is a perfect piece for our nation’s capital. The complex plot interweaves two love stories. The main characters are two earnest, well-intentioned women: wealthy widow Mrs. Madeleine Lee (subtly acted and sung with bravura confidence by soprano Keri Alkema, a graduate of Washington Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program); and Esther Dudley (Amanda Squitieri, a current member of that program), a "bohemian" photographer (she wears pants), and the daughter of the Supreme Court’s chief justice (an atheist who "says that going to church gives him un-Christian feelings"). Each woman falls in love with an inappropriate man: Lee with a scheming senator who has a checkered political past and Dudley with a charismatic and manipulative preacher, a 19th-century Billy Graham. Both affairs are doomed, and for Wheeler and Linney, their failures constitute the "happy ending."

Wheeler is a disciple of Virgil Thomson, so it’s not surprising that both of his operatic works should share elements with Thomson’s masterpieces, Four Saints in Three Acts and his Susan B. Anthony opera, The Mother of Us All, both difficult but inspired collaborations with Gertrude Stein. Wheeler’s musical language is essentially tonal and tuneful. The score is infiltrated with suggestions of hymn tunes and parlor ballads, marches and dances. And as in Thomson, historical settings are cross-fertilized with modernist theater devices. Like Four Saints, Democracy uses a "compère," a narrator who addresses the audience. Here, it’s the witty Baron Jacobi, the not-very-closeted Bulgarian ambassador (campy tenor Robert Baker), who alienates the political powers-that-be because he has too much on them and isn’t exactly reticent about his contempt. This opera, he tells us, is the story of "how I lost my job."

Washington Opera didn’t stint on some production values. There wasn’t much set to speak of, but director and set designer John Pascoe’s sumptuous costumes — white ball gowns and black tuxedos, with Mrs. Lee the only character wearing a different color, green — and Jeff Bruckerhoff’s punchy dramatic lighting were among the stars of the show. Pascoe kept the action fluid (I especially liked the way he staged Wheeler’s cinematic alternations between two parallel love scenes on the two halves of the stage). But except for Alkema as the conflicted Mrs. Lee and Kyle Engler as Esther’s sharp-tongued spinster aunt (indifferent to any possible husband’s morals, she just hates the idea of a man on top of her), Pascoe didn’t get much nuance of characterization from the singers, most of them Domingo-Cafritz fellows just about to launch into professional careers. Anne Manson, with snap and an ear for Wheeler’s variety of orchestral color, led the accomplished Youth Orchestra of America and the George Washington University Chamber Choir.

Wheeler is a brilliant and energetic orchestrator, but much of Democracy shares with many contemporary vocal works more musical invention in the accompaniment than in the vocal line. I wish the singers had had more-soaring, more-memorable tunes than I thought they did on a first hearing; and the characters need greater musical distinguishing. Grant, especially, needs some fleshing out (maybe with an aria). Wheeler may also have been too faithful to his source. Linney’s Democracy seems like a well-made play, with witty repartee and some compelling characters, but there’s an unfortunate turn into melodrama. As a book for an opera, it’s too talky, and by keeping too much of the dialogue, Wheeler straitjacketed himself into too much recitative; this flattens out the pace and hides the larger forest of a dramatic shape among the trees of small talk. The two most gratifying musical events are the central duets for the two heroines, one in each act. I wish the confrontations between the women and the men had had the same intensity.

What’s best about Democracy is — I’m almost embarrassed to use the phrase — its "contemporary relevance." "These dead shall not have died in vain" are the words we see on the drop curtain before the opera begins. "George Washington stood above politics — that can’t be done today," sings the unsavory senator. The conflicts are also larger than merely personal ones — including issues of "faith-based" belief as opposed to "reality-based" evidence. Democracy: An American Comedy is ambitious in its aims, and its intentions are admirable. It needs work. And then it needs to be done here.

GLUCK’S ALCESTE, one of the major works to fall between the Baroque operas of Handel and the classical operas of Mozart, got its very first Boston performance in a joint venture of Opera Boston and Boston Baroque. The production at the Cutler Majestic was a peculiar combination of intentions: period instruments, the provenance of Boston Baroque’s Martin Pearlman (who in 1999 put on a staged concert version and then released a recording of another neglected Gluck masterpiece of "tragédie lyrique," Iphigénie en Tauride), accompanied a very post-modern staging. Here, the Euripidean story about Alcestis, the wife of the dying king Admetus, who sacrifices her life in order to get her husband back his (it’s the main image of Milton’s great sonnet "Methought I saw my late espoused saint"), was set not in ancient Greece but in a Shaker village intended as another image of a repressive society.

This is not a stupid idea and was clearly the result of some serious thinking. But it didn’t work either as a reflection of the music or as a dramatic formulation. In Euripides, and in Gluck, the fate of an entire kingdom is at stake. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, requires nobility. The leaders of a small egalitarian American sect don’t have the grandeur of ancient royalty. And Gluck’s aristocratic music — with the stateliness and refinement that remained even after all his efforts to reform, to make more "natural," the older "opera seria," with its static showpieces — was undercut by the bald plainness of this Americanization. Susan Zeeman Rogers’s enclosed, partly burnt-out meeting house, with its long table and its Shaker chairs hanging on the walls, was stifling and monotonous for two acts and part of the third. Only when it opened out into the desolation of Hell, a landscape of charred timber and an empty door frame, did it approach the music’s majesty. (The audience giggled, though, when Alcestis was said to be "at Death’s door" and there she was, standing in a quite literal doorway.) Rafael Jaen’s simple black and white robes and gowns (the second black and white costumes I saw in the same weekend) had some of the stylized elegance the set eschewed.

Gluck remains more elusive to us than almost any other major opera composer. Peter Sellars and others have figured out how to make Handel our contemporary; vividly realized Mozart has never been a problem. But even a genius like Mark Morris couldn’t find a convincing way to stage Gluck’s best-known work, Orfeo ed Euridice. When the two adorable (too adorable?) children of Alcestis and Admetus danced, they used ballet steps that would have been appropriate in a more conventional production. (The choreography by Prometheus Dance’s Tommy Neblett and Diane Arvanites Noya made the most of Gluck’s extensive dance music.) But a little boy (the amazingly authoritative Xavier Leal Ferreira) elegantly pirouetting around the stage like Billy Elliot seemed a bizarre incongruity at a Shaker meeting.

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Issue Date: February 4 - 10, 2005
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