Returning to Poul Ruders’ Opera at SFO

Composer Paul Ruders (photograph by Lars Skaaning, courtesy of San Francisco Opera)

Some readers may recall that, almost exactly a week ago, I wrote an account of the opening night performance of the West Coast premiere of Poul Ruders The Handmaid’s Tale by the San Francisco Opera. On that occasion my conclusion was that there was “so little evidence of motive that one has to wonder why this journey was undertaken in the first place.” Nevertheless, because my wife and I have a Sunday afternoon subscription, we returned to give the production a second chance.

As Herman’s Hermits sang in their recording of “I'm Henery the Eighth, I Am,” “Second verse, same as the first!” Having a better sense of the overall narrative and how it was structured only led to more averse observations. Indeed, in the “long view” of the entire production, there are too many scenes that go around the same block too many times. If that were not enough of the problem, those repetitions did little to establish the narrative at all, let alone leave the audience attentively wondering what would happen next.

My guess is that the weakest link in this chain is that of motive. Bad things happen, but that is always the case in opera seria. The more important issue is whether or not there is any motive behind those bad things, and all we really know is that a country that used to be “free and fair” was now under authoritarian domination. Beyond that, there is little sense of that motivates the authorities, other, perhaps, than a desire to restore the “world order” of men dominating women.

I have already disclaimed that I have not read the novel by Margaret Atwood that provided the narrative thread for the libretto. For now, at least, I do not feel particularly encouraged to do so. It would not surprise me if Atwood knew how to deploy just the right rhetorical skills to make sure that the curious reader would keep going from one page to the next. Sadly, the libretto by Paul Bentley does not encourage such motivation; and even the most attentive viewer will quickly recognize that the narrative of the opera is little more than “one damned thing after another.”

About a decade before I was born, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers union approached Harold Rome to compose score for musical entitled Pins and Needles. The title of the most memorable song from that show was “Sing Me a Song of Social Significance.” If there was any “social significance” in Bentley’s libretto or, for that matter, the staging by John Fulljames, you would probably need a very powerful magnifying glass to find it!

At this point readers may think I was ignoring the composer. The fact is that this was my second encounter with one of his operas. However, my first encounter was only with the music itself. This was the score for The Thirteenth Child, which was performed by the Santa Fe Opera in the summer of 2019. Unfortunately, my knowledge of this opera has been limited to the music, which I encountered on a Bridge Records CD produced by David Starobin. However, I would like to conclude with an excerpt from the article I wrote about the tracks from this album at the end of June in 2019:

These are sufficient to convey how Ruders uses his music to capture the darkest qualities of both the narrative itself and the agents responsible for unfolding that narrative. My personal impressions, resulting from initial listening experiences, are that Ruders has a tendency to be too heavy-handed with both his instrumental resources and the overwrought angular contours of his vocal lines.

I still hold to that sentence about “dark qualities;” and there is no shortage of them in The Handmaid’s Tale. However, I see that, even in my “first contact” with Ruders, I had to deal with heavy-handedness; and that is how I have come to feel about The Handmaid’s Tale.