Poul Ruders’ Latest Opera Coming to Santa Fe

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

Next month will see the world premiere of the latest opera created by Danish composer Poul Ruders. The Thirteenth Child was written on a joint commission by the Santa Fe Opera and the Odense Symphony Orchestra. Santa Fe Opera will perform the opera for the first time on July 27, followed by an additional five performances during this summer’s season. The libretto is written in English by Becky and David Starobin, the latter having performed several of Ruders’ compositions for guitar. The libretto text basically unfolds a dark fairy tale, consistent with Ruders’ interest in such narratives reflected in previous operas such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Kafka’s Trial (both with librettos by Paul Bentley), as well as an operatic treatment of Lars von Trier’s almost unbearably grim film Dancer in the Dark entitled Selma Ježková.

In anticipation of this premiere performance, the Odense Symphony Orchestra recorded Ruders’ score over the course of more than two years during the period between September of 2016 and December of 2018. Those sessions resulted in a CD produced by David Starobin, which was released by his Bridge Records label on June 21. While the accompanying booklet gives little suggestion as to how this opera will be staged, it does provide both a useful synopsis of the plot and a complete libretto. These are sufficient to suggest that this is a narrative that could lend itself to a variety of different realizations on an opera stage.

However, as long as the new release from Bridge is the only resource at our disposal, we are limited to forming impressions based only on the recording sessions that have been captured and edited. 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.

One unfortunate result is that listening tends to trigger personal memories of parodies, many of which probably no longer resonate with contemporary readers. Thus, the overall acoustic sense of the score turned out to remind me of my student days, when I read a parody movie review covering a (non-existent) film by Ingmar Bergman entitled Bleak Darkness. (These days I find myself wondering how many people recall any of Bergman’s films, let alone the man himself!) The vocal rhetoric, in turn, triggered memories of those good old days of the Hoffnung Music Festival, whose 1961 production included a duet from The Barber of Darmstadt, composed by “Bruno Heinz Jaja,” the name that Humphrey Searle synthesized out of the champions of atonality that shared their wisdom at gatherings in Darmstadt during the Fifties.

Nevertheless, I have seen enough operas in performance to know that the impact of the narrative almost always depends upon the insights of the stage director. Thus, in many respects, it will be up to Darko Tresnjak to establish the twists and turns of the narrative behind the libretto without letting the whole affair devolve into parody. Ultimately, he will be the storyteller behind both the words and the music through which those words are delivered. I sincerely wish him well.