Iain Bell - A Harlot's Progress
Theater an der Wien, Vienna 2013
Mikko Franck, Jens-Daniel Herzog, Diana Damrau, Marie McLaughlin, Tara Erraught, Christopher Gillett, Nathan Gunn, Nicolas Testé
Theater an der Wien - Live Internet Streaming, 24 October 2013
Much in the same way that William Hogarth's prints lend a natural structure for Stravinsky to follow in his opera of The Rake's Progress, so too do the six engravings that make up the satirical morality tale of its companion piece provide a strong framework for A Harlot's Progress. Premiered in 2013 at the Theater an der Wien, British composer Iain Bell effectively fleshes out the six tableaux of A Harlot's Progress in music and drama in his first opera work. Even with the expertise and authenticity of a libretto noted London historian and author Peter Ackroyd, the work however never really brings any deeper sense of meaning, purpose or indeed humanity to Hogarth's sharp-edged satire.
The six scenes of Hogarth's 1732 engraving sequence for A Harlot's Progress could be described as follows: 1. Moll Arrives in London; 2. Moll is the Mistress of a Wealthy Gentleman; 3. Moll becomes a Common Prostitute; 4. Moll beats Hemp in Prison; 5. Moll is dying of Syphilis; 6. Moll's Wake. As each engraving of A Harlot's Progress represents a sequential stage in its morality tale, Bell's opera follows the same "progression", although Moll Hackabout's story is evidently and intentionally less a progress than a steady decline.
From the moment the young innocent country girl arrives at the Cheapside market in London "to find her fortune", the downward trajectory of her progress is indeed on the cards. Pressed into the service of Mother Needham, a procurer of young girls for wealthy gentlemen, Moll's fortunes decline steadily even as she lives a life of apparent luxury as the kept woman of Mr Lovelace. When the gentleman finds that Moll secretly has a lover of her own - the highwayman James Dalton - he throws her out onto the streets where she becomes a common prostitute, gets pregnant and dies ignominiously in a prison in a syphilitic condition.
No, A Harlot's Progress is not a barrel of laughs, but does Iain Bell's score and Peter Ackroyd's libretto really have to be so relentlessly miserable? Ackroyd's depiction of the period London is undoubtedly authentic in its character detail and language - which gets very colourful indeed - even if the work is consequently too wordy and descriptive. It certainly fleshes out the sequence of engravings into a credible narrative drama, and - like the image of Moll's hat and the presence of the baby in Hogarth's drawings, Ackroyd manages to use references that replicate the idea of the series being a cycle. That's all well and good, successfully bringing the series to life, but the opera doesn't advance further on Hogarth's ideas, nor bring anything new to the table.
As far as opera goes, the morality tale of the fallen woman story has by now been told many times in operas like La Traviata, Lulu, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and even most recently in Anna Nicole, and done in all the above with considerably more character, invention and colour. Even Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress recognised that there was humour, satire, irony and tragedy in Hogarth's work and found a way through neo-classical arrangements and pastiche to express the varied character of the tale. Neither Ackroyd nor Bell are able to match the wit and satire of Hogarth's prints, finding only misery, rutting, disease and death in it all.
The tone of Bell's score is consequently rather dark, drab and lacking in character. The overture sets the ominous tone for what is ahead, with rolling drums, fragmentary phrases, plucked notes and droning violin as bodies in rags crawl through the mist to the front of the stage. Individuals arise out of this seething mass, one stabbing and robbing another, others selling their wares, and the score picks out moments and characters with short phrases and serial runs. There's a full orchestra and a chorus employed here, but they are never used to bring any real dynamic to vary the tone or suggest any deeper level of individual character. Everyone in their own way is just miserable and out for themselves. Playing on the theme of Paul Bunyan's 'The Pilgrim's Progress', Hogarth's prints were a satire exposing the hypocrisy behind the society and its establishment figures in their exploitation of good people like Tom Rakewell and Moll Hackabout, but there's very little of that evident here.
The Theater an der Wien's staging is simple but effective enough for the purposes of connecting the scenes of the drama together. Although the costumes are approximate to the period (with some exceptions), the set wisely doesn't pile on the grimy misery of Georgian London. A stylised backdrop of a white wooden cage encloses the drama with panels that increasingly shut down sections on Moll's life as black ashes fall down upon the stage. Moving to contemporary opera is a considerable challenge for Diana Damrau and far from the Mozart roles she is most famous for, but she carries it off and gives a good performance. Tara Erraught's Kitty is also impressive, and Nathan Gunn is fine as James Dalton, but despite the attention paid to fleshing out the detail of the drama, there's not much for the characters to do here other than play out the misery of their existence.
Philip Glass - The Perfect American
Teatro Real, Madrid, 2013
Dennis Russell Davies, Phelim McDermott, Christopher Purves, David Pittsinger, Donald Kaasch, Janis Kelly, Marie McLaughlin, Sarah Tynan, Nazan Fikret, Rosie Lomas, Zachary James, John Easterlin, Juan Noval-Moro, Beatriz de Gálvez, Noelia Buñuel
Medici.tv / ARTE Internet Streaming, 5th February 2013
It's not too hard to see the point being made about in Philip Glass's new opera based on the last days of Walt Disney. The irony is hammered home repeatedly and with no great subtlety in either the libretto or the musical arrangements. His animation and the safe family-friendly ideals they espouse may be revered by generations of children and their parents, but those values are derived from a rather more flawed human individual. An old-fashioned, smalltown country-boy with Republican ideals, intolerant of progress and union activity, Walt Disney is depicted in The Perfect American as a megalomaniac who not only took the credit for the hard work and talent of others, but he treated them appallingly as well. So he wasn't a nice guy. Why make an opera about him? Well, if Walt Disney and his works are held up as being the epitome of "The Perfect American", even ironically, then there might be some merit in exploring prevailing bigoted attitudes and intolerance. If that's its purpose however, the opera singularly fails to make its case.
Whether Walt Disney should be accorded the stature of being the subject for opera isn't so much in question then as much as whether a study of the animation giant as the "Perfect American" really has as much to say about the society we live in today as the subjects of previous Glass biographical works - Einstein (Einstein on the Beach), Gandhi (Satyagraha) or the great reforming Egyptian pharaoh (Akhnaten). Whatever you think of Walt Disney or his children's animation films, he's not exactly the first person who comes to mind when you look around for a representative icon of American values. Yes, the Disney animation studio was certainly one of the earliest and biggest exports of American family values, the empire of the Mouse and the Duck expanding to conquer and achieve universal recognisability in even the most remote corners of the world. As for whether the personal attitudes of Disney persist and hold influence, there's a case could certainly be made for that, but not laid specifically at the door of Walt Disney the man.
The idea that he may have been as important as Thomas Edison or Henry Ford may form a part of Walt Disney's self-delusion, but there is no reason given why the audience should believe it or even any suggestion that anyone takes the comparison seriously. This is a fault that lies throughout the whole premise of the opera. Based on a novel by Peter Stephen Jungk, a fictionalised account of Walt Disney that recounts the last few months of his life, The Perfect American seems to be attempting to suggest that the flaws and delusions of one man have some kind of wider implication, but in reality it just presents the twisted views of one small-minded individual that seem to have no place or purpose on the operatic stage. The same could perhaps be said about Mark Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole, but the tragic story of the rise and demise of Anna Nicole Smith could arguably be said to reflect the pitfalls in following the American Dream with a broader historical scope (Marilyn Monroe) and more cutting social observation, at least on the compromised position of women within that Dream.
Like Anna Nicole, The Perfect American similarly relies heavily on a depiction of the corrupting influence of smalltown America. But whereas Anna Nicole Smith saw it as a "shithole" that she had to escape from, Walt Disney - in the kind of obvious expositional language that is prevalent throughout Rudy Wurlitzer's libretto ("Everything that I've become has its roots in Marceline"), looks back fondly on his origins, seeing in his hometown all the good old-fashioned American values that he holds dear. Just to emphasise his position as a reactionary and an unpleasant man, his relationship with Wilhelm Dantine - an animator on 'The Sleeping Beauty' - and their fall-out over union activities is the linking element between the three acts, but Dantine is still devastated when Walt dies. The libretto's idea of any other kind of character development is limited to snappy mottos ("Never say die!"), common clichés (Mickey Mouse being "more famous than Santa" and "more recognisable that Jesus") and banal observations ("That's what he does, spares everyone the worst") that don't so much highlight the nature of Disney as illustrate the lack of imagination of the libretto and the treatment.
Even those areas where the work tries a less literal approach, the implications are no less obvious and at the same time no more revealing of the man other than the scale of his self-delusion. He expresses his desire to a nurse at the hospital to be cryogenically frozen so that he can be revived in the future, and hubristically compares his cartoons to Greek gods, believing that his work and his beliefs in good conservative American values will "live forever". A little more colour is added when Walt is contrasted with Andy Warhol, who was born in the same year, or in a sequence where Walt has a conversation with a robot Abraham Lincoln, but even there, it seems like just thrown in as an opportunity to allow Disney to express some pretty distasteful views on the abolition of slavery leading to the degradation of traditional American values.
The latter sequences allow director Phelim Mc Dermott and designer Dan Potra a bit more freedom to experiment with the staging, but to be honest, it's impressive throughout. It's not on the same scale of brilliance of McDermott and his Improbable ensemble's work for Glass's sublime Satyagraha a few years ago, but that narrative-free work called out for a strong collaborative theatrical expression. Here however, they still manage nonetheless to find an imaginative way to work with the rather more banal reality of The Perfect American, keeping it visually engaging and thematically relevant through projected animation sequences and supernumeraries playing the larger-than-life rabbits of Disney's mind, avoiding any Mom and Apple-Pie clichés or overly literal depictions of small-town Americana.
The performances of the cast at the Madrid world premiere run in the Teatro Real (viewed via Internet streaming) were also exceptionally good. Christopher Purves was an outstanding Walt Disney, but all the cast managed to inject some personality into their characters and even some sense of melody into their singing. As scored by Glass however, there wasn't much of that in the lifeless orchestration of bland repetition that lacked and real dynamic or variety in tempo and seemed to have no sense of a distinct dramatic character or expression for the work. It's a long way from Glass at his most original and operatic best in Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha or Akhnaten, but Glass has shown himself in more recent times to still be creatively inspired when the subject (Kepler) or the source (Kafka, Cocteau) are worthy. Walt Disney and The Perfect American doesn't seem to fire the composer's imagination this time, and it seems hardly likely to excite audiences when it comes to the English National Opera this summer.
The Perfect American is available to view via internet streaming - with some region restrictions to the UK - on Medici.tv and on ARTE Live Web.
