From the Met’s manufacturing of Moby-Dick.
Picture: Karen Almond/Met Opera
After 15 years of crusing from home to accommodate, the Pequod has lastly floated into the Met, its splintering wooden, freezing iron, and sodden ropes transfigured into digital drawing. Moby-Dick, an opera by librettist Gene Scheer and composer Jake Heggie has been carried out broadly sufficient (in Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington) since its 2010 premiere that it qualifies as a semi-classic, and Leonard Foglia’s manufacturing, too, arrives well-used. And so the belated firm premiere has the sensation of a completely honed present: intelligent, pleasing, and low on roughness or threat. The opera tells a simple story wherein the boy by no means will get the whale and all people dies, however why we must be informed it isn’t fairly as clear. On opening night time, the assured solid—Brandon Jovanovich as Ahab, Steven Costello as Greenhorn (you may name him Ishmael), and Thomas Glass stepping in for Peter Mattei as Starbuck—made a round-the-world voyage on a leaky hunk of carpentry sound a bit too simple. On this opera about monomania and desperation, the stakes one way or the other appear low.
A lot of the thrill comes not from the characters or the pit orchestra (regardless of Karen Kamensek’s vigorous conducting) however from the stage enterprise. The vessel’s rigging rises far above the deck, forming a cat’s cradle of masts, ropes, and sails. In Robert Brill’s set, the stage is formed like a half-pipe with rungs, in order that solid members scramble, pitch, tumble, and row flimsy whaleboats over large waves. The one-legged protagonist (sung by a two-legged tenor) is a person of restricted mobility who tends to clump on deck and ship his arias, so the frantic motion that takes place round him turns into important.
Melville’s Moby-Dick is a profoundly bodily ebook, and his sentences haul parlor-bound readers right into a world of swinging spars, slippery decks, bone-deep terror, the musky odor of whales, and the vertigo of obsession. That’s all wealthy stuff for a composer, since music is a instrument for translating one sensation into one other. Sunshine, ache, waves, cracking hulls—a well-carpentered orchestral rating can convey all of it.
Heggie makes an attempt all this. He is aware of the canon of seafaring music, together with Britten’s Billy Budd, Debussy’s La Mer, and Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. A number of the churning present of chords may need flowed into the rating from John Adams’s The Dying of Klinghoffer, which takes locations aboard a hijacked cruise ship. And Heggie is accustomed to summon an orchestral storm and paint the portrait of a proud hunter. He’s studied operatic conflicts between leaders and the led. He was proper to make the boy Pip a soprano pants function (sung right here by the lone feminine solid member, Janai Brugger), and to emphasise Ahab’s religious quest as a substitute of his authoritarianism by making him a tenor fairly than a baritone. Scheer was sensible to whittle down the novel’s winding sentences into quick, sharp exclamations and curt directions—and likewise to be devoted to Melville’s rendition of the captain’s irritable diction. When Starbuck suggests discovering a port to restore barrels which are leaking whale oil, Ahab replies incredulously, and with alliterative power: “Heave-to right here for per week to tinker a parcel of previous hoops?” And Heggie is aware of set such a wealthy set of syllables in order that they don’t get misplaced in a whoosh of open vowels. But, for all that professionalism, there’s a scrim of civilized politeness between his music and the occasions it describes. Swells surge then abate, storms get grumpy however by no means plausibly murderous. There could also be few phrases within the English language extra suggestive of a musical temper than Melville’s “wild, watery loneliness.” The opera is simply too domesticated, earthbound, and companionable to convey that excessive bleakness.
Moby-Dick is on the Metropolitan Opera via March 29.
Join The Critics
A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers solely.
Vox Media, LLC Phrases and Privateness Discover