A banquette at Compass. WHITE, in black tie (loosened), and BLACK, in white tie (loosened.) Two fresh Martinis; the wreckage of a small plate of smoked trout and tangerine; two ESTHER programs.
W. Well, the sound in the hall is much clearer—
B . Not in row D! The singers are still swallowed—
W. Only upstage of the apron. And you insisted on Row D. In the First Ring it’s crystalline—
B. It was always good in the First Ring—
W. Yes; still, it’s audibly better; not warm, yet, exactly, but less…congested—
B. Acoustics by Sudafed!
W. …and please remember, in his speech before the gala, George S. quite pointedly noted that this was just Phase One of the renovation—
B. The gala! raptly Joyce!
W. raptly Joyce!
B. awed Ramey!
W. awed Ramey!
B. warmly Lauren!
W. warmly Lauren!
BOTH eyes very wide, voices down a minor seventh: Rufus.
B. and W. exchange glances; drain dry their Martinis; wince; shake their heads rapidly, like dogs fresh from the bath; and smile brilliantly.
B. So: Esther.
W. carefully Well. The production is, quite literally, luminous; if, as rumour has it, Jerome Sirlin digitized the projections he first made for the 1993 mounting, it was absolutely worth the effort, as they—as well as the costumes and lighting, by Joseph A. Citarella and Robert Wierzel, respectively—are both narratively eloquent and visually arresting. Under George Manahan the orchestra plays lustrously, particularly in the many starkly exposed brass passages; Weisgall writes the harp as a scouring desert wind, and Jessica Zhou Sara Cutler (mea culpa!) makes the most of the (guitar-pick?) glissandi with which he’s gifted her. And Lauren’s lovely in the title rôle, particularly given that in many ways this is an ingénue part: she infuses much of the music (particularly her opening aria about the shapes of clouds) with a timbral sweetness that’s as winning as it right; but her dramatic last act is hot and strong.
B. The débutantes are startling, too—
W. They are, and in similar ways: both Roy Cornelius Smith, the Haman, and Margaret Thompson, the Zeresh, are at once big-voiced, funny, and fierce. It’d be interesting to hear them in the rôles these most resemble both in vocal scale and dramatic contour, which are Herod and Herodias.
B. Mr. Maddalena is noble as Mordechai –
W. And Beth Clayton is, as ever, a volcano: though playing Vashti, the imprisoned queen, she must perforce sing most of her rôle through a scrim—
B. I know! She had only three lines on an open stage in that “Who is Esther?” trio in Act Two before her exit, and suddenly her voice ricocheted around the room.
W. It happens. Little Women at NYCO was all scrims, and Christina Bouras, our incandescent Beth, once quipped that she felt as if she were singing into a pillowcase. But you heard tonight that once any principal stepped out in front of the proscenium, they rang and rang and rang.
B. pointedly So: we like the production—
W. studiedly making a Lohengrin swan of his cocktail napkin …And, as a programming gesture, Esther couldn’t be righter. The opera wasn’t a NYCO commission, but it might as well have been, given that San Francisco Opera, which requested both the team and the subject, passed on the première; so City Opera gave it, to substantial acclaim, during Christopher Keene’s tenure. It’s also the valedictory score of a distinguished American composer whose idiom is more modernist than not. This selection at once distinguishes NYCO from the MET’s artistic policies but links it with George Steel’s at the Miller, which, you’ll remember, gave the U. S. stage première of Elliott Carter’s What Next? two years ago.
B. more pointedly So: we get the programming choice—
W. heading him off Look, I like the libretto a lot.
B. You. Like. A Libretto?
W. It’s not subtle, and for my taste it telescopes the emotional developments of the story even more than sung theatre demands. But the libretto of Esther knows what it’s about. And it holds the stage; every scene has an arc, a point. Do we need to recap the synopsis or not?
B. Um…I was there?
W. For example, I could wish that the book spent less time on the mechanics of the story—wicked Persian prime minister plans a pogrom! Plucky, quick-thinking Jewish maiden saves the day—
B. But that’s the story!
W. That’s the story we know. But Charles Kondek writes some beautiful lines that touch on themes of responsibility, on the pressures placed on a minority to assimilate into a larger culture. For example, there’s a lovely bit of dialogue in Act Two Scene 8, in which Esther, resisting her uncle Mordecai’s insistence that she use her new prestige as queen to argue against a pending assault on her Jewish coreligionists, retorts:
“Deny certain customs, deny certain rules.
Those who don’t are fools.”
Your words, your advice!
B. And Mordecai acknowledges it—
W. …And then we move on.
B. I disagree. In context, Esther’s motive “Who am I? I am Esther” which does thread through the whole evening (albeit constantly mutating) is really a masked way of asking and re-asking that very question: to whom do I belong; myself or my people?
W. To me, the treatment is a little careful, though—
B. Kondek did tell Cori in the podcast that he didn’t want the word “Jew” to be spoken in the entire show, presumably so as not to make it too parochial. (I can only imagine how those discussions went! given that not even Bernstein was more self-consciously Jewish an American composer than Weisgall was.) Hence Haman’s language about this “different people—”
W. I like this script! It finds a convincing diction for Biblical characters while being neither slangy or orotund; the tone, albeit solemn, is well-sustained; the language has an internal bounce and tension which comes partly, but not only, from its rhyme scheme; and—above all—each scene begins, makes its point, and segues seamlessly into the next. This production, among other things, makes a most eloquent rebuke to Regietheatre. Christopher Mattaliano’s direction owes much of its grace and modernity to its close, close fidelity to the text as written. Get a script that moves and thinks as moderns do, and even an Old Testament setting can feel like now.
B. And the ending is brilliant.
W. And the ending is brilliant. Which is a good thing, because after Esther decides to confront the King, most of the last act is as expository as a children’s pageant—until that final palindromic tableau, in which the chorus sings an undulant chorale peaking on the word “Forever,” which here acquires a new and chilling meaning. Not subtle. Just perfect.
B. So. Anything you’ve left out?
Pause. B. smiles radiantly.
W. You’re a cold, wicked man.
B. Just honest.
Pause. W. crushes his origami swan into a ball.
W. Weisgall writes very intelligently for the solo voices. Some of his melismata feel a bit arbitrary to me, but overall his text-setting is immaculate. His orchestration is fine—clear and varied, with some beautiful touches, as I mentioned earlier. Saving the highest strings for the finale is a lovely aural coup de théâtre—
B. So you’re saying the score works?
W. pelting B. with the balled-up napkin, as B. dodges: Well, no, en toto I am, with regret, saying that I don’t think it works; which is tragic, actually, because Weisgall strikes me as an innately theatrical composer who boxed himself into an anti-theatrical idea of what harmony is, or does. He came by his modernism honestly, given his generation and his background—and, Verdi notwithstanding, it’s not often that a composer reinvents himself at 81, which is when he wrote this piece. But if you leave assaults on, or defense of, ideology out of the discussion, and simply listen to what the music does, then you have to—well, I have to—conclude that it doesn’t work: if by “work” you mean “convincing an audience of its aural logic as it goes along.” Because—however it’s built, whatever vision it comes out of— the harmony sounds arbitrary. Weisgall trusts neither silence, nor repetition, nor pulse, nor consonance. Like Henry Ford, he’ll use any harmony you like as long as it’s three to six pitches—the more seconds and tritones, the better—and as long as it doesn’t last much longer than a quarter-note. So the texture ends up sounding as monochrome and mechanical as early, wall-of-e-minor Minimalism, and for exactly the same reason; you feel that a process, not a person—and certainly not a character!—is generating the materials.
B. But an audience isn’t sitting in the theatre with the vocal score, counting the chord-tones: they’re listening to much or little theatrical the music sounds.
W. Just so: and, concomitantly, I would suggest that theatricality in music depends much more on high contrast and on audible punctuation more than on harmonic consistency. So, for example, listen to Esther’s aria at the end of Act Two, which concludes with the lines, “ I know now, that I am, yes, that I am Esther!”—her most important moment in the score. Weisgall the vocal composer gives her a falling tritone—high B to the F-below–a vocally, if not harmonically, conclusive move. But Weisgall the harmonist won’t be overheard writing a conclusive gesture at a conclusive moment—so we get another three bars of scrambling chromatic eighths and sixteenths, of exactly the same character as the rest of the piece, while—in this case—Lauren Flanigan stands there, exactly as if she and the orchestra are playing the same scene—
B. A., Couldn’t stage direction fix that? and B, what do you want? Five one, ta-da?
W. I want audible closure, which can be achieved by many means other than five-one.
B. But isn’t the entire premise of modernism, musical or literary, that life itself is a constant stream of the eternal present—all narratives artificial, all conclusions momentary, or false—
W. Is that your experience?
B. What do you mean?
W. Have you never lived a conclusive story? Has your life never had starts, finishes, moments of tension and release?
B. huskily Ask me again. Ask me in French.
W. glaring Assuming it has, then, why is it more intelligent to depict life without using that sort of punctuation? Is the major triad intrinsically false?
B. No more than the tritone is intrinsically true.
W. So why exclude it?
B. You want The Young Person’s Guide to Modernism? On one cocktail?
W. Is repeating a chord dishonest?
B. This is so severe; so minute! Maybe repeating a chord is not to Weisgall’s taste!
W. Excellent! See, taste, I accept. Artists have tastes. So do audiences. Taste, as a criterion, levels the playing field. But these choices are never defended on the basis of taste. They’re defended as “progressive,” “uncompromising,” and, above all, “intelligent.” But what’s intelligent—as opposed to conformist—about drastically limiting your harmonic range? What’s intelligent—as opposed to fashion-conscious—about composing music without punctuation? Particularly when the genius of Kondek’s libretto is its sense of paragraph, its careful framing of the truth of any given moment?
B. Couldn’t you argue that Kondek punctuates so Weisgall doesn’t have to?
W. You could. But what’s musically intelligent about that?
B. May I suggest that your argument is more with modernism and its exponents in general, rather than with Weisgall and Esther in particular?
W. You may indeed! Because I respect Esther. Again, it’s a beautiful production—well-designed, well-cast, well sung, well-played, well staged—the music is precisely crafted within its very sharp limits, and dramatically you’re never bored. But, frankly, I do think the opera succeeds because of Kondek, not—indeed, often despite—Weisgall. And I insist that there’s something tragic about this, because I think Weisgall had virtually everything else you need to be a major opera composer except either the ear or the historical perspective to realize (and do recall that this score was composed for 1993, not 1953) that his ideologically overdetermined harmonies and rhythms limited him more than they empowered him. And the reason this remains important is that—and you know this as well as I do—that in the next twenty-four hours, somewhere, in some periodical, someone is going to argue that people resist the score of Esther because the music is too “brainy,” too “difficult,” too “uncompromising” for the Bohème audience—
B. I adore that argument. Revived more often than Bohème!
W. …when I would argue that the problem of the score is not that it’s too intelligent, but that it’s not operatically intelligent enough. And this is important, because Esther is going to be scrutinized quite carefully as a hint of New York City Opera’s future artistic policies. So the language matters here. If the piece is presented and reviewed as—let’s say—“a passionate example of mid-century American modernism, applied to an enduring dramatic theme by one of the period’s most distinguished composers,” &c—that’s one thing, because it places the piece in an honorable and historically intelligible line. But if, in our passionate desire to see City Opera triumph, we start to use the rhetoric of progressivism—Esther: behold the future!—well, then you’re going to see a lot of contemporary composers start drinking heavily—
B. Start?
W. —because it’s not the future. It’s the past’s idea of the future. Weisgall’s Esther is a serious piece by gifted artists with a thousand good things going for it; even its failures are evidence of its ambitions. But the problems with the evening are Esther’s. They’re not ours.
B. Enough italics! The gala! Joyce!
BOTH Joyce!
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