From the book to the film, then to the opera. We’ve seen this pattern before but in the making of Moby-Dick, the journey has been celebrated and dissected in thoughtful discussion.
The nation's epic
First, the novel, published by Herman Melville in 1851 – regularly described as America’s best known and/or best loved novel, (though many are the comments that it was impossible to get through.) There’s a very detailed account here.
It’s a book based in the author's knowledge and in true stories, though Melville (thankfully) did not record the full horror of the story that inspired him, the loss of the whaler Essex and its crew. The book was hardly a success in Melville’s lifetime, and he too faded to obscurity and wrote no more novels. Half a century later, it was rediscovered and reinvented as a great novel. Here’s a typical study guide.
Too much of a read? You can listen to the book in a free presentation prepared from an exhibition at University of Plymouth: Click here for the Moby Dick Big Read.
Each of the 135 chapters is read by a different reader, many famous names among them (e.g. Tilda Swanson starts it off, Sir David Attenborough gets Ch 105, and (then) Emma Ayres reads Ch 112.) The website presents them beautifully, each illustrated with photos or art works by current artists.
A book for our times? Author Philip Hoare thinks so - read here his 2019 article in Guardian. Earlier, in 2008, Stephen Kinzer observed, (“Call me Bush”), that Moby-Dick was “an eerily prophetic allegory about 21st-century America. It is now truly the nation’s epic”. And during lockdown, it was revisited as a story for our times – by journalist Paul Daley, who wrote: “No book more deeply and revealingly explains the spasm of madness through which the United States has passed in recent years than Moby Dick. For generations, it has been considered a masterpiece of world literature, but now can it be seen as an eerily prophetic allegory about 21st-century America. It is now truly the nation's epic.”
The monster film before Jaws
Then in 1956 came John Huston's film, starring Gregory Peck (who remained unsatisfied with his performance) in the role of Ahab.
The film’s ghastly ending – true to the book – is on YouTube here. For lightening relief, read the account of the model used for the whale, and how it was lost at sea. This includes an answer to the mystery of how a fully limbed film idol managed Ahab’s one leg: ‘Gregory Peck's last speech is delivered in the studio while riding the white whale's hump (a hole was drilled in the side of the whale so Peck could conceal his real leg).'
‘Great music in those pages’: but is there great music in this opera?
Jake Heggie’s is an American success story, which would in itself plot an opera . His early operas won mixed reception – for the modern but not quite modern music. Short version here. For much more detail, and insight into the music as well as the man, read this extended interview report.
“With Moby-Dick, the critical tide turned — even the Times praised the Dallas premiere — but there are still plenty of digs taken, at his popularity as much as his music. Carped Wall Street Journal critic Heidi Waleson of Moby-Dick, “Heggie and Scheer and their producers tamed this ferocious monster into a farm-raised fish suitable for the cautious palates of modern opera audiences.” The most common complaint among the wrecking crew is the derivative nature of his thematic materials….
"Where Heggie’s operas succeed, however, is where his peers so often fail: from prelude to curtain, he draws you to the edge of your seat with a theater artist’s deft hand. Primary colors of love, death and valor shine bright, but they are well-blended with subtle shades of morality and compassion. In true operatic tradition, he builds suspense through a wordless fusion of music and character. When Starbuck, poised to shoot the sleeping Ahab, puts down the musket, the underscore is the color of conscience. When Ahab seems to acquiesce to Starbuck’s wish to return to Nantucket, then reneges, you can hear the moral compass turn. Heggie’s music imbues narrative with the very essence of theatrical magic: even the inevitable is unexpected.”
Listen for this: as Carl Tanner, who sang Ahab in the East Coast premiere comments, Ahab's alienation from his crew is in the music.
“If they’re in major, I’m in minor. If they’re in minor, I’m in major. Plus there are all these time changes, so you can never stop counting. It’s some of the most difficult music I’ve ever encountered.”
For an insight into the genesis of the opera, and the ways of working together that brought Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer to this outcome, settle down to listen to them in this one and a half hour panel discussion the day after the SF premier. (Skip the first 5 minutes of acknowledgements!)
Listen for the motifs, and wait for the choruses. Clive Paget, in Limelight Magazine wrote:
"Once again, Heggie demonstrates why he’s one of today’s go-to composers for thoughtful, yet accessible music theatre. His imaginative score glitters with an impressionistic sheen, its motor rhythms paying a minor debt to minimalism. His intricate, effective, melismatic (when it pays to be), and most of all singable vocal lines owes something perhaps to Britten, but he’s very much his own man, a singer’s composer par excellence who always puts comprehensibility ahead of demanding effect. Memorable, yet never cheesy, his frequently catchy motifs are subtly deployed, drafting their own inner storyline even as Sheer’s economic, punchy and poetic libretto tells the more direct tale.
"If it seems odd to single out arias and choruses in a contemporary opera where such blatant shibboleths are generally eschewed, that is another of Heggie’s strengths. His choruses, lusty yet complex, bear comparison with that other shipboard take on Melville, Billy Budd... The ultimately disastrous mob mentality and tribalism of the cooped-up mariner comes over in testosterone-charged set pieces of considerable potency."
Is it a great opera? That NYTimes reviewer details the strengths and weaknesses of the music - read it here. The Chicago Tribune reviewer settled for strengths:
"Though some of the score teeters on the obvious, and though none of it proves particularly challenging, there’s no question that it sweeps inexorably – if sometimes too slowly – toward its tragic end. This is 21st century opera on an epic scale, Heggie’s writing for orchestra and chorus, especially, giving the work its muscular character but also most of its forward motion."
Our Production
We’re watching this two-act opera, with commentary, over two weeks and the production we’re showing is the brilliantly successful SFO premiere. (The opera was jointly commissioned by Dallas Opera, San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera, State Opera of South Australia, bless them, and Calgary Opera.) There's a review in Gramophone, here, of our recording. SF Opera, where we find it, describe it as ‘a high-octane operatic thriller’. Watch a trailer here.
This production - and subsequent ones - have earned awe for their presentation of the ocean and its terror and beauty - above all, terror. As this review of the Adelaide production described it:
"The staging of this opera is remarkable with a set that finds people up to ten metres above the stage on an almost vertical wall, leaping off of their perches and sliding down to the ground when their boat capsizes, people climbing high above the stage into the rigging, the young cabin boy, Pip, having been thrown into the sea, swimming for his life in raging seas, whalers melting blubber in a cauldron to get oil, the fire so hot that it looks like a room in Hades, handfuls of men in small sea-boats harpooning whales, and so much more.
"The seamless combination of projections, the physical set and live action is astounding, seeming to blend opera with theatre, circus, cinema and visual art into a multimedia extravaganza. It has to be seen to believed. If it were not for the power of the music and the superb performances it might have overwhelmed the production, but that did not happen, instead it became an equal part of a greater whole."
Ben Heppner premiered the role of Ahab in Dallas (with his own leg tied back so the wooden leg could be attached to it).
The SF production has – as did Adelaide - the triumphant heldentenor Jay Hunter Morris as Ahab, ‘the tormented soul whose quest for vengeance against a monstrous white whale is bought in human lives.’
Hunter-Morris is an interesting case of late arrival at the most difficult tenor roles. Here's an interview with him in his mid40s after he rose from understudy to star as Siegfried at the Met, to glowing reviews. He had to find how to survive the massive, tenor-destroying Wagner role - clearly helping him now as Ahab. (Heppner, ironically, who premiered Ahab, was one of the two tenors who'd withdrawn from the Met's Siegfried!)
There’s a fascinating interview with this "blue collar tenor" here. Read a review of the Adelaide production here.
(Could it be better on film than on stage? Interesting comments here.)
Lyn, 14 Feb, 2023
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