An opera and its production are so closely linked that it is sometimes impossible to judge them separately. You can try to assess the music alone by repeatedly listening to a recording in the comfort of your own home, but that will give you just a fraction of the whole opera. The rest is available only in a theater. Only there, watching the performance and seeing the stage picture at the same time as you hear the singers’ voices, can you get a sense of what the composer and librettist were really up to. And yet, ironically, this full experience will by definition also be an attenuated one, for in the theater the initial creators will be joined by the producer, the stage director, the costume, set, and lighting designers, the orchestra conductor, the actor-singers—in short, all the people who both make the opera and make it something other than the composer’s own original work. So you will probably have to see many different productions before you can arrive at a definitive judgment about which aspects, which particular flaws and virtues, belong to the opera itself as opposed to the individual performance.
You can, however, take a guess. I have seen only one production of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd and one production of Leos Janacek’s The Makropoulos Case—both in the same week, as it happens, during their recent runs at the Metropolitan Opera House. Each production was very good, and I am not at all sorry I went to either, but the Janacek was certainly the more gripping experience. This, I think, was not only because the performances were slightly superior, but also because Janacek understood, in a way Britten did not, how to make sung theater come alive on a stage.
First, to get the equivalences out of the way: the stage designs for the two operas were both brilliant. If anything, William Dudley’s set for Billy Budd—a stage-sized ship which rose up to reveal the below-decks cabins, story upon story, and then collapsed as needed—was even more striking than Anthony Ward’s three beautiful Makropoulos interiors, each gorgeously lit by Howard Harrison. But neither set, for its purposes, could have been bettered.
As for the lead singers, Nathan Gunn was a terrific, endearing Billy Budd, his baritone voice movingly inflected, his diction clear, his acting and gestures all superlatively done. James Morrison, who played Claggart, was perhaps too old for the part. (He played it, after all, in the original performances of this John Dexter production, in 1978.) John Daszak, who sang Captain Vere—the tenor role Britten wrote for his companion, Peter Pears—was vocally adept, but not quite charismatic enough to support the whole opera. But here is where production problems begin to bleed into more basic structural problems. Couldany Starry Vere carry the whole show, as Britten’s score and E. M. Forster’s libretto force him to do? When Melville wrote “Billy Budd,” he understood that though the moral dilemma and the guilt-ridden aftermath resided with the captain, the pathos of the story lay with Billy. We need to fall in love with him—what’s more, we need to project ourselves inside him, feeling the frustration of his stammer as if it were in our own throats—for the unfairness of the tale to wreak its havoc on our emotions. By choosing to begin and end the opera with Captain Vere, Britten and Forster turned this from a passionate tale to a philosophical disquisition about good and evil. There are moments of pathos still, as when the old sailor Dansker goes below-decks to give food and water to the condemned Billy, and Billy winningly thanks him for his kindness; but such moments are too few to sustain the weight of a four-hour opera. Melville’s story did not need to choose between emotional impact and moral elucidation, for narrative prose—which intimately darts in and out of individual characters, allowing us to imagine ourselves as each in turn, or as none of them—is cleverly designed to do both. Opera needs to choose, however, and in this case I think the composer and the librettist chose to emphasize the wrong strand. But it’s possible, as I say, that a different performance might cause me to change my mind.
Janacek had the advantage over Britten here, in that he chose to base his opera on a stage play rather than a story—and a play, moreover, that featured an opera diva as its central character. But this choice was due to intelligence, not luck, and he deserves credit for it. More intelligent still was his understanding of the relationship between the sung and the spoken word. If I had to point to a single realm in which The Makropoulos Case triumphs over Billy Budd, it would be this: the sung line in Janacek’s opera always works dramatically as well as musically. In Britten’s case, word and music are occasionally allied but more often at odds, so that the straightforward vocal rhythms of the Forster/Melville prose fight against the more diffuse tones introduced by the composer—as they do, I have to say, in much other English-language opera, especially of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I do not know Czech, but even I can tell that Janacek’s singular genius lay in converting the spoken tongue into music. Apparently he arrived at this ability in a very practical way, for—according to the Met program notes—the composer “would roam the streets for hours, notebook in hand, eavesdropping on conversations and translating the rise and fall of casual speech into musical notation, taking special care to capture the word-rhythms in all their metrical complexity.” In this way Janacek was able to use Karel Capek’s theatrical dialogue nearly wholesale, making the long speeches succeed as opera through the skill with which he scored them.
In the Met production, this attentive scoring is amply served by the great Karita Mattila, who carries every scene as the outsized, heartless, glamorously attractive three-hundred-year-old Elina Makropoulos, currently making her living as the acclaimed opera singer Emilia Marty. (As she says at one point, “You can’t live three hundred years without changing your name a few times.”) The supporting cast members are all great too, from the weak, needy heir, Albert Gregor (Richard Leech), to the assertive attorney, Dr. Kolenaty (Tom Fox), to the cleaning woman (Jane Shaulis) who drolly picks up the flowers tossed to Emilia on the stage. Each embodies perfectly, in acting andsinging, the stage character he or she has been assigned, so that we feel immediately drawn in, as we are by a clever play, without the artificial distance opera usually imposes.
And in this opera, Janacek does not have to make a choice between feeling and philosophy, because the only true feeling is in the philosophy, in the contemplation of what would happen to human experience if we were allowed to live on forever. There is no question of individual pathos here, as there is in Billy Budd. Most of the characters are equally dislikable, equally beyond the reach of our intimate sympathy. The overall tone is sardonic, and even the most pathetic figures (like young Janek, who kills himself out of love for Emilia Marty) are too slight to earn our tears. If, by the end of this opera, we are brought to a condition approaching Aristotelian awe, it is through forces larger than mere sympathetic identification. The situation itself moves us: we are actually made to grasp, and to fear, the consequences of immortality. And Janacek’s music—with its perfect connection to everyday speech, its own practical understanding of what it means to be human—is what finally leads us to this realization.
—May 14, 2012