Moby-Dick San Francisco Opera Performance
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.