‘Jobs’ hums with electric pop
Opera brings problematic figure to musical life
It’s an old, old story. A guy builds a thing, for any number of reasons — out of a thirst for knowledge or power, to win a war or just because it’s too cool to resist — and unleashes it on the world.
Later, the regrets set in. “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs,” Mason Bates’ and Mark Campbell’s dynamic and often brilliant new opera about the rise of Apple and the man who made it happen, is the latest instance of this archetypal yarn. It’s a vibrant, spangly creation, as sleek and irresistible as anything coming out of Cupertino today with Jobs’ minimalist aesthetic still posthumously lingering in its DNA.
Bates’ score, built around an eclectic pop sensibility, bounces and hums with theatrical fervor — now reflective, now breathlessly driven. Campbell’s libretto is full of tenderness and dry wit.
But when “Jobs” made a late arrival Friday, Sept. 22, at the San Francisco Opera, one of several opera companies that had co-commissioned it, the piece landed in a slightly different cultural milieu than it encountered during its 2017 world premiere at the Santa Fe Opera.
The context has even shifted since 2020, when “Jobs” was scheduled to make its San Francisco premiere before the COVID-19 shutdown put a stop to that.
Today, we have “Oppenheimer” in the rearview mirror, making it easier than ever to trace the Faustian undercurrent in this rich moral fable.
Not that that theme was ever too far from the surface. During the opera’s single intermissionless stretch, running about an hour and 45 minutes, the audience follows Jobs’ life and career from the garage in his Los Altos childhood home to his memorial service in the Stanford University Chapel. The fact that nearly every scene in the opera is set in the greater Bay Area provides an admittedly parochial hometown thrill, on top of the fact that Bates is a longtime Burlingame resident.
As the dying Jobs looks back on his life together with the ghost of his spiritual mentor, the Zen monk Kobun Chino Otogawa, a series of key episodes unfolds like something out of “This is Your Life.” They include professional triumphs and setbacks: the release of the first
Apple personal computer and of the all-conquering iPhone, as well as Jobs’ traumatic (though short-lived) ouster from the company he helped create.
We also witness the rocky contours of Jobs’ personal life, including his vile treatment of his girlfriend Chrisann Brennan and his rejection of their daughter, and finally his transformative marriage to Laurene Powell.
All of this is well within the familiar bounds of Great Man conflicted hagiography,
and “Jobs” never completely dodges the pitfalls of that problematic genre. In her concluding eulogy, Laurene describes her husband as “a brilliant man and a freak,” and we know all too well what she means.
Yet what saves “Jobs” from the lure of cliche — what makes it such an ebullient and haunting evening in the opera house — are the beauty and inventiveness of Bates’ score and the brisk efficiency with which Campbell, together with director Kevin
Newbury, splices together the piece’s component scenes.
If anything, there are moments when a little more expansiveness would be welcome, especially in probing Jobs’ supposed late-in-life conversion to the notion that you don’t have to be glued to your smartphone all the time. But the breathless pace of the opera’s first major scene — an iPhone product launch that casts Jobs as both visionary and huckster — sets the tone for much of what follows, and
the result is powerfully effective.
It helps, too, that the members of the San Francisco cast (some of them repeating their assignments from the world premiere) are superb from first to last.
In the title role, baritone John Moore on opening night was a fireball of manic energy, raging against the shortcomings of his employees and acquaintances, then tempering that volatility with sudden pathos.
The role of Laurene, as the male creatives have conceived her, is a bit undercooked — a redemptive Madonna figure out of Wagner — but mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke infused her with robust vocal splendor and a shimmery radiance that’s impossible to withstand.
Tenor Bille Bruley was a funny, clear-toned presence as Jobs’ fellow innovator Steve Wozniak, and soprano Olivia Smith, a gifted current Adler fellow, made a forceful, eloquently sung contribution as Chrisann. John Keene’s Opera Chorus made a lithe ensemble.