S.F. Opera mines the West, comes up with fool’s gold
Imagine being on the receiving end of a Thanksgiving dinner monologue by a veteran of an earlier era — let’s say Grandpa Abe from “The Simpsons.” His stories about life in the old days meander on and on, full of nebulous detail and the occasional sense memory, often without arriving at a point. Sometimes the tales trail off entirely; sometimes they’re interrupted by impassioned howls of outrage at some real or perceived injustice.
Finally he falls asleep, his face in the cranberry sauce.
That pretty much sums up the experience of “Girls of the Golden West,” the operatic tofurkey from composer John Adams and librettist-director Peter Sellars that had its world premiere on Tuesday, Nov. 21, at the War Memorial Opera House. Bloated, repetitive, self-righteous and dull, this commission by the San Francisco Opera (in partnership with the Dallas Opera and Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam) represents a miscalculation of astonishing dimensions.
It’s a portrait of Gold Rush California inhabited by pasteboard figures and disembodied political mouthpieces. It jettisons actual drama in favor of endless travelogue, time-wasting asides and disjointed narrative logic.
And for all its stated intent to present a warts-and-all evocation of life in the Sierra Nevada of the 1850s, the piece doesn’t even conjure up that milieu with much more distinctiveness than a highbrow Yosemite Sam cartoon. Say what you will about the historical absurdities of Puccini’s “Girl of the Golden West,” with its laughable Italian miners and its singular heroine, but that work — to which Adams and Sellars offer an ill-
judged poke in the eye — at least trades in verisimilitude for genuine emotion.
Most dismaying, “Girls of the Golden West” is a work that seems to have taxed Adams’ prodigious creative energy to its breaking point, leaving him to recycle favorite stylistic tics from his earlier work (and from other composers) amid a stream of discursive monologues and choppy ballads.
All of this, needless to say, comes as a huge shock from a team that has given us such operatic masterpieces as “Nixon in China” and (on balance) “Doctor Atomic.” For anyone anticipating another artistic peak along those lines, the gap between expectation and reality registers with whipsaw cruelty.
In the spirit of the holiday, it’s worth taking a moment to express gratitude for small favors. The San Francisco Opera has assembled a phenomenal cast of young singers to give voice to the new score, led by debuting soprano Julia Bullock in a performance of remarkable clarity and presence.
Sellars’ production, with sets by David Gropman and meticulous costumes by Rita Ryack, offers Gold Rush scenes as if illuminated by lightning flash — now abstract, now pointedly detailed. In his company debut, conductor Grant Gershon had occasional difficulty on opening night keeping everyone on the same rhythmic track, but he shaped the score’s overall flow with welcome directness.
None of it, though, could rescue a work whose central misjudgments were baked in from the start.
Chief among these was the decision to erect an entire theatrical edifice around the writings of Louise Clappe, a Massachusetts-bred intellectual who traveled with her physician husband to the gold diggings at Rich Bar in 1851 and left her observations in a series of artfully composed letters home, published under the comical pseudonym “Dame Shirley.”
To read these letters in book form — something everyone should do — is to fall immediately in love with Clappe’s puckish prose style and keen eye. Witty, heartfelt, ironic and magnificently observant, Clappe’s writing opens up a window onto Gold Rush life with splendid immediacy.
But the virtues of prose reportage and those of operatic singing are antithetical, and Sellars’ decision to incorporate huge chunks of her work could not have been more misguided. With a single act of copy-paste, a wonderfully chatty correspondence becomes an intolerably talky libretto.
And because Clappe is intent on evoking her world for those far away, her detailed scenesetting becomes a drawback on the stage. In scenes where Bullock as Dame Shirley describes the decor of her cabin or the local hotel — things the audience can see perfectly well for itself — it’s as though the stage directions had been set to music by mistake.
The rest of the libretto, which Sellars has once again assembled from a variety of primary historical sources (letters, speeches, newspaper clippings) represents the most definitive demonstration to date of how thoroughly this collage technique fails to produce a workable dramatic framework.
There isn’t a phrase or a line in the entire libretto — not even in the Shakespeare scenes that get smuggled in out of context — that can stand next to the exquisite craftsmanship of Alice Goodman’s handiwork for “Nixon” and “The Death of Klinghoffer.” (Future music historians, I think, will perceive even more clearly than we can today the extent to which Goodman’s retirement from creative activity was a central, defining catastrophe in Adams’ operatic career.)
And because Clappe, observing actual life, was not a dramatist, “Girls” becomes a string of undifferentiated incidents. Some pack a punch, such as the climactic episode in which a Mexican woman, Josefa (mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges, singing with lustrous hauteur), fatally fends off a rapist and is swiftly hanged by a kangaroo court. Others, like a ceremonial dinner, fall flat.
An extended theatrical extravaganza, combining “Macbeth,” a Brechtian ballad of a Chinese prostitute (the stratospheric soprano Hye Jung Lee) and the manic exertions of dancer Lola Montez (Lorena Feijóo, late of the San Francisco Ballet), takes up a huge chunk of Act 2 to no discernible purpose. The opera’s run time of 3¼ hours feels arbitrary — the piece could have run five hours, or 80 minutes, and had essentially the same effect.
Filling out the roster of characters are a noble African American (the heroic bassbaritone Davóne Tines) and a soulful Mexican man (baritone Elliot Madore). There are two white guys (bass-baritone Ryan McKinny and tenor Paul Appleby) who are distinguishable only to the extent that one is slightly more drunken and menacing than the other. One is named Joe because of course he is; the other isn’t, because that would be silly. The men of the Opera Chorus roister and stomp their feet as the miners and gamblers of Rich Bar.
The evident point of this racial and gender balance is to bring a political critique to bear on the history of California — to remind us that as hard as life was for the miners, it was even harder for the women and people of color in their orbit. Which is true, and unobjectionable, and badly in need of dramatizing.
But that would require (in addition to an actual libretto) a score of greater psychological depth and specificity than Adams — who finished the night by being awarded the San Francisco Opera Medal — has come up with.
Dame Shirley’s extended dispatches from the field emerge in a drab, uncharacterized parlando. The slew of folk ballads and camp songs that Adams created afresh tromp along in rhythmic lockstep without transcending the formulaic nature of their texts. The hardscrabble, percussive orchestral textures that are so apt to the milieu soon outstay their welcome.
And even in those occasional intervals when Adams rolls out a big vocal set piece as a reminder of what an eloquent composer he can be in the right circumstances, the lack of any dramatic context undercuts his efforts. Near the beginning of Act 1, for instance, Dame Shirley pauses on her way to Rich Bar to observe some Native American women gathering food, and is struck by the loveliness of one of the girls.
It’s a wonderfully evocative moment, and Adams fits it with one of his trademark rhapsodies, full of arching, lyrical melodies and shimmering strings. But it’s also completely untethered from its surroundings; you can hear the brakes being thrown as Adams shuts the action down to make way for this little surge of expressive feeling.
To hear Adams’ music at its most sublime, though, means waiting through the entire stretch of “Girls” for Dame Shirley’s extraordinary closing soliloquy. Here, in a five-minute stretch of almost unbearable beauty — with a breathtakingly supple vocal line and sumptuous harmonies — the main character looks around and extols the California landscape. And you can feel, just for a moment, how powerfully it must have struck her in 1851.
The assembled Opera a has phenomenal cast of young singers to give voice to the new score.