Normally, at least in San Francisco, the summer music offerings tend to be safe and crowd-pleasing. At the moment, for instance, the San Francisco Symphony is advertising a series of movie-score evenings as its featured seasonal fare. (But then, the SFS appears to be in the process of an irreversible decline, following on its idiotic parting with the much-treasured maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen earlier this year.) Across the street at the San Francisco Opera, however, the tone in June has been very different, with three unusual productions on the boil at once. If they are not all equally successful, they nonetheless represent a very brave attempt to do something serious and interesting in this normally silly season.
The first of the three I attended was an import from the Komische Oper in Berlin: The Magic Flute, directed by Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade. Since Barrie Kosky is my favorite opera director in the world, I was most eager to see this production—and, perhaps predictably, I was most disappointed in its shortcomings. Since I will be publishing a full-length discussion of this Magic Flute (and one other) in the Winter issue of The Threepenny Review, I won’t go on at length here about what went wrong. Suffice to say that a brilliant idea—to borrow the methods and style of 1920s silent cinema and apply them to this fairy-tale plot—turned out to be incredibly tedious in practice. I suppose I could have shut my eyes and just enjoyed Mozart’s terrific music, but that is against my principles. So I suffered through the two-hours-plus of flat-screen presentation and delirious animation, wishing at every minute that I was back at one of the truly great Kosky operas I’ve seen in the past.
A much better production, originally directed by Christopher Alden in London in 2008 and brought to San Francisco relatively intact, has been given to Handel’s Partenope. I am a Handel fan of the first order, but even I have to acknowledge that this nearly plotless opera from 1730, featuring only six singers and lasting for well over three hours, did not represent the composer’s finest hour. Yet thanks to the lively cast and the intelligent stage design (which frequently interacted with each other, due to the cast’s special abilities), this minor opera came off as a real treat. The two countertenors, Nicholas Tamagna and Carlo Vistoli, were especially wonderful: not only did they both have beautifully pure, unforced, melodically nuanced voices, but they were also marvelously adept at the physical parts of their roles. Tamagna, in particular, had the grace and humor of a young Charlie Chaplin. His feats included singing as he fell down the stairs, singing as he twirled a top hat on a cane, singing as he danced a clever jig—you name it. The soprano Julie Fuchs was also excellent in the title role, though I could have wished she had not been made out to be a nymphomaniacal dominatrix: Handel never grudged his women a strong sex drive, but I guess Alden couldn’t quite imagine that. And Alek Shrader, the tenor who performed Emilio, was also pretty great in his part, though why Emilio had to be played as the photographer Man Ray (the entire production was set in 1920s Paris) is beyond me. Still, I didn’t mind the French-bohemian costumes, and I loved the elegant set, so I was able to let this little senseless distraction go.
The set of Innocence, the late Kaija Saariaho’s last opera, was a stunner too, but it was also an essential part of the performance: in fact, I can’t imagine a production done with a different set. This one, designed by Chloe Lamford, slowly rotated clockwise throughout the entire hour and forty minutes of the intermissionless production. One side of the huge central structure consisted of a two-story Helsinki house at which a wedding was being celebrated; the other side showed the interior floors of an international high school at which a mass shooting had taken place ten years earlier. The connection between these two events (the brother of the groom had been the shooter, while a waitress hired to serve at the party turned out to be the mother of one of the dead girls) formed the gripping plot of the opera.
I use the word “plot” advisedly. Being present at this opera was, in a way, like watching an incredibly suspenseful but also highly disturbing movie. The program acknowledged as much by stating on the synopsis page, “The story is intended to unfold in real time as we experience it as audience members. The full synopsis can be found on page 44, but please note that it does include plot spoilers.” The idea of spoilers in an opera plot is something new to me, but then again, this was the U.S. premiere of a 2021 opera. There was also the fact that Saariaho and her co-creators (Sofi Oksanen as the writer of the original Finnish libretto, Aleksi Barrière as the multi-lingual librettist and dramaturg) had chosen to take up such ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter. To say they did it tastefully or tactfully is not quite right: the impact of the production would have been far less if we did not feel the violence so viscerally, and that applies to emotional violence at least as much as to dead bodies. But it was done well and powerfully, and the music—all recitative or purely instrumental, no arias whatsoever, in Saariaho’s uniquely contemporary but never coldly abstract style—strengthened the effect throughout.
To put on a new opera with a libretto in nine different languages is challenging enough; to have it be on such a disturbing subject makes the challenge doubly or triply hard. Yet the San Francisco Opera rose to the occasion. I can’t say I approved of their side trimmings—for instance, the full-day violence-in-the-schools seminar and all its surrounding platitudes, which I took as the equivalent of the annoying modern habit of providing “triggers warnings”—but I understand why they felt they had to soften the blow. What I do approve of is the number of young people who filled the auditorium on the evening I saw the opera, along with their wholehearted enthusiasm for the production itself. I myself applauded strongly (initially for the stage crew, who took the first bow, but also for the 21 principals, 40 choristers, and 65 orchestra musicians), but what I really felt by the end of this show was exhausted, wrung out, my muscles as tense as if I had just been through some terrible event. I am very glad I saw Innocence, but I hope never to see it again—it was just too painful. Still, it is salutary to be reminded that opera, at its freshest and most original, can do this to an audience, and I am truly grateful to the San Francisco Opera for bringing me that discovery.