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OPERA REVIEW
"A Streetcar Named Desire" Just Entertaining
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By Marvin Tartak
Andre Previn's "A Streetcar Named Desire," in the most advertised world premiere in San Francisco Opera history, September 19, turned out to be nothing greater than an entertaining evening in the theater. Following the hype that preceded the opening, one expected no less than the Second Coming. It's good, but not that good.
Philip Littell has crafted a splendid libretto from Tennessee Williams' play, often word-for-word in his adaptation. Even the scene divisions and the two intermissions follow those of the play. Lines familiar to many in the audience who have seen the play and the movie spring forth like gems from Shakespeare, insuring that one is getting the real thing. A lot of background material is cut, of course, following the old dictum that music expands the time span of the text. A complete performance of the original in music would last until the wee hours of the morning (no celebratory dinner in the tent). Instead, the librettist has tweaked the play; the focus on New Orleans in the 40s has been narrowed to the mind of Blanche Dubois, a nightmare of despair and loss. In actuality; the opera in its final version lasted nearly four hours on opening night.
The characters are well-realized, beautifully acted. The staging by Colin Graham couldn't be better. The set is perfect, a two-room apartment that from time to time splits in two when matters get intense. Thereafter, reality, like sanity, is lost. The dramatic sweeping staircase alone, curving around the side of the two-story building, is a winner. Thomas Munn has lighted the set so it responds to mood swings in the most dramatic, most enchanting way. To look at the production is to feel the illusion of the heroine, her pretenses and the sad truth of her existence.
Yet one misses two things in this rendition of America's most famous play--the sultry setting of the South in dissolution (symbolized by the rape), and, more importantly, the sleaze. Where is the South?; where is the haunting sense of New Orleans, the French Quarter? The set looks right, but in the opera's obsession with Blanche, the world outside this raffish apartment is lost. Even the southern accents come and go, present in recitative, lost forever in aria. Some actors hold their mush-mouth identity. The tenor Anthony Dean Griffey as Mitch is the best at it. His pathos as lonely loser touches the heart. Others slip in and out of dialect. In this form, the story could happen anywhere; the milieu is abandoned.
More drastically, where is the common aroma of the lower classes? Alas, it isn't here. Aside from a few blues licks, a sliding around in the brass, a clarinet wailing between phrases, the composer writes music dead serious in modern opera style. For ambience of lowdown New Orleans one ought to depend on the music; moreover, in the play Williams asks for offstage blues piano and raucous polkas. In the opera this power of vulgarity is missing.
"Jazz would be too easy," Previn has said. Pity; for that's just what is needed and he's very good at jazz. Instead, one hears an orchestra mired in figurative details that work at odds with the simplicity of the words on stage, an amalgam of musical styles from a myriad of musical sources. The eclectic Previn has acknowledged the influence of Britten, Barber and Strauss; one also hears a touch of Honegger, Milhaud, Berg, and in the orchestration, even Korngold. These musical giants form the now-conservative musical language of 20th century orchestral styles; where is Previn's own language?
In truth, the composer is very good at picturing emotion. "Winsome" is his strong suit; Blanche's arias are sublimely tender. (Her aria, "I want magic!" was performed here to better effect than on the recent recording with Levine.) Stella's moment of contentment after having sex with her husband is perfect. Elizabeth Futral is excellent, persuasive in a basically underwritten part. The violence is convincing. Ronald Gilfrey as Stanley, looks and acts the part of lower class brute. When he screams out "Stella!" the orchestra is right there with him, and the scene is powerful. Whenever Littell breaks away from the stricture of following the play to introduce a more poetic scene filled with fantasy and imagination, Previn loosens up and gives some of his best music.
However, when the text turns to conversational bits, Previn drowns it with busy work in the pit. The strings saw away in an obsessive figure; the woodwinds chatter; the brass bray fortissimo; and the percussion, particularly the gong, push everything else out of focus. The simple words are lost, and the ear distracted.
Sometimes there's too much attention given to innocent lines of the text; one such moment leads to an unfortunate gaffe. In the first scene of Act I, when Blanche asks Stella about Stanley, she identifies him as a former "Master Sergeant in the Army Corps of Engineers." Previn obliges with a fanfare of trumpets. But Stella goes on to assert, "I wasn't blinded by all that brass." Didn't anyone notice?
Renée Fleming as the heroine Blanche is a consummate actress; she is wonderful on stage, acting up a storm. Is she the Blanche from the play? Not enough. There is a touch of the diva about her. What is a diva here? Someone who interrupts the character when an aria rises in her throat, who takes center stage and poses for the ultimate applause. What's missing in her character? Fragility. She shakes, she trembles, she holds her hands to her ears when Stanley isn't nice, but not for a moment does she appear as a woman about to break apart. She's very strong; one can tell by her ability to sing difficult passages.
Paradoxically, what works against her at times is the ambitious quality of the music. Her role as singer demands accuracy of pitch and rhythm, and Previn gives her wide ranging lines to perform. Her voice soars beautifully and is magnificent in its musical effect--but wrong for the realistic character of a woman descending into madness She doesn't sound about to lose it; she sounds like a virtuoso singer at the top of her craft. (Occasionally what she gets to sing isn't good enough. In the last scene when Blanche fantasizes about her death by the seaside, the music grows saccharine and is unworthy of the rest.)
The music defeats the character of Stanley, too. Just before he rapes Blanche, he must sing Williams's words: "Blanche, we've had this date with each other from the beginning." Previn writes a musical line that is difficult, high, and angular; Rodney Gilfrey executes it perfectly, but it isn't believable. Can anyone about to violate the heroine sound so measured? Where are his guts?
Ultimately, an aesthetic question arises, whether a realistic, down-to-earth drama like "Streetcar" should be set to music at all. Certainly the play has powerful emotions, dramatic moods, a terrific plot and marvelous characters--all the ingredients of good opera. But the text remains in prose and in the language of mundane folk. Opera by its nature changes this; it exalts feeling, transforms and expands and makes the everyday sublime. What sort of opera could respect Williams' naturalism and still preserve the direct beauty of his words? It's a challenge to any composer, and Previn tries very hard.
Too hard.
(Marvin Tartak, who twice worked as a rehearsal pianist with the S. F. Opera [1973 and 1983], teaches a course in Opera at City College of San Francisco. He has written program notes for the San Francisco Symphony and Opera, has also has edited two volumes of Rossini for the Fondazione Rossini, and is soon to embark on a third.)
©1998 Marvin Tartak, all rights reserved
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