This pièce d’occasion is itself an occasion. Unique, tender, exquisitely worked, John Musto’s and Mark Campbell’s Later the Same Evening made its first visit to Manhattan courtesy of the eponymous School of Music Wednesday night, and to hear it was to feel nourished.
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.