Chasing Ice -- Film Review A Late Quartet -- Film Review Moby-Dick San Francisco Opera Performance

Chasing Ice

Directed by Jeff Orlowski

  

This is a film about making a film, rather than the film that should have been made.  I think a good opportunity was missed.  This film should have been about the melting ice, the retreating glaciers, and the implications this has for the world.  Instead it was a self indulgent portrayal of James Balog, the photographer in charge of the mission, the suffering hero, and the trials and tribulations of making a film in the harsh conditions of the Arctic. 

What is good in the film is the spectacular photography of the glaciers, ice formations, and seascapes in the frozen worlds of Iceland, Greenland, and Alaska.  The film visually documents the dramatic retreat of the glaciers, which is accelerating with the warming of the Earth.  They placed 25 cameras set to continually photograph numerous glaciers throughout the Arctic creating a time-lapse record of the ice melt and retreat of the glaciers that is undeniable.  There is powerful footage of a massive calving from the Colombia glacier in Alaska the size of Manhattan.  One cannot help but be awed by the visual beauty and obvious, alarming decline of these unbelievably massive glaciers. 

The film falls short in establishing the significance of its own report.  So what if the glaciers are melting?  Let them melt.  Who cares?  The film does not deal with this.  It does not spell out the implications of all of this melting ice for climate, the oceans, and human societies.  There is brief, passing mention that 150 million people will be affected by a sea level rise of one foot, but who, or how, and over what period of time is not described. 

The problem is that too much time is spent on James Balog and the gory details of how the film was made.  All of this should be relegated to minor footnotes.   Frankly, I don't find James Balog particularly interesting, nor his wife, his kids, his knee, nor all the different problems he had getting his cameras to work under the inhospitable conditions of the glaciers.  He is much too grandiose and masochistic for my taste.  Tramping through ice water in his bare feet to get the best shot.  Gimme a break!  He thinks he is going to save the world through his self sacrifice.  But carbon dioxide is at 391 parts per million and it is still climbing.  That is about 30% more than the maximum over the last 800,000 years.  The Earth is in for some rough sailing ahead and there is nothing we can do about it.  The only question is how extreme the catastrophe will be and how quickly it will rain down upon us.  Balog claims he wants to inform people and get the message out about global warming;  he should do that and get himself out of the way.   

Much of the film is preoccupied with the petty troubles of the expedition and establishing what a great photographer James Balog is and his dedication to the project and how much he is prepared to suffer and punish his body to accomplish this noble challenge.  But the issues this film should be dealing with are far bigger than James Balog, his life, or any of the difficulties in making the film.  The dirty laundry of how the film was made should be kept well in the background.  His photographic work is stunning and incomparable.  He really is the Ansel Adams of the Arctic.  If he would put his work in the forefront instead of himself, I would go see anything he does.

This film offers some magnificent views of the glaciers of Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska, and it establishes without question that what is going on is well outside the boundaries of normal fluctuation.  Maybe the filmmakers thought that simply showing the glaciers and documenting the severity of their melting would be too boring, and therefore they felt they needed this human interest aspect to draw people in and hold their interest.  Actually it is the other way around.  I found myself getting impatient watching them figure out the best way to mount a camera on the side of a mountain.  I want to see the pictures they took with that camera once they finally got it to work.  So the film is worth seeing, but it gets a little tiresome and falls far short of its potential. 

 

A Late Quartet

Directed by Yaron Zilberman

  

This is the story of a classical string quartet in crisis due to the illness and departure of its cellist and senior member, Peter Mitchell (Christopher Walken).  It is a powerful, moving story, but I doubt that it will have a wide audience.  The audience for this film is devotees of classical music, students in music conservatories, and fusty old conservatives with very conventional ideas about music, sex, and relationships.

It is a film for mature audiences.  When I say "mature audience" I don't mean that it has sexual content and is therefore not suitable for young people.  On the contrary, I think sexual content is especially appropriate for young people because they are most curious and preoccupied with sexual feelings and issues, and should therefore be taking every opportunity to learn about it in any way they can.  "Mature audience," for me, means an audience that has lived long enough to grasp the complexities and layers of personal relationships that have continued over a long period of time.  "Mature" means having perspective, being able to see the context in which passions and longings are played out, understanding the limitations and trade-offs, and ambivalences that are inevitable in human relations.  Being able to see that things change and evolve, and what is true today, may not be true tomorrow, and what was true yesterday may no longer be true today however much we might wish it to be.  It means being able to face up to what we are as people defined by what we have done or not done, rather than by what we have wished or strived for.  Young people can grasp these things intellectually, but they don't know, and can't know, what it feels like and looks like to a much older person.  That is just the nature of being younger or older.  That is the meaning of "maturity."   So when I say that this film is for a mature audience, this is what I am talking about.  The issues are mature and the themes are mature.  I don't mean to say that young people should not see it.  They absolutely should, because it will help them understand older people.  But the issues of the film are not their issues, with the exception of the sexual affairs between the younger girls and the older men, which the film treats very badly, trivializing them, and dismissing them in a rather callous, nonsensical fashion. 

I like the subject matter, and the film is very well made, but I have a number of problems with the script.  The female characters are not well drawn, and I think, given short shrift.  The most promising character in the whole film, Alexandra (Imogen Poots), is turned into a confused, spineless, simpering jellyfish.  Juliette, (Catherine Keener) the violist and wife of the second violinist, Robert (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and the mother of Alexandra, is not fleshed out at all.  She becomes a very conventional and inadequate housewife and mother whose only asset seems to be her role as violist in the quartet.  She fails as a wife and she fails as a mother, and is rather problematic throughout the saga.  She seems to want to keep everything the way it has been, but she is not very effective in anything she attempts and we do not see who she is in any depth. 

Although sex plays a major role in the story line, the film upholds very conventional middle class attitudes toward sex and relationships, which have nothing to offer but disappointment, defeat, and failure, and you're supposed to just live with that.  Robert, the second violinist, whose dissatisfaction with his role in the quartet and his marriage is one of the dynamic forces in the film, ends up being defeated in all his attempts to shake things up and alter his position vis-a-vis the others in the group.  He starts an affair with a young flamenco dancer (Liraz Charhi) that gets nipped in the bud by his wife after their first night together, and the very appealing girl is rudely dismissed.  He should have fought harder for her, but he was a total wimp and caved in to his wife with hardly a protest.  The incident did prompt them to hash out some of the issues in their marriage, which are of long standing, as such things usually are, but they don't really get anywhere.  Juliette takes the typical attitude of the American middle class woman and is prepared to trash the whole marriage because her husband fucked a young dancer one time.  It's so idiotic.  I've seen people blow up twenty year marriages, sell houses, move long distances, fight bitterly over kids and money, all on account of a little bit of outside fucking.  Americans are crazy.  So while the film panders to conventional attitudes, it fails to offer anything constructive or insightful.  It doesn't raise any questions.  It just proffers pat answers that it takes for granted. 

Similarly with the affair between Daniel (Mark Ivanir), the first violinist, and Alexandra, the daughter of Robert and Juliette.  Daniel and Alexandra have probably known each other since she was born.  The first question you have to ask yourself is why this affair even happened?  As the film presents it -- which I don't quite believe -- Robert recommends Alexandra to Daniel for violin lessons.  Daniel treats her like a child and belittles her.  He tells her she is not ready to tackle Beethoven's Opus 131.  I suspect that is something music students often hear from their teachers, that certain pieces are beyond their understanding and they should wait until they are older or more mature before they tackle them.  What a lot of quatch!  So what if you make mistakes?  So what if you don't understand it fully?  Go ahead and plunge into it, if you feel a strong urge beckoning you!  Defy them!  I mean it!  Of course you'll play it better when you're fifty.  You better hope you will.  But you have to start where you are, when you feel the desire and enthusiasm to tackle the challenging new project.  If you wait for a bunch of old people to bless you and tell you you're ready, you'll never do anything.  She should have ripped the music book in half and stormed out.  Instead she seduces him.  She is the aggressor and the initiator of the affair.  She seemed to be seeking his approval, and she wasn't getting it through her violin playing, so she had another way of getting it that she knew would work for sure.  OK, so once you get him, what do you do with him?  Here the film reaches its low point of nonsense.  The affair is quickly discovered by the others in the group, in particular, by her parents, and they go into apoplexy.  Why?  Why is it so objectionable to them?  The film treats their disapproval as something self evident and unproblematic.  But the affair is quite natural and almost predictable.  Robert, in the most dramatic moment of the film --, and very much out of character for a string quartet -- punches Daniel in the face and knocks him off his chair during rehearsal -- a punch that will probably be applauded by every second violinist around the world.  But it is total nonsense.   Robert becomes a ridiculous figure, flailing about violently, out of control, completely helpless and totally ineffective.   Alexandra stands up very admirably to her mother, but then turns around and inexplicably dismisses Daniel and ends the affair that she just started, although Daniel is firm in his resolve to continue with it in the face of all the opposition -- the only one in the film with any real character.  But this makes Alexandra look like a weak, confused, immature idiot.  This is why I think this film treats the women with pronounced hostility.  All of the sexual affairs -- which are initiated by the young women -- are quickly and definitively crushed, but for no good reason.  The film is simply hostile to sexual relationships that don't fit into the mold of conventional middle class marriage.  This gives the film an atmosphere of mundane conservatism.  It is very ordinary.  Nothing like Beethoven. 

I should probably say something about the Beethoven Quartet Opus 131 in C# minor that plays a thematic role in the film.   The choice of this particular quartet as a centerweight to this film is very appropriate because of the broad emotional range found throughout the quartet from anguish, contention, and turmoil, to relaxed, airy, lighthearted fun, as well as some enigmatic aspects that are difficult to penetrate.  This quartet is rather unusual.  It is in seven movements instead of the usual four, and Beethoven wanted them played without the usual pauses between the movements.  So it makes for a rather long, continuous piece that is demanding for both performers and audience.  Beethoven expected people to have long attention spans.  He should have lived in America for a while.  The piece is somber and anguished.  The first movement is painful.  It is a fugue that stabs at your heart.  The second and fifth movements are much more upbeat, especially the fifth movement, which is essentially a scherzo.   It is somewhat repetitious, but vigorous and lively.  The second movement is bright and almost lilting.  The third and sixth movements are very short and seem to serve as introductions to the longer, more substantial movements that follow.   The sixth movement is a somber, mournful dirge that segues into the vigorous final movement.  The fourth movement is quite long, nearly fifteen minutes.  I found it difficult to relate to.  I couldn't seem to get a fix on it, emotionally.  There seems to be a longing that is not well defined.  The anguish is there, but it is subdued, almost below the surface, threatening to break through in points but never quite taking over.  Some of the good cheer fleetingly appears and then vanishes just as suddenly.  I don't get it, and I think it is the heart of the quartet.  It seems to be the center of gravity of the whole piece.  The last movement is rough, contentious, and full of struggle and drama.  This quartet is a mature piece that challenges both the listener and the performer.  It is very fitting to the issues besetting this group of people. 

The film has a lot to say about music and performance that will be of keen interest to musicians.  I found it to be very touching and moving.  It could have been a great movie if it had not taken such a conventional, mediocre attitude toward the story line.  At the end of the film the cellist is replaced by a new member, who has worked with the group before, and is judged to be a good fit that will maintain the established character of the group.  So everything stays the way it was.  The quartet continues on playing the same music with the same character and style.  The sexual affairs with the young girls are ended.  The marriage seems to be limping along as it had before.  Everything ends up pretty close to the way it was at the beginning.  Only the cellist is replaced.  And that is supposed to be a happy, harmonious ending.  What a crock!  It makes a mockery of the whole film.  What was all the contention and struggle about if we end up with essentially the same quartet, playing in the same style, in the same personal relationships?  Does the mere presence of a stable cellist subdue all the conflict and dissatisfaction that was afflicting this group from long before this movie started?  This film should be titled "The Triumph of Conservatism and Conventionality in Classical Music and in Life."

This quartet should have broken up like the Beatles.  I thought about that as I was watching it.  The married couple should have separated or divorced.  The daughter should have moved in with the first violinist.  The second violinist should have left, founded his own quartet and been very successful, and the flamenco dancer should have gotten pregnant with the second violinist's child.  Now that would have been a good movie. 

Moby Dick

San Francisco Opera Performance

October 26, 2012

  

Moby-Dick has been a source of joy and inspiration to me for many years.  I often pick it up and peruse it and read sections from it.  I came to this opera well disposed toward its subject hoping to like it.  I knew that it would necessarily be an abbreviation;  selections would have to be made, a concept and an approach would have to be developed.  It is not an easy book to adapt for a staged presentation.  Much of the book is reflective commentary, metaphorical descriptions, and symbolic representations. Any attempt to produce this for the stage will necessarily be an interpretation.  One cannot expect the full grandeur of Melville's sweeping prose to be reproduced in an opera that spans even several hours.  I watched it suspending judgment, stifling a growing dissatisfaction until a point in the second act where Ahab and Starbuck sing a duet, and Starbuck tries to cloy Ahab into turning back from his quest to find the White Whale with sentimentalizing images of a boy waiting in a window in far off Nantucket.  This nauseated me, and at that point I stopped trying to like it.  The duet comes from section 132 of the book, entitled The Symphony.  Starbuck and Ahab do indeed have such a conversation.  Ahab recounts to Starbuck how he has been at sea for forty years, how he married a young girl when he was past fifty, and left her the day after the wedding to go back to the sea, "I see my wife and child in thine eye," he tells him.  Starbuck, seizing the chance, gives vent to his longing to flee this perilous life at sea and importunes the Captain to turn back and head for Nantucket.  The operatic recreation engenders a feeling of a common bond between Starbuck and Ahab, that Ahab shares Starbuck's homesickness and  longing for the security and warmth of the hearth and home.  It is not a faithful representation of that encounter and grossly misrepresents Ahab.  They misunderstand Ahab's comment to Starbuck, "I see my wife and child in thine eye."  What he meant was that he saw in Starbuck's eye the longing to return to his home, his family in far off Nantucket.  He did not mean that he felt the same longing.  Ahab had long repudiated and walled himself off from any such feeling or desire for connection.  Starbuck briefly reminded him of such long buried feelings, but he was not about to allow them to be rekindled.  When Starbuck is making his plea, the text tells us, "Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last cindered apple to the soil.  'What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? . .  "  At the end of Ahab's reverie Starbuck has gone.  "But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the mate had stolen away."  (132)

This conversation is not properly represented by a duet.  It is a supplication by Starbuck that was futile from the beginning.  Ahab is beyond reach.  These sentimental images of a boy's face in a window will never reach Ahab.  Starbuck and Ahab are not singing from the same score, and they have very different melodies in their hearts. 

When the Pequod meets the Rachel, another whaling vessel they encountered at sea (128), the captain of the Rachel pleaded with Ahab to assist in the search for his son, who was lost in a small boat pursuing the White Whale on the previous day.  

Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab; and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.

"I will not go," said the stranger, "till you say aye to me.  Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case.  For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab -- though but a child and nestling safely at home now -- a child of your old age too -- Yes, yes, you relent; I see it -- run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards,"

"Avast," cried Ahab -- "touch not a rope-yarn;" then in a voice that prolongingly moulded every word -- "Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.  Even now I lose time.  Good bye, good bye.  God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go."  . . . Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest suit. (128)

This gave me the clue to why I found this opera unsatisfying.  It took me some time to figure it out and articulate it.  I almost gave up and decided not to review it, but I persisted.  I felt I owed it to all those many people who will come to this opera blissfully ignorant of Melville's magnificent original.  They will sit through this opera and emerge thinking they have seen Moby-Dick.  That would be a travesty.  On the night I went I saw a large group of adolescents that I surmised were some sort of class on a field trip, perhaps a high school literature class that was reading Moby-Dick.  I hope the teacher makes the students redouble their application to the book after this performance.  It is for them that I write this.

The problem with this opera is not a matter of facts or details, although there are many alterations of the original, but of spirit.  This is a voyage of death and doom by men who are practically indifferent to life, the only exception being Starbuck.  The opera treats them as a group of men who all harbor this middle class longing to get the job done and get back to their families and children, perhaps akin to soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq. 

The book opens with the immortal line "Call me Ishmael."  The opera does not heed that admonition.  It does not use the voice of Ishmael.  Ishamel does not appear in this opera.  The character closest to Ishmael is called "Greenhorn" in the opera.    It was a significant departure from the tone and voice of the text that indicates that these authors intended to rewrite the story of Moby-Dick rather than faithfully recreate it.  There is nothing wrong with taking inspiration from a classic work or the work of a predecessor and creating one's own variant or take off from it.  Many brilliant works of art have originated that way.  Sometimes the derivative works are actually better and more successful than the original source.   The risk that is run by taking a classic of the stature of Moby-Dick, reworking it and then putting the same title on it as the original, is that you invite comparisons between the classic work and your own revamped version which are unpromising.  Let us consider the opening passage:

Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.  It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation.  Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp and drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.  This is my substitute for pistol and ball.  With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.  (1)

Ishmael is a man on the verge of suicide, who has no strong investment in life, who chooses the peril and adventure and loneliness of life at sea in the company of likeminded men equally absorbed within their own private dungeons of torment and regret. 

Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this . . . therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them -- 'Come hither, broken hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.  Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death.  Come hither! put up thy grave-stone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!'  (112)

It is this spirit of despair of life and indifference to death, punctuated by moments of high excitement,  that is missing from the operatic recreation.  There is a gloom that pervades this story, and ineffable darkness of the soul worthy of Wagner, that this opera fails to capture. 

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.  And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.  And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.   (96)

This recreation by Scheer and Heggie stays on the plain.  It doesn't reach the deep gorges and exuberant sunny spaces that would give the performance a powerful dramatic intensity.  By concentrating on characters and relationships rather than the inward pathos expressed through a myriad of symbols and metaphors in Melville's text the character of the whole enterprise is fatefully transformed.   The authors of the opera assume a bias favoring human relations and human connection.  That's how they created the opera by building it upon five main characters:  Greenhorn, Queequeg, Pip, Starbuck, and Ahab.  Each character is also substantially reworked from the original presentation in Melville.  However, the people and the world that Melville describes in Moby-Dick are men who have reduced their human connectedness to the barest minimum.  It is a world and a mindset of profound alienation.  Moby-Dick is not a story about relationships and their vicissitudes.  It is a searching commentary on life and on the world at large from the standpoint of a man who has little stake in it and little use for conventional values and outlook.  This opera is a sanitized, normalized version of Moby-Dick crafted to appeal to a contemporary white American middle class audience.

Completely absent from the opera are any sexual allusions which Melville's book is full of.   There is one scene in the opera where the sailors on the ship dance with one another, but it is done in a farcical style that trivializes itself to the point of self-mockery.  It brought chuckles from some in the audience.  This opera is afraid to touch the same sex attractions that were and are a major attraction of men going to sea.  The erotic overtones of the relationship between Queequeg and Ishmael are completely ignored.  The sailors on the Pequod tend to be men for whom the avoidance of women and family responsibilities is a salient characteristic.  That doesn't mean they don't have sex.  But this production treats the sailors as homesick to return to their wives and children in Nantucket.  Clearly a fantasy of the writers, not a representation of nineteenth century sailors, and certainly not of Melville's work. 

The introduction of a religious point of view through the character of Starbuck, who acts as a kind of conscience to Ahab, is particularly foreign and distasteful.  There are allusions to religion, religious figures, and religious ideas throughout Moby-Dick, but they do not take the form of a moralistic conscience that is pressing against the whole way of life of sailing as in the opera.  Moby-Dick does not have a moral point of view.  It presents a tale that clearly illustrates the ultimate universal destructiveness of monomaniacal vengeance,  but it does not say that this is a bad thing.  Ishmael is clearly steeped in the religious ideology of his day, but he has his own take on it.  His point of view and his use of religious allusion is very idiosyncratic and unorthodox, but the opera takes a very conventional outlook that will be readily acceptable to mainstream American viewers. 

Also missing from this opera is the whale.  Except for a cameo appearance at the end, the whale is scarcely mentioned.  But a high percentage of Melville's Moby-Dick is taken up with descriptions of whales, their characteristics, behavior, and the vicissitudes of hunting them and processing their corpses.  The whale has powerful symbolic significance for Ishmael who sees the whale as an almost divine spirit, whom he both respects and reveres while at the same time seeking to kill it. 

Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality.  He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin.  In Noah's flood he despised Noah's Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.  (105)

Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.  But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head?  much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none?  Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen.  But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again, he has no face.  (86)

This alludes to the biblical passage in Exodus 33 where Moses is on the mountain with God and God tells him "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.  And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me and thou shalt stand upon a rock: And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft by the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by:  And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: by my face shall not be seen." The whale to Ishmael is essentially isomorphic to God.

Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby-Dick not only ubiquitious, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen. (41)

Ahab cherished a wild vindicitiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. (41)

He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.  (41)

Moby-Dick can be seen as a defiant protest against God himself for all the ills of mankind, the accumulated slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that befall people in life from the beginning of time.  It is a powerful repudiation of the religious quest to seek union and reconciliation with God.  This is a story of those who are at war with God and seek to destroy him.  It is also, I think, a pessimistic commentary on that undertaking.  It is a very modern book.  However, you won't get that out of this opera.  In fact the opera bypasses these most profound issues and even alters them and makes them conventional and palatable.  The more I think about it, the more offensive it becomes.   

What was good in this opera was the staging.  The sets and the lighting and special effects were outstanding and highly effective.  An A+ to lighting designer Gavan Swift and Projection Designer Elaine McCarthy.  The imaginative stage presentation creates an engaging spectacle that holds the attention of the audience and keeps it rapt in the story.  If you don't know you are being snookered, you will probably like it on the strength of quality of the presentation. I've been thinking about it for over a week now, and the more I think about it, the more firmly I am turning against it.  But it is a dazzling spectacle, well presented and well performed.  Just don't kid yourself that it is Moby-Dick.