Working with the University of Maryland, the National Gallery of Art commissioned the score to celebrate its retrospective of the forlornly transfixing paintings of Edward Hopper.  It was the director Leon Major who approached Musto and Campbell, who had just created a new Volpone for Wolf Trap Opera, with the project: and Campbell’s idea first to select a quintet of late-night Manhattan images and then to conjure an inner and outer life for the figures within.

The resulting libretto plays like a chaste ‘30s American variation on Schnitzler’s Reigen: a chain of missed and nearly-missed emotional connections which links its characters not by sex but by setting.  In their comfortable apartment, a not-so-newlywed young couple bicker; in a hotel lobby, a recent widow fidgets while awaiting the arrival of the first man she’ll have dated since her husband died.  An aspiring chorine gives up aspiring, drafts a letter to the lover she’s deserting for safer Indianapolis.  An excitable English teacher from Virginia is bedazzled by the city; a visiting borghese, less so.  At length, all these and more lose themselves at the same Broadway musical: after the curtain, in the rain, most find themselves ever-so-slightly less solitary than they were before.

As a premise, this is clever and obviously pictorial, but very, very small: which is why the resulting play—sharp, personal, every moment alive—feels like such a miracle.  And it’s a miracle accomplished by that most basic and yet most rare talent in our current operatic theatre: good dramatic writing, by both librettist and composer.  Note the first third of Later the Same Evening, which presents three of those dissatisfied women—the irked wife, the fretful widow, the disheartened dancer—in monologues each concluding with images of windows: windows through which to intrude, or escape, or to gaze into the twilight.  Note, then, how beautifully Musto, in this most poignant contrapuntal moment of a richly contrapuntal score,  retrieves those window strophes for a trio that makes unmissably audible that, however different those windows appear, each opens onto vistas of loneliness.  Did Musto request or execute Campbell’s textual design?   The audience can’t—and needn’t be able to—tell.  All we hear is character in sound.

And what sound!   Musto’s score has every strength—harmonic, rhythmic, melodic, organizational: spinning through myriad worlds, it never loses its internal memory.  Freshly patterned ostinati scamper under banal dialogue, but hold stock-still to listen when the characters speak their hearts: often rhythm alone distinguishes text from subtext.  The score is carefully but lightly woven, over large stretches of musical time: the texture is most often arioso threaded through and punctuated by leitmotiv, rather than tight song-form.  But Musto’s arioso is so dramatically apposite and beautifully proportioned that it always holds the ear.   Listen as the dissatisfied wife, politely enduring the small talk of that giddy schoolteacher, breaks into a brief but breathtaking solo about the ultimate unknowability of those you love.  The texture was so convincing, and the moment so true, that if you asked me whether the moment was scored in starkest dodecaphony or indigo E-major, I couldn’t tell you.  Time stood still.

If I have any criticism of Later the Same Evening, it’s only of a certain melodic reticence its composer maintains at key moments.  I wish, for example, in that luminous women’s trio, that Musto had been a touch more generous with his homophony, had risked, even, the anthemic: the moment coalesces, and beautifully so, but for me, its muted tastefulness makes it seem less, not more, emotionally authentic.  I’m similarly ambivalent about its final sequence, in which a series of reconciliations and personal epiphanies is set against a vocally rich and rhythmically vital ensemble on the word “rain.”  This is, again, finely done, and surely this would be the wrong moment for “Make Our Garden Grow:” but the subtlety of the final gesture—”the rain has stopped,” as the characters wander into the night—seems a degree too cool for what has gone before. 

And yet, to my ear, Musto and Campbell need change not a syllable nor a semiquaver for Later the Same Evening to merit a thousand mountings by a thousand companies—starting, please, with this one.  I’ve admired Leon Major’s direction since my student days in Washington, and his leadership of his ardent students and his sophisticated designers was characteristically pellucid.  It’s a tribute both to the force of the writing and the talent of these student performers that they could sing so convincingly of middle age, of marriage, of disappointment and disillusion: and under the precise and ebullient Michael Barrett, both they and the School of Music’s orchestra swung and snapped and soared.  

I want to conclude with an observation and a challenge.  There is no comparison, at all, on the level of artistic achievement, between the two new short operas I’ve heard this week.  One is rangy, precise, dramatically intelligent, musically protean, lyrical yet tough-minded about love, lies, and solitude: I engage the other here.  I assert that its accomplishment makes Later the Same Evening the more progressive of the two.  Skill isn’t all of modernity: but there’s no modernity without it.  This is not, however, to withhold from Ainadamar its due: which is credit for its creators’ willingness to take on so politically resonant a subject.  (Nor is it to suggest that the modesty of Later the Same Evening was anything but perfect for its subject.)  What we need in new opera, though, is both at once—the bold vision and the lapidary technique, the political challenge embedded in, not careless of, the personal detail.  When master artists broaden their reach, and eager firebrands deepen their craft, then we’ll see a golden age.

It is nothing if not ingratiating. The Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted by Robert Spano, brought its concert version of Osvaldo Golijov’s and David Henry Hwang’s opera Ainadamar to Carnegie Hall on Sunday afternoon, and all the composer’s usual charms were in evidence: the vital pan-Hispanic rhythms, the grateful singing lines, the clean textures.  Flamenco vocalism is intrinsically histrionic, and Golijov, quoting it in full here, spurs Dawn Upshaw to a performance of such scenery-chewing extremism that she makes Aprile Millo seem like Vanessa Redgrave in The Year of Magical Thinking. Lamenting female choruses magnify the characters: dabs of musique concrète sprinkle them with a shimmer of the new.  What’s not to love?

Its inertia; and its glibness. David Henry Hwang’s libretto, unusually, suffers from brevity rather than overlength, announcing with children’s-theatre obviousness just enough of the actress Margarita Xirgu’s relationship with Federica García Lorca to set up the big numbers for the soloists. (”Margarita, tell me about the first time you met him at the “Albor” Bar in Madrid!”)  Virtually every interesting moment in the story is either told but not shown, or shown but not accurately.  Kelley O’Connor swaggers onstage as a Lorca played by Antonio Banderas, all put stripping Dawn Upshaw’s Margarita of her mantilla: only later, in a one-sentence throwaway, do we learn that Lorca was, in fact, homosexual.  “He has done more damage with his pen than others have with their pistols,” shouts a fascist officer.  Really?  But Hwang’s and Golijov’s Lorca, explaining “My play is not political,” sings a long paean to a statue of Mariana Pineda (Xirgu’s signature rôle) as a symbol of love, not revolutionary purity.  How such an innocent soul came to be executed by a Spanish firing squad is a story worth dramatizing, but in Ainadamar that story will be bullet-pointed, asserted, and mourned—not explored.  As a result, the piece feels both lightning-quick and stuck in place: too scattershot to maintain the attention, even at a brisk seventy-five minutes.  (I wonder if its writers were aware of this.  Certainly their designating Ainadamar “an opera in three images” beards us but-there’s-no-drama! lions in our den: since “images” are, by definition, static, aren’t our expectations of theatrical vitality now our problem, not theirs?)  No one’s saying that Hwang and Golijov needed to do a three-hour extravaganza on the Spanish Civil War.  But its ingénue-on-the-train-tracks blatancy and its tempo-di-Cliff’s-Notes narrative ultimately make Ainadamar feel unserious.  The all-too-real martyrdom of a dissident playwright seems used only to give a whiff of solemnity to what is otherwise a diva-centric melodrama with flamenco décor—an Adriana Lecouvreur of the Spanish left.  

And Golijov doesn’t help much.  I wish this artist’s work bespoke the creator more than the importer.  All the elements of pan-Latino musical sensibility deeply familiar to us from so many other mass-culture contexts—from the Buenos Aires nightclub to the South Beach discotheque to Jazz at Lincoln Center to West Side Story—materialize in Ainadamar. But if you compare what Golijov does to refresh these tropes with what Silvestro Revueltas or Carlos Chávez or Alberto Ginastera did fifty years ago—to say nothing of what Gabriela Lena Frank or Gabriela Ortiz are doing now—you find yourself bewildered by his prestige.  The music always has a sheen, a warmth, an openness, which counts for much: and there are orchestrational touches that bespeak a less limited ear, like those female choristers silvered with harp and vibraphone in their “fountain of tears” music.    But much more characteristic of Ainandamar are the bullfighters’ trumpet riffs that open the score: if these are fresh composition, I don’t know what cliché is.  His sound design—yes, Rick Jacobsohn is credited with the actual work, but the ultimate responsibility is Golijov’s— buries his musique concrète touches in the orchestra, and inflicts on his singers miking that gives them a dynamic range from pantomime to echo-chamber.  More importantly, Golijov’s dramatic technique is inconsistent.  Lorca’s aria to the statue, “Desde mi ventana,” written for Kelley O’Connor’s sumptuous, almost baritonal low register, is rhythmically square, but at least has some harmonic range, some direction—the sonorities seem to encircle the Mariana image much as the enraptured narrator does.  But how does a composer of any sensitivity set “Spain is a river of mourning, a people draped in a black veil” to an upbeat dance arrangement that could easily back a new Marc Anthony single?  It’s charming, and Ned Rorem will tell you that there is no art without charm: but charm isn’t the whole of art, either.   Argue, if you will, that flamenco is to Latin-American mourning what the blues is (are?) to African-American mourning: a way of making suffering endurable by freeing the body to move to it.  But is this a viable dramatic method?  If so, where are the great blues operas?

One hates to typecast oneself as the eternally disgruntled DaPonte of the bløgösphere, but the fact remains that no major practitioner of operatic composition, in any country, in any era, has ever been blasé about the rôle of the libretto in crafting an expressive music-drama: and Ainadamar seems yet another example of what I have come to call the Peter Sellars method of operatic composition; this consisting primarily of choosing a premise so politically weighty that questioning the inadequacies of its musico-dramatic execution comes to seem small-minded.  The audience is bullied out of its critical responses by the spectre of tragedy.  (You were bored?  Well, Lorca was slain.  By Fascists!)  I respectfully suggest that a comprehensive narrative technique, wielded in both music and word, makes politically charged subjects more, not less, intellectually confrontational: more, not less, emotionally immediate. Important opera companies are considering Golijov for major commissions, and I have every hope that given the right topic, the right collaborators, and the right approach, he’ll rise to the occasion.  But if he’s going to compose for the world stage, he needs to incorporate, personalize, and expand upon—not simply quote—his musical sources: and to choose very carefully between the thorough and the merely impressive. Craft is politics.

“The Birgit Nilsson Foundation said it would begin awarding a $1 million prize, which it is calling the largest such prize in classical music. The foundation, established by Ms. Nilsson, the Swedish soprano who died in 2005, will award the prize every two to three years to reward the outstanding achievement of a concert or opera singer, a classical or opera conductor, or a specific production by an opera company.”

I’m assuming this money comes from investments of the fees Birgit Nilsson earned by singing music in the world’s great opera companies over her forty-year career.  I’m trying to remember how such music came to be!  I’m sure it’ll come to me.

Happy Thanksgiving, all.  We’ll connect again re Ainadamar, if not before.