Opera

A Quiet Place

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Trouble is a deceptively beguiling little piece, so entrancing musically with its comments from the jingle-trio chorus, the witty description of the trashy movie of the title, and the fluent ease of the word-setting that it is all too easy to overlook how sour and bleak is its depiction of a day in the life of a suburban marriage on the rocks. Competitive, macho Sam conducts his business and wins the handball cup, Dinah visits her analyst and the cinema, nine-year-old Junior is left to his own devices while his parents row, and in the evening they prefer to go to the escapist movie (Dinah for the second time) rather than stay at home and sort out their marriage. Ouch.

The initial aim of A Quiet Place, commissioned jointly by Houston Grand Opera, La Scala and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, was to find out what might have happened to these characters 30 years on; the larger aim, in the words of the librettist and producer of the successful Scala/Vienna version, Stephen Wadsworth, was to write an opera about ‘non-ethnic middle-class Americans, not a regional folk opera, not a neo-European grand opera, and not a sentimental pop Singspiel... an opera in the American language as it is spoken by Americans to express their American selves’. Both aims seem to me to have been fulfilled with complete success— second time round, that is.

At the Houston premiere, A Quiet Place was a long one-acter (four scenes lasting two hours) following a performance of the 40-minute Trouble in Tahiti. The first scene was set in a funeral parlour: Dinah has been killed in a car accident. We meet the Analyst who didn’t actually appear in Trouble, Dinah’s brother Bill, her best friend Susie, her Doctor and his wife, and her widower Sam, who stands silent and apart until the end of the scene. Sam’s and Dinah’s daughter Dede, born after the action of Trouble, arrives with her French Canadian husband Francois, formerly the lover of Junior, who is now homosexual and mentally disturbed. Fierce antagonism between father and son forms the climax of the scene. The remaining three scenes encompass the working out of family tensions, culminating in heartfelt and convincing reconciliation in the garden, the ‘quiet place’ imagined by Dinah in her one-sided session with the Analyst in Trouble. The post-Houston revision turned the two one-acters into a single piece; Trouble was split in two and woven into the second scene, which became Act 2; the remaining two scenes were joined together to form a third act.

The advantage of the revision is the extra dimension it adds to the working-out of the communal trauma: a prelude becomes a memory, with Old Sam remembering and learning how his younger self helped to land the family in its current mess. The complicated and resonant emotional cross-currents put one in mind of MacMillan’s Anastasia, one of this century’s great dance dramas, and one which reached its final form by a process not dissimilar to that of A Quiet Place. One only hopes that Bernstein and Wadsworth have not settled upon the work’s final form, for the disadvantage of the revision is that the subsidiary characters, presented in great detail in the first scene/act, have been cut from the new third act—one feels cheated at not knowing how their tensions are resolved. Part of Junior’s psychosis is an incestuous relationship with Dede in childhood that may or may not be imagined; in any event, it finds an echo in their sharing of Francois, and there seems to be a parallel to it in Bill’s memories of his sister Dinah in the first scene. In the first version, the Doctor’s Wife, a wonderfully drawn character, tart, smart and cynical, admitted that she loved Dinah, adding another ingredient to an already dangerously heady brew. Thc powerfully imagined first scene at present stands out on its own. (In her lip-smackingly unpleasant biography of the composer, Joan Peyser suggests that A Quiet Place is air opera a clef, with Junior as the composer, Sam as his father, Dede as his sister, and Mrs Doc as Lillian Hellmann, who is supposed to have formed an attachment to Bcrnstein’s wife Felicia. Be all that as it may, both composer and librettist created the piece in the wake of bereavement; Bernstein lost his wife and Wadsworth his sister shortly before starting work on it, and the score is dedicated to the memory of both.)

Wadsworth’s text, written defiantly and most effectively in demotic American, is perfectly conceived for operatic treatment: in its calculated incoherence it cries out for music—to fill in the gaps if nothing else. In a dramatic world reminiscent of part Tennessee Williams, part Ayckbourn, thoughts that remain unspoken are powerfully suggested by the score; the series of thirteen short ‘dialogues’ in the funeral parlour is handled with stunning virtuosity, each one with its own special ‘tinta’, each filled with little bombshells in the way of half-finished sentences and social gaffes. At the centre of the second act, framing the two scenes of Trouble, is an equally virtuoso double duet, with Sam and Dede in one room of the house, Junior and Francois in another, all severely starting to come to terms with the past. If there is a danger of the miasma of deviancy in this act teetering on the edge of parody, and of the upbeat Happy End of the final act in the garden seeming too good to be true, both are avoided by the power of the music. With his Wagnero-Mahlerian musical hat on, Bernstein manipulates material from the neo-Broadway Trouble with enormous skill: motifs are transmuted and developed in subtle, unobvious ways, Stravinskyan ostinatos handled deftly, the tension between two essentially different musical languages always used purposefully. The one ‘big tune’— Dinah’s garden motif— sideslips the charge of sentimentality with its sheer depth of feeling, something that doesn’t always happen in, for instance, Mass. Purely technically A Quiet Place is a tour de force.

So is the recording, especially given that it is live. The vocal lines are both extremely tricky and technically strenuous, but accuracy and stamina are not found wanting here, even if there are moments of strident, strained tone that would be the cause of re-takes in the studio. Chester Ludgin’s performance as Old Sam, a role as demanding emotionally as it is vocally, is extremely impressive—he holds nothing back in either case, and copes heroically with his fiendishly written interior-exterior monologue in the first act. Even though he is not heard, one somehow senses his presence in the scene with his younger self (Edward Crafts, ideally sonorous and confident). Beverly Morgan is vibrant, at times a little shrill, in the high soprano role of Dede, Peter Kazaras tactfully restrained as Francois, John Brandstetter fearlessly unbuttoned as Junior—he too spares us nothing. In smaller roles Clarity James is a wonderfully rasping Mrs Doc, Theodor Uppman—who created Billy Budd—makes much out of potentially little as Bill (the indefinable musical charge under his brief dialogue with Francois is one of many intriguing moments in the score), and Wendy Craft sings young Dinah in Trouble with cloudless, touching lyricism. There is a heart- (and practically every other organ) on-sleeve emotional rawness to the work that ought to make it inimical to your average WASP, but this particular one found it both disturbing—as it is intended to be—in its very rawness, and ultimately healing, and he can’t wait to see it on stage. It would be perfect at Glyndebourne, perhaps in a slightly reduced orchestration. Heaven knows what a WASPish audience would make of it, though. Perhaps if a learned programme note stressed the parallels with the Ring proposed by Andrew Porter in his review from Houston, they could take it in their stride.

Reproduced from Opera Magazine (Oct' 1988) in an article entitled 'Towards the Great American Opera' by Rodney Miles.

 
Here is the fulfilment of a long-cherished project. Its roots are in the 1952 one-acter, Trouble in Tahiti, in the mixed-genre Mass of 1971, in the 1977 Songfest (which the composer himself called "a study for an American opera"), in Weill, Blitzstein, Menotti and dozens of other composers who have contributed, positively or negatively, to Bernstein's vision of the Authentic American Opera. Most of all it grows out of his disappointment that American composers did not follow the lead of West Side Story.

The other side to it is that both composer and librettist were preoccupied with recent bereavement, so that when Bernstein suggested a sequel to Trouble in Tahiti he and Stephen Wadsworth immediately found themselves on the same wavelength. Marrying those grandiose ambitions and intensely personal experiences into a coherent work of art proved to be an arduous process, in the course of which Trouble in Tahiti became incorporated into its own sequel as a series of flashbacks.

Dinah, wife of successful businessman Sam, has died in a car crash, and the family is now gathered for her funeral. Their son Junior is "a crazy queer who skipped the draft" (one of several lines which amusingly defeat the translators of the libretto) and the most obvious victim of his parents' joyless marriage. He is given to psychotic states and longs for reconciliation with his father. Daughter Dede, who may have had an incestuous relationship with Junior, has married his lover, Francois; this sounds cosy. But all three are troubled, principally because of their unfinished emotional business with Sam.

The Quiet Place is a realm of remembered shared intimacy, the opposite of the restless emptiness Sam and Dinah inadvertently drifted into. It is now the goal of the rest of the family, who have to rediscover how to communicate. The relationship of father and son is the most sustained idea in the opera. In Act 1 Junior scandalizes the funeral gathering with a decadent stripping song. In the flashbacks of Act 2 something of the background to his present torment is sketched in; young Sam wins a handball trophy and young Dinah returns from a movie (Trouble in Tahiti), half scornful of its absurdity but half dependent on its glittering alternative to drab reality—both of them have avoided going to see Junior as the hero in his school play. In Act 3 Old Sam mellows, having read touching extracts from Dinah's diaries. For the first time he welcomes Francois into the family, and after an unexpected and vicious argument he finally takes Junior into his arms.

However you tell it, the story has the look of a Richard Strauss Intermezzo gone to New York and coated in self-indulgent breast-beating; and a parable of middle-class American alienation, however believable, may not be everyone's idea of a promising opera text. But I have to say that that final reconciliation is intensely moving, even though it seems in part too obvious (any devotee of American soap could see it coming) and in part too obscure (what is the 'gun' which looms so frighteningly in Junior's earlier ravings, and which he now symbolically hands back to Sam?). Its power must have something to do with the extra-ordinary precision and commitment of the whole performance, and it is certainly heightened by the timing of final argument—after the apparent reconciliation. It also has to do with an underlying strength of the whole opera—the fact that the breakdown of communication is a ready-made metaphor for Bernstein's music, undercutting most of the reasons that might be advanced for resisting it. Which is to say that a stylistic mishmash, a sense of rootlessness, ennui, embarrassment, superficiality, vulgarity and so on can all be taken as part of the self-conscious role-playing which afflicts the characters—they represent the problem the family has in saying anything truly heartfelt. And if the ending hardly transcends all that the reconciliation on stage is, after all, only a beginning.

In any case this must surely be one of Bernstein's most impressive scores. Certainly the orchestration is as characterful as you could wish—punchy and seductive by turns—and the ideas are for the most part strong enough for their purposes. A pervasive descending motif recurs at pivotal moments— "an old certainty", Stephen Wadsworth calls it—perhaps slightly too close to the "Prize Song" for comfort, but no more so than some of the lump-in-throat bits of West Side Story are to the 'Redemption' motif from The Ring. Indeed, anyone who knows West Side Story will also know whether they find an aftertaste of saccharine in Bernstein's would-be heartfelt music. My own resistance to the Bernstein of the Mass and Songfest is fairly high. But in A Quiet Place I have to confess particular admiration for the melancholy mindscapes of the postludes (even if they do owe something of their effectiveness to the example of Wozzeck) and his sleazy Broadway idiom is at its sharpest for the representation of Junior's outrageousness and Dinah's suburban blues.

That is not to say that this is an unblemished masterpiece. The First Act drags rather (as first acts so often do) and one spends a fair amount of emotional energy getting to know various of Dinah's associates only to discover that they play no further part in the opera. Sam and Dinah's Act 2 duet seems to me not to match the quality of the set-piece solos, some of the gnomic utterances of the Brecht/Weill chorus seem contrived, and the symbolism of the garden (= the Quiet Place = the formerly shared, now longed-for intimacy) is hardly subtle. Also I wonder quite how a stage production would cope with a scenario in which nothing actually happens and where the dialogue consists largely of comic-strip thought-bubbles.

But Bernstein considers this "emotionally the strongest thing I have ever written"; I think he's right. And whether or not the goal of the True American Opera is an attainable, or even desirable, one, I think A Quiet Place does take a definite step in that direction.

The performance is inspired. Long stretches of rhythmically displaced, dovetailed dialogue must be the devil's own job to co-ordinate, and the cast bring to it a confidence and razor-sharp precision astonishing for a life recording. Wendy White as the young Dinah recounts her visit to the movies with terrific panache, and Beverly Morgan is superb in the flighty virtuousity of Dede's lines. The male roles are not all sung with that degree of distinction, nor am I convinced that the writing for them is quite so memorable. Nevertheless, they are well enough done to engage a measure of sympathy for the characters. The Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra play magnificently and Bernstein's conducting has a charisma without which one suspects the whole thing would make far less of an impression.

Incidentally, the two CDs last 74'57" and 74'09"—bravo to that. The sound on the three LPs is superb in terms of balance and realism—again a marvellous achievement for a live recording.

DJF

From 'Gramophone' magazine http://www.gramophone.co.uk
 
 

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