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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Witty, Entertaining, Tartuffe As Opera
February 16, 2001
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By Hather Hadlock
Friday was a notable day for the Bay Area composer Kirke Mechem: the 200th performance of his comic opera Tartuffe. Mechem himself was in the audience for West Bay Opera's new production at the Lucie Stern Theater in Palo Alto. Director Kenneth Tigar and conductor David Sloss brought together an excellent young cast, beautiful sets and costumes, and inspired musical direction of Mechem's witty and very entertaining work.
Tartuffe's international success is easy to understand. Based on one of Moliere's funniest and most enduring comedies, it has a sure-fire plot full of intrigue, satire, and hilarious situations. The con man Tartuffe, posing as a humble man of God, has infiltrated the household of the wealthy Orgon with hopes of seducing Orgon's wife, marrying his daughter, and getting his hands on as much money and property as possible. Orgon's family must work together to expose Tartuffe's villainy and thwart his schemes.
Mechem's music is brisk, sparkling, and varied, stocked with the kinds of numbers familiar from comic opera and operetta. There are patter songs and ensembles, waltz songs, laughing songs, and spoofs of "high" style. The music pushes the action along and at the same time is full of its own interest and jokes for the opera lover to savor.
Mechem's program notes point out that much of Moliere's humor came from spoofing the rhetorical registers of theater in his day: the flowery language of lovers, the pompous droning of clerics, the saucy quips of wisecracking servants. The composer's strategy was to play a similar game with opera's conventional modes of expression. Thus when Mariane, the ingenue, is left alone to consider her father's command that she jilt her sweetheart and marry the vile Tartuffe, she of course resolves upon madness and suicide. Her aria ranges through a sort of catalog of suicidal heroines. She begins with an accompanied recitative in high Baroque style, short exclamations of despair punctuated by abrupt chords from the orchestra. Then she moves to the quieter, more resigned style of a Dido, and the orchestra alludes to Purcell's famous lament. From there she suddenly strikes a Violetta-like pose to proclaim, "Addio!" and finishes the aria in gentle sorrow like that of Mozart's Pamina. The whole history of female suffering in opera flashed comically before our ears. The sassy maidservant Dorine is of course standing by to make wry comments on her mistress' histrionics, finding each of her outbursts in the pages of a sentimental novel. And so the whole scene is familiar from Mozart's comedies, reminding us of Despina mocking her ladies' storms of feeling or of Leporello remarking that Donna Elvira "talks like a printed book." Dorine's own showpiece aria borrows its cynicism from Despina, its laughing refrain from Strauss' Adele, and its Spanish color from a similar song in Auber's delicious Domino Noir.
Mechem has an equally rich fund of operatic religiosity to draw upon. When Orgon describes to the audience how he met Tartuffe in church and was overwhelmed by his humility and saintly spirit, the music takes on the fulsome churchiness of Massenet's religious scenes. Full, buttery chords are gilded with ethereal flutes and dusted with a cascade of harp obbligato. Tartuffe, stalking soberly about the stage in his drab black suit and plain gray wig, intones his lines of sustained organ-like chords. The man is such a thorough hypocrite that he rarely abandons this chanting style — not when he is alone and not even when he sets out to seduce his host's wife, Elmire. West Bay has assembled a talented young cast working at the top of their form. They shone as individuals and played off each other in the busy ensemble comedy. The director, Kenneth Tigar, gives Tartuffe's outrageous situations the verve of a great sitcom episode. Aimée Puentes, as the maid Dorine, won the evening's loudest applause for her coloratura laughing song. Puentes must also be praised for keeping her stock character genuinely fresh and funny. Sylvia Eowyn Bloom and Kurt Alakulppi, playing the young lovers, Mariane and Valere, did not quite rise above the cliches of their situation. But they were endearing and pretty to hear and see. Michael Strelo-Smith, as Damis, came into his own as a singer and comedian in Act II, with his futile ranting against Tartuffe — who first tries to seduce his stepmother and then steals his inheritance.
Eric Coyne, as Orgon, was unusually gentle and sincere for a comic patriarch. This made his predicament more compelling and the satisfaction all the greater when his persecutor, Tartuffe, was at last exposed and defeated. James Akin had the gratification of receiving a hearty round of boos for Tartuffe's villainy, mingled with applause for his unctuous bass voice and insinuating acting. Mezzo-soprano Rachel Michelberg, as Elmire, had the only emotionally complex role. Like the Countess in Figaro, she had to put herself in a compromising position in order to prove her honor to her husband. And like the Countess, she had a few moments of melancholy reflection on the fragility of love, accompanied by plaintive woodwinds. She was an agile comedian in the scenes where she must evade Tartuffe's ever-more-lecherous advances while remaining the still center of pathos around which the hectic comedy turns. (Heather Hadlock is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Stanford University. She is the author of Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann (Princeton University Press, 2000)) ©2001 Heather Hadlock, all rights reserved |
