SFO Premieres Poul Ruders’ Take on Atwood

Last night the War Memorial Opera House saw the West Coast premiere of the second opera to be presented in the current San Francisco Opera (SFO) season. The opera was The Handmaid’s Tale, composed by Poul Ruders with a libretto by Paul Bentley based on the novel by Margaret Atwood of the same title. It was first performed by the Danish Royal Opera on March 6, 2000 in Copenhagen in a Danish translation of Bentley’s English text. The first performance of the libretto as it was written took place in the spring of 2003 over the course of seven performances by the English National Opera in London.

The narrative is set in the United States in the 22nd century. A right-wing faction has dissolved the constitutional government, creating a new theocracy given the new name of Gilead. The Handmaids are women who have violated the Bible-based laws of the new government and are subjected to monthly inseminations to provide babies for barren households. The title character is Offred, sung by American mezzo Irene Roberts. There are also flashbacks of a younger Offred, sung by mezzo Simone McIntosh, in her life prior to Gilead.

Offred (Irene Roberts) and her Commander (John Relyea) (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of San Francisco Opera)

Much of the narrative involves the relationship between Offred and her Commander, sung by bass John Relyea. Mezzo Lindsay Ammann sang the role of the Commander’s wife, who is barren. There are also reflections of Offred’s life prior to Gilead, in which she is sung by Simone McIntosh.

By way of disclaimer, I should make clear that I have never read Atwood’s novel. I hope it would not be simplistic to say that she provided a feminist take on oppressive fascist totalitarianism. This involves not only relations between women and men but also among women themselves. Such fiction could easily serve as a study in sexual politics, but I would conjecture that the very genre of “study” runs a heavy risk of shortcomings in the transition from didactic prose to operatic libretto.

Thus, where the attentive listener to opera is involved, the experience of the current production begins to run aground before the conclusion of the hour and fifteen minutes of the first act. The unfolding of the episodes begins to feel oppressive long before that first act has concluded, and there is so little evidence of motive that one has to wonder why this journey was undertaken in the first place. To be perfectly frank, the one element that sustained my attention was the imaginatively rich orchestration in Ruders’ score with an impressively diverse array of percussion sonorities.

That music may not have been a particularly useful guide to the narrative; but it did not need an explicit narrative framework (let alone a synopsized plot line) to engage listener attention!