Antony and Cleopatra: Adams gives free rein to his sense of musical colour
The two principal cast members, Julia Bullock and Gerald Finley, were stunning. Both in voice and acting vim.
They are mysteries as enigmatic as the characters at the centre of John Adam’s opera, Antony and Cleopatra, premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on 12 September, already performed in San Francisco and Barcelona. Why, as usual, was the Met late to the party?
And what took Adams on his epic voyage to Ancient Egypt and Rome? After all, the leading American composer of contemporary opera has crafted his reputation on a genre largely of his own creation. Shining an unforgiving light on controversial, current events.
His canon is distinguished. Nixon in China, (1972) the unlikely meeting in Beijing of the ultra-conservative American President and Chairman Mao in 1971.
The Death of Klinghoffer, (1975) a bravely even-handed treatment of the murder of a disabled, Jewish American tourist hostage on the hijacked cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. (What’s new?).
And Dr Atomic, (2005) the Robert Oppenheimer story – heaps better than the recent biopic movie, Oppenheimer – lasering in on the stark moral choices which dominated the 1940’s Manhattan project.
That trilogy singled out Adams as the go-to guy, really the only guy, prepared to stick his neck out for the novelty, the current affairs opera-documentary. Plenty of other composers deal with compelling social issues of the day. Few dare run commentaries on headline news.
I have watched endless interview footage of Adams explaining why he changed gear. After all, domestic and international crises abound. The target rich area around the Potomac has offered low hanging operatic fruit since 2016.
Sieving out all the self-rationalising noise, it distils to this. Like Giuseppe Verdi and other composers before him, Adams is fascinated with Shakespeare and his taut telling of history’s best stories. Why not give them the added emotional dimension music brings?
Adams wrote his own libretto for Antony and Cleopatra, a heavily pared down version of Shakespeare’s play, then crafted the music round the words. Only occasionally, when the Bard of Avon’s poetry did not suit the music, or missed a story line Adams wanted to highlight, did he turn to other sources, Plutarch and Virgil.
The composer is not subverting Shakespeare, reinventing the wheel. He seeks to musically embellish. Following Benjamin Britten’s lead in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the audience is treated to lines that simply cannot be bettered.
Take this example when Antony falls out with Cleopatra and helpfully reminds her of her storied past, populated with lovers.
Antony: “I found you as a morsel cold, cold upon dead Caesar’s trenchard. Nay you were a fragment of Gneius Pompey’s”.
Cleopatra, a virtuoso of deflating irony: “Have you done yet”?
Netflix drama script writers eat your hearts out.
This production is from Elkhanah Pulitzer, a Met debut for the Massachusetts director, and sets events in the glitzy Hollywood of the 1930’s. Her rationale is that everyone has an idée fixe of Cleo and Antony, based on immersion from childhood in the iconic Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton encounter.
On set, Burton found Taylor a tasty morsel, boiling hot, on trenchards previously the property, of Conrad Hilton, Michael Wilding, Mike Todd and Eddie Fisher. Come in, husband no. 5!
I am not convinced by the all-out Hollywood treatment. Subtle allusion might have worked, but Pulitzer and set designer Mimi Lien, give full-on cinematic engagement. Camera lenses obtrude into the set, filmed images form backdrops. For a reason that beats me, Mussolini appears at his daughter’s wedding.
Settings flash between Rome and Egypt as the action demands. Scenery is rooted in angular images derived from Roman and Egyptian architecture. Apparently, the tomb scene is based on the interior of the little-known “Red pyramid”. There you go!
Visually, it is super-slick, but what’s the point? Is it history or is it Hollywood? But it’s hard not to like the imagery. I especially squirmed with delight at Caesar addressing a rally of the faithful from a balcony, waiting for that famous Virgil line to fall from his lips: “Fac Romam iterum magna!”
Annie-B Parson is the choreographer charged with filling quite lengthy passages of Adams’ score with dance and marching about. Again, good to watch. It may have been better for the audience to have some down-time, focusing on the music. But, full-on Busby Berkeley razzle dazzle passes muster.
The plot follows Shakespeare’s play, so I shall not elaborate, but add a link for any reader whose school recently abandoned Shakespeare for a curriculum of Marvel junk – here.
The two principal cast members, Julia Bullock, soprano, Cleopatra and bass-baritone Gerald Finley, Antony, were stunning. Both in voice and acting vim. They were paired in the original San Francisco production, although Bullock had to withdraw from the premiere due to illness. It was a stroke of genius to bring them to the Met.
They delivered all the fire of the legendary Burton/Taylor romance to the story. The opera opens with a hangover – and Antony, still pissed, in woman’s clothes. He learns that his wife, Fulvia, is dead and there is bad karma with Caesar, who thinks he is dawdling in Egypt. Which, of course, he is.
He hails the first Uber trireme he can find and heads Romewards. When Cleo learns that Antony has tried to curry favour, marrying Caesar’s sister Octavia, Bullock spits at her best. “He’s bound to Octavia? On what terms? The best terms – the bed!” And she ends on a sustained high note which can only be described as fearless.
Finley is one of the most powerful character singers treading the boards today. And he is familiar with Adams. He sang the role of Oppenheimer in the Met’s Dr Atomic. His 2016 performance of the cobbler, Hans Sachs, in Glyndebourne’s Die Meistersinger, Wagner, proved beyond doubt that he could travel an emotional journey.
In the role of Antony, he did it again. Up to the moment when, learning of Cleopatra’s death (a whoopsie, as it turns out) he impales himself on a sword with the words, “I am dying, Egypt.” Then dies in her arms after she surprisingly makes an entrance.
As Romeo and Juliet could have told them, never act rashly in opera, or theatre, on hearing of your lover’s demise. Most likely fake news. Just hand around and they’ll either wake up, or turn up.
Other members of an excellent cast can be found here.
Adams was, appropriately, in the pit for the Met premiere. His baby. And what a baby that score is. Adams, always shying away from atonality, and the nihilism of contemporary colleague composers of the ilk of John Cage, gives free rein in Antony and Cleopatra to his sense of musical colour.
At the opening of ACT II, the audience is greeted with music reminiscent of Verdi’s atmospheric creation of the Nile in Aida. I don’t know if this is an Adams hat-tip to the Italian great, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Portraying the vapour of a cloud is a tough musical call. Antony: “Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish, a vapour sometimes like a bear, sometimes like a lion, a towered citadel, a pendant rock, a fork-ed mountain”. Adams rose to the occasion.
The Met opened in 1966 with a disastrous performance of Samuel Barber’s – Antony and Cleopatra. It was dropped after its eight-performance run. And has hardly ever been heard of since. Maybe that goes some way to Managing Director, Peter Gelb’s hesitancy in staging the Adams’ version.
The temptation to ruin an opera with a climactic final scene with the fatally afflicted heroine singing at full screech is hard for composers to resist. Cleopatra clasped an asp to her bosom, a shimmering violin portraying the slithering asp.
Then she simply faded away, the music mirroring the slowing of her heart. With an unresolved upbeat it was all over. That Adams trick of heightening the tension with a melodic line reducing to nothing is why he is currently America’s best in the opera composing business.