Scalia/Ginsburg opera review – RBG on song

The pitch to the potential producer was not going well for composer, Derrick Wang: “So, you want to stage an opera about the legal opinions of two US Supreme Court Justices.” “Yup”. “And they disagree with each other.” “Yup.”

“It’s a man and a woman, right? Are they having a raunchy affair?” “Nope”. “Ah, each is determined to destroy the other?” “Nope, they’re friends. They dine and go to the opera together.”

“Well, give me the spice. There’s lots of political zip, wild, chanting demo choruses of supporters and trashers on each side? Chaotic scenes of clashing interests desecrating the hallowed steps of the Supreme Court. Twitter mayhem?” “Nope.”

“What the hell is there, then?” “A Commentator.” “A what?” “You see, this Commentator morphs from a statue, confronts Justice Antonin Scalia about his constitutional principles and puts him on trial in a locked court. Justice Ginsberg emerges from the floor, defies the Commentator’s attempts to shut her up and defends her colleague a.k.a. opponent.”

“Okaaaaaaay. I’m tryin’ to get this. Maybeeeee … it’s a searing commentary on the divided society of America today, epitomised by the overt politicisation of the nation’s arbiter of the constitution, our hallowed (bows low, clasping hands) Supreme Court? I geddit. Wow! Très woke. So Washington Post. The liberals of Foggy Bottom will be storming the box office.”

“It’s a comedy.”

“Look here. No offence, Derrick, old chum, but I’ve got this hot libretto burning a hole on my desk. It’s a wordless commentary set to a one-note, atonal Philip Glass theme (How can a single note be atonal, ed.?) – “As Paint Dries on my Arkansas Barn.” The Clintons are backing it bigly. Sure-fire winner. Got vim, compared with your limpo rag. Tell you what. Come back when you’ve added some sex and violence. Comedy in the Supreme Court? Are you a Republican?”

The good news for Derrick Wang and all of us is that Scalia/Ginsberg was produced successfully in 2015 and is a tightly woven 60 minutes of meticulously researched commentary, punctuated by belly-shaking humour. It is, of course, highly topical.

Both protagonists are now dead. Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died this week. The Commentator never lived. Composer and librettist, Derrick Wang, describes his purpose as “a creator, unlocking value in unlikely places.” He is also a lawyer. In his choice of the Scalia/Ginsberg paradox as an opera theme he stretches the meaning of “unlikely” towards new horizons.

Having chosen the theme, it would have been child’s play for Wang to have knocked off a 60 minute burlesque, riding on the surf of cliché that has embedded Justice Scalia in the public consciousness as a crusty, change-over-my-dead-body interpreter of the will of America’s founding fathers, and Justice Ginsberg as an ultra-liberal, using the power of the nation’s highest court as a political battering ram to reshape the intentions of the founding fathers. That tension has shaped American presidential elections for close on half a century. It could decide this one.

Instead, Derrick Wang’s Scalia/Ginsberg libretto is a thoroughly researched precis of the dicta and commentaries of both justices, leavened by arrow sharp witty apercus. They prevent the work from descending into dreariness. Still, hardly a comedy. More an encyclopaedia.

Don’t be deceived by the lightness of touch. Almost every line placed in the mouths of the protagonists is supported by a detailed legal or literary reference. The footnotes in the libretto outnumber the sung lines. Not a word is an invention of the composer. He purposefully assumes a role as accurate reporter of a meticulously documented Scalia/Ginsberg story.

Example time. The Ginsberg aria, “You sir, are wrong here,” laments Ruth’s early exclusion from court employment on the grounds she is a woman. The aria’s text is supported by no fewer than fifty footnotes, citing legal cases, referencing published works and offering interpretative guidance for singers and orchestral performance.

Surely, this is pettifogging buffoonery. Well, no, it constructs the hard underpinning on which the light, often throwaway, lines sung by Ginsberg and Scalia stand, giving them authority. This is source material.

The work is musically eclectic, “A (gentle) parody of operatic proportions.” It draws on the “operatic precedent” – “precedent?”, there’s even a glancing legal allusion in the title strapline – of Handel, Mozart, Verdi, Bizet, Sullivan, Puccini, Strauss, et al. Whew! Not derivative, then.

It is not intended to be unkind to conclude that the music is ancillary to the libretto. This opera is all about delivery of complex information. The music is oil that helps the machine along and is, frankly unremarkable. Anything more attention grabbing would simply get in the way.

So, what happens in Scalia/Ginsberg? Very little. The scene is set in the regal surroundings of The Supreme Court. Justice Scalia is confronted by The Commentator, a supernatural being with unearthly powers, (No, Donald, it isn’t you) who seals the room and declaims, “No man may enter.”

Justice Ginsberg, always quick to avenge any equal rights slight, uses her femininity loophole to rise through the floor and join with her dining and opera buddy, Scalia, to meet the challenges together.

There’s something of Mozart’s Magic Flute in the air, hero and heroine facing the tests of purification imposed by Sarastro, to allow them to enter the halls of his order.

Ginsberg has some catty comments for the Commentator who objects to her intrusion:

Ginsberg – to the protesting Commentator:

“Then you have no idea with whom you are dealing.

(It’s not the first time I’ve had to break through a ceiling.)

I heard you say: “No man can leave or enter.”

So—as for any woman—what’s to prevent her?

(To Scalia) Nino, what’s going on here?”

The Commentator concedes the point and tells them both to justify their positions.

Commentator:

“I have resealed the exits!

No man—or woman—can leave or enter.

Now both of you can enjoy the pleasure of having me as your tormentor,

For both of you shall now stand trial.”

It is less a trial than a verbal jousting tournament. The opera arches across their respective points of view, Scalia and Ginsberg setting out and challenging each other’s famously divergent takes on constitutional interpretation.

What is the role of judges?

Scalia:

“The Justices are blind!

How can they possibly spout this—?

The Constitution says absolutely nothing about this.

We all know well what the Framers did say,

And (with certain amendments) their wording will stay,

And these words of our Fathers limit us, For, we are unelected.”

Are judges permitted to make, rather than interpret law?

Scalia:

“Flexible!”

Just another word for “liberal,”

Always “liberal” . . .

What folly! what folly!

And saying that our future’ll

Be suddenly “race-neutral,”

Is acting like an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand—

Because it cannot stand,

To see what plagues our land.”

There is a paeon to equality:

Ginsburg:

“In a nation, in a place

That, regardless of station or race,

Is a nation where all of us truly belong!

So, until every person is treated as equal,

Well beyond what the Founders initially saw,

Let our past and our present be merely the prequel

To a future enlightened by flexible law!

Law, law, law!”

The riposte:

Scalia:

“Ah! how very uplifting—

And yet so rootless and shifting.

“So, to us, I believe, they bequeath the decision . . .”

“Bequeath?”

To what secret knowledge are you the heiress?

If I disagree, am I then to be

The object of derision,

The hostis humani generis?

I have had more than I can swallow (Or even gargle)

Of this impossible-to-follow legalistic argle-bargle.”

There are belly-laugh one-liners:

Commentator (Aside):

“Even lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”

And trenchant, often poignant, apercus:

Scalia:

“But, if words can be whittled,

Until they are hollowed,

If laws are belittled,

Until barely followed,

Then my world is already dead.”

Having administered reciprocal verbal drubbings, the characters, in true Baroque opera tradition, turn to the audience for a summation. They do not mawkishly reconcile their differences but make the point that common humanity transcends their conflicting ideologies and we are treated to the aria: “We are different. We are one.” That’s hardly an anthem on the lips of crowds seething in Washington DC today.

Ginsburg:

“We serve justice together,

And that means we can speak with one voice.

And here, I choose to join him”

Duet:

“We are different. We are one.

The U.S. contradiction—”

Scalia:

“The tension we adore.”

Duet:

“Separate strands unite in friction,

To protect our country’s core.

This, the strength of our nation,

Thus is our Court’s design:

We are kindred,

We are nine.”

Duet:

“Always one decision from charting the course we will steer . . .

For our future Is unclear,

But one thing is constant—

The Constitution we revere.

We are stewards of this trust;

We uphold it as we must,

For the work of our Court is just begun . . .

And this is why we will see justice done:

We are different; We are one.”

None of this well-intentioned hokum can hide the fact that the Supreme Court is now the principal battleground of the November presidential election. The fact that Derrick Wang thought the subject matter worthy of operatic attention speaks volumes. In what other nation, would anyone bother to write an opera about judges, apart, of course from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe? But that was a critique of a fuddy-duddy establishment, not a commentary on a political arm-wrestling judiciary.

Forget the press commentary on the significance of the upcoming judicial appointment. This libretto tells you all you need to know – although in 54 dense pages. It is also, now, a touching obituary to both Justices.

The celebrity cult status of Justice Ginsberg is astonishing. When she entered the auditorium for a performance of Samson and Delila I attended at Washington’s Kennedy Center in 2019 the audience rose as one.

Spontaneous? The outwardly meek but savvy Justice had timed her entrance to perfection – as the lights dimmed and she was caught in the beams ushering her to her seat, causing just enough disturbance in the settled house to attract attention. No mean performer.

At the finale the Commentator concedes defeat and releases his captives from the sealed room.

Commentator:

“Then go back to your world,

To live, wise and strong.

And know,

That you can always,

Come to this celestial stage,

Where spirits and voices all rise,

All rise in song,

Here, where you belong!”

Now that they have shuffled off their mortal coils, have Justices Scalia/Ginsberg taken the Commentator at his word and joined him in his heaven? I do hope so. And, that they’re still giving him hell.