The Great Gatsby
By Lee Sandlin
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I still think a Gatsby opera is a good idea. One of the most striking things about the novel is how incipiently operatic it is–it’s practically a libretto as it stands. Behind the brittle, chic neoromantic prose, the story of Gatsby’s hopeless love for Daisy is told in a succession of eminently stageable big scenes: ecstatic assignations between doomed lovers and over-the-top confrontations with betrayed spouses. Scenes of high melodrama are carefully punctuated with grand set pieces–the all-night revelries at Gatsby’s mansion, the drunken afternoon parties at New York apartments–that don’t advance the plot but provide oodles of opportunities for local color. And as for Gatsby’s most indelible gesture–his arms-outstretched yearning for the green light across the harbor, the symbol of his unattainable happiness–what could be more extravagantly operatic? Puccini would have swooned with envy.
Harbison, alas, is no Puccini. He’s a fine composer, but he has no detectable gift for drama. I don’t know why he made the fatal decision to write the libretto himself. He seems to have gone about it by simply reading through the novel and underlining every famous bit he didn’t dare leave out. So with clockwork predictability Gatsby calls everybody “old sport”; Daisy’s horrible husband, Tom Buchanan, laments the imminent fall of civilization; the shadowy old gangster Wolfsheim shows off his sinister cufflinks (“Finest specimens of human molars”–odd that nobody wonders where he got them); and Nick Carraway winds it all up with his mysterious rhapsody, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Given such a deliberately strident and unlikable score, I probably shouldn’t complain too much about what the singers do with it. But I’m obliged to say that several people in the Lyric cast–mostly replacements for the big names who left after New York–are out of their depth. The general level of performance, at least the night I was there, is barely passable for a major opera house. Russell Braun was blustering and wooden as Nick. Patricia Risley’s Jordan Baker was ineptly mannered, and she spent so much time flouncing saucily I thought she’d dislocate a hip. Alicia Berneche’s Daisy was blankly passive. All of them sang with considerable strain and often failed to make themselves heard above the orchestra. Jennifer Dudley was much better as Tom Buchanan’s doomed mistress Myrtle, because she has a strong, lovely voice and because she threw herself into her performance with absurd abandon: she came off as an overwired lap dancer, but in this context any erotic charge was welcome.
But what matters with this opera is that it contains a lot of Tchaikovsky’s most gorgeous music, which the Lyric cast sings spectacularly. There isn’t a single weak performance. The quality of their work is so high that it seems a shame to single anybody out, but I was particularly struck by Katarina Dalayman as the doomed heroine Lisa. A couple of years ago I heard her do an excellent recital of Sibelius songs, with just the right measure of darkly brooding poetry, but I had no idea she could be as exhilaratingly theatrical as she is here. Another surprise was the Lyric orchestra, which turned in an uncharacteristically strong and assured performance under the baton of the new music director, Andrew Davis–a pleasant omen for seasons to come. And then there’s Vladimir Galouzine as Ghermann; the night I saw him he was pretty close to perfect. The role is a long one–the longest tenor part in Russian opera–but he tore through it with note-perfect clarity and sweetly lyrical ease. I swear he could have sung the entire opera over again without breaking a sweat. A performance like this one will do just fine till something better comes along.
