Opera Review: The End Of The Affair
By Steven A. Kennedy
Last year, the Houston Grand Opera received notice in FSD for its premiere production of
Rachel Portman's The Little Prince.
More recently, throughout the month of March 2004, Graham Greene's
novel The End of the Affair
got an operatic treatment featuring music by Jack Heggie and a libretto
by Heather McDonald (her first). This is Heggie's second opera, the
first being based on Dead Man Walking, which received a recording on
the Erato label.
This was the 29th world premiere for the Houston Grand Opera. The
organization has a long history of introducing contemporary opera, many
by Carlisle Floyd. John Adams, Michael Daugherty and Robert Moran are a
few more familiar composers who have had works premiered there. Jack
Heggie is a noted composer and performer and has held
composer-in-residencies at the San Francisco Opera and the Eos
Orchestra. The latter will be familiar for its concerts of film music.
Greene's best-selling 1951 novel takes place during World War II and
uses a love triangle of sorts to develop deeper themes of personal
religious struggle. It is all set against the devastation in London
during this time. There are two film adaptations. The earliest version,
from 1955, featured Deborah Kerr, Van Johnson and Peter Cushing with a
score by Benjamin Frankel. Neil Jordan's recent 1999 acclaimed version
included music by Michael Nyman and starred Julianne Moore, Ralph
Fiennes and Stephen Rea. The HGO's cast features the husband-and-wife
Australian's Cheryl Barker and Peter Coleman-Wright, and Teddy Tahu
Rhodes -- who appeared in Portman's opera.
Heather McDonald's libretto is filled with referential arching story
lines that pick up where one leaves off in a previous scene. There are
also larger story arcs that attempt to tie in the end of Act One with
the beginning of Act Two. The text itself seems to capture the period
well, but there is one general problem and that is that character
development seems to be lacking. This is also due to the precious
little musical connections for the primary characters. There is a
semi-lyrical theme that plays in the opening of scene one and which
recurs briefly elsewhere, but it only serves to help anchor the
listener a bit.
One musical issue that is perhaps as much a problem of casting as
anything else, is that all the male characters have a similar vocal
quality, and that makes them indistinguishable from one another. On a
dramatic level, this is one way of showing the similarities in the men
that Sarah chooses to be in her life. But by the time all four are on
stage in the final act for a quartet, it really just becomes an
indistinguishable mesh of sound.
Scene three from Act One features the detective that Maurice (Sarah's
former lover) has hired to see what she is doing and if she has another
lover. In what is a kind of on-stage musical equivalent of the slow
fade into a flashback, he tells the story while bits and pieces are
sung by the other characters until we are firmly in the flashback. That
was an interesting effect that worked well. The fourth scene in Act One
is a wonderful mixture of what film fans would recognize as diegetic
and non-diegetic music playing simultaneously and in alternation. We
hear the orchestra playing a dance number which is coming from a record
player on stage. Heggie also casts his other orchestral language into
the mix as well and the two vie for attention until the player is
turned off. Of all the scenes in the opera, this one is perhaps the
finest. The dance theme is further played out by the maneuvering of the
three characters who appear in this scene and move through the staging
on and off stage. Sarah's mother has the best defined character
performance of the piece and practically steals the scene. The music
throughout wavers between a tango-esque and bolero rhythm that hints at
the sinuous sexy innuendos she throws out at Maurice. This scene also
reveals an important clue about Sarah's past. And what we plainly see
is that Sarah is really searching for a substitute father figure to
help rationalize his tragic death that happened in her childhood. It
helps explain the God language we have heard, as well as her religious
comments that pop up in the first act.
The religious themes of the opera are problematic for two reasons. One
is that we really do not get enough character development for us to
really care one way or the other about what they think. Secondly, an
extended series of scenes in Act Two that are simply monologues about
believing or not believing, or semi-dialogues with God feel archaic in
their language. They pull the drama to a standstill in Act Two as we
move from what should have been storyline and character development
into more psychological ground. The latter can often work really well,
but the ending of this affair wimps out with the message that love is
eternal -- comment that I overheard flippantly from those leaving the
performance. That is a good message but the response from most was so
what. The connection between that and the love of God was not
communicated.
Heggie's music is at least accessible and filled with piled up
harmonies that provide ambiguity to where he may head tonally but
somehow still manage to provide a harmonic center. Angular orchestral
ideas play nicely against the rather restrictive vocal pitch ranges.
But when the vocal lines soar they attempt to reveal the deep seated
emotional punch and struggle that a character is dealing with in the
story. The orchestral scene interludes are fabulous constructions that
are orchestrated with great variety in the limited palette that Heggie
is using here. The HGO Orchestra had a few rough moments of ensemble
throughout the evening hinting at the difficulty of the work. The stage
changes may have also caught the ensemble off guard a few times as
well. During one scene change the orchestra has a wonderful subdued
piece that would have been wonderful to hear but two stage pieces were
rolling across for the next scene and all but obliterated the orchestra.
The sets and overall look of The End
of The Affair are superb by all accounts. The effects of the
changing stained glass church window were fascinating to watch. The
central rotating piece was well-used and very functional in its
positioning on-stage. The set changes though also experienced a bad
night with a lot of extraneous sound distracting even the singers
during scene four in the first act. By the second act a piece of
staging managed to snag and rip the bottom of a curtain too -- so a it
was a less than ideal night for the HGO, which is definitely an
exception.
I hope to hear more of Heggie's orchestral music in the future as it
made the opera far more interesting than it could have been otherwise.
His interest in religious themes will likely continue and in what
should be a long career he'll ultimately find the answer and expression
that he continues to explore.
The Houston Grand Opera's production is directed by Leonard Foglia and
ran in eight performances throughout March.
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