December 5, 2005
An American Tragedy Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 02:00 PM EST Friday night I went to the Metropolitan Opera to see the world premiere of Tobias Picker’s much anticipated new opera, a work based on a great American novel about a once infamous historical event. Full disclosure: I have known the composer for years and consider him a friend. That said, I am very pleased to be able to report that he and the whole cast and crew have done a thrilling job. They’ve produced something worth going out of your way to see if you possibly can during its short run this month. Theodore Dreiser’s huge 1925 novel An American Tragedy tells the story of a poor boy who tries to climb in the world, gets overwhelmed by the American dream, and is led, ultimately, to murder. It’s a fascinating book not only for the tale it tells but also for its Tom Wolfe-like portrayal of life as it was really lived when the story takes place, with closely observed scenes set everywhere from a Kansas City whorehouse to a soul-deadening factory of a century ago and the grand mansion of the man who owns the factory. The novel is based on the events surrounding a real-life murder that took place in 1906 (the murder led to what was called at the time the trial of the century); the novel has in turn been the basis of two movies, a silent and the 1956 A Place in the Sun, starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters. Picker and his librettist, Gene Scheer, went back to documents about the original murder, including letters written by the victim, a woman made pregnant and then forsaken by the tale’s ever-striving protagonist. They put together a tightly packed three-hour story that refracts many elements of American life both then and today. Clyde Griffiths, the main character, is the son of street preachers, and the tension between faith and irreligious freedom runs through the opera as it does through so much of life now; it dogs Clyde as he keeps seeing success grow both nearer and more costly, and some of the most stirring moments in the score have hymns running through them. Clyde Griffiths is not a bad man; as he pursues a rich, glamorous woman and tries to disentangle himself from his poorer earlier girlfriend, he is, as Dreiser wrote, “really doing the kind of thing which Americans . . . would have said was the wise and moral thing for him to do had he not committed a murder.” The greatness of the novel lies partly in its rich and detailed recreation of particular times and places in America but more in its ability to make us relate to and identify with a man inexorably drawn, by forces we all know, to murder. Clyde Griffiths is every one of us. Picker’s music heightens the power of such identification. The first reviews I’ve seen of the opera tend to praise everything about the production with the exception in at least one case of finding some of the music too accessible, too Broadway-like, as one critic put it. So if you want your music obscure and indigestible, stay away. If you want to see an electrifying story brought to life, go. The case includes several of the best opera singers in America today. Clyde Griffiths is played by Nathan Gunn, a 33-year-old baritone who looks like Montgomery Clift to some people and has gotten a cult following not only for his voice. The woman he makes pregnant is portrayed by the dazzling soprano Patricia Racette; the woman he aspires to, by Susan Graham, a young Texan with one of the richest, most seductive mezzo voices around today. They and the rest of the cast are shown to great advantage by Picker’s wonderfully imaginative vocal writing and deft orchestration. These are singers who look their parts, and who can act too. The sets cleverly combine period stage furniture with large photographic backdrops to both heighten the sense of place onstage and accommodate the mammoth scale of the Met stage without overwhelming the players. An opera based on a novel, like a movie based on a novel, is a distillation. It must replace breadth and detail with intensity and focus. An American Tragedy does so most movingly. I found it an absorbing and truly convincing artistic immersion in a timeless tale of the American dream.
|
