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OPERA REVIEW
The Drama of Deadman In A Lyrical Setting
October 10, 2000
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By Michael Zwiebach
When composers dream, I imagine they see visions of a premiere such as the one given Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking by the San Francisco Opera on Saturday night at the War Memorial Opera House: outstanding and fully committed performances all around, an expertly staged and beautifully conducted production, TV cameras, a standing ovation from a packed auditorium, major celebrities in the audience, and, as icing on the cake, an anti-death-penalty vigil and informational picket outside, letting everyone know that, yes, opera can speak to contemporary subjects.
Of course, a composer might also dream that his opera is an enduring masterpiece. But Heggie's music, though extremely effective and beautiful in spots, struck me as being curiously bland.
Terrence McNally's libretto makes excellent use of its source, Sister Helen Prejean's book, which has always had clear operatic potential. A murderer who comports himself with sneering bravado gradually embraces intimacy with his spiritual advisor as the terror and psychological stress of his impending execution bear in on him. The opera adds a prolog in which we witness the murders, so that the full progression from depraved beast to vulnerable human can be presented, with the final transfiguration occurring at the moment when the state's impersonal machinery takes his life. At this point, the production resorts to one the most revered of melodrama's clichés, the image of Christ on the cross.
But Prejean's subject is also herself, her own spiritual journey from a closely guarded personal relationship with God to one that includes social activism. She must open up and become vulnerable as well. She makes mistakes, which she unsentimentally details. She falsely assumes, for example, that the victims' families want nothing to do with her, a mistake she corrects at some emotional cost. This encounter becomes one of the opera's most memorable scenes. McNally and Heggie give this narrative its due weight, and the first extended solo of the show takes up the subject, an aria that Heggie fills with fervent passion. Heggie writes music that is largely lyrical, in a quasi-Romantic vein, akin, in spirit at least, to the styles of Barber and Carlisle Floyd. Like his first composition teacher, Ernst Bacon, and a number of other American composers, he uses the legacy of folk song and popular song as dramatic tools. A particularly clever mix of elements opens Dead Man Walking. After a short orchestral prelude, the curtain rises to the accompaniment of two songs (by Heggie) coming from a car radio. The orchestra bursts in as the murderous attack occurs, and the scene shifts to Sister Helen (Susan Graham) and Sister Rose (Theresa Hamm-Smith) at work with children of a housing project, teaching them the Gospel hymn "He Shall Gather Us Around." The filmlike movement between orchestral narration and music as part of the scene draws us into a sung vernacular before taking the further step of setting the plain accents of American English. It is a clever mediation between the realism of the story and the essential unreality of singing mundane communications. (At the end of the opera, Sister Helen's singing of the same hymn a cappella is perhaps the only way to restore the realm of music after the silence of the execution.) Heggie has an excellent ear for setting text so that the sense of the words comes through without much exaggeration. At its best, this knack and Heggie's lyricism find a serious emotional depth. For example, when the four bereaved parents confront Sister Helen, their threnody is composed of the casual phrases that end up being the last (insufficient) words they say to their children. On the other hand, the Act II duet between Sister Helen and Sister Rose sets Hallmark-card sentiments about parental love to an overblown melody, a case, perhaps, of going to the well once too often.
The major flaw in Heggie's score is that it is hardly ever unsettling. Certainly Heggie can write dissonances and goad the orchestra into sounding a barbaric squawk. But these seemed like effects larded on with a trowel rather than fully realized sections of the composition. The moments are either interruptive, like the scene in which Sister Helen crosses the prison courtyard to a crashing orchestral expletive, or overwrought with ersatz symbolism, as in her fainting spell at the end of Act I, the musical equivalent of finger-pointing. The worst effect might be the bass drum thump with a brass chord (pause: repeat), as hoary a cliché as the one Sister Helen laughs at the prison chaplain for using. Heggie employs a variety of ostinato accompaniments to give momentum and drive to the score. But these repeated rhythms lack the vital asymmetry and layering that make such rhythms an effective force in the scores of Stravinsky or Glass or Adams. In Dead Man Walking, they have illustrative interest but are flat in their musical effect. And so it is the power of the story and the performances that carries the greater part of the dramatic burden, greatly enhanced by Joe Mantello's sensitive direction. In the lead role Susan Graham combined fierce intelligence with just the right touch of vulnerability. Aside from deploying all the colors of her varied and rich mezzo-soprano, she was specific and detailed in all of her dramatic choices. John Packard as Joe de Rocher, the murderer, was also completely believable. Even though his voice lacked a little command and was a bit strained under pressure, he was entirely at home in the blues/Elvis Presley idiom that Heggie builds into the character's music from the start. Frederica von Stade was predictably wonderful in the smaller but crucial role of Joe's mother. Theresa Hamm-Smith as Sister Rose and SFO regulars Robert Orth, Nicolle Foland, Catherine Cook, and Gary Rideout as the parents constituted luxury casting in a terrific ensemble of supporting players. Patrick Summers led a faultless performance from the pit. (Michael Zwiebach holds a Ph D in musicology from UC Berkeley, specializing in opera, and is a lecturer for the San Francisco Opera.) ©2000 Michael Zwiebach, all rights reserved |
