Yesterday afternoon my wife and I returned to the War Memorial Opera House for a second encounter with John Adams’ latest opera, Antony and Cleopatra, this time from the Box seats we have held for over fifteen years of San Francisco Opera (SFO) subscriptions. Readers may recall that, after my first encounter, I questioned whether Adams’ music had done justice to William Shakespeare’s command of iambic pentameter. In discussing our first encounter with my wife, I wondered whether any music could do justice to iambic pentameter without devolving into banal singsong.
Yesterday I recalled that not only iambic pentameter but also Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter could be given a fair shake in at least one musical genre. When I was in high school, I knew a fellow student that would sing a tune called “Shakespeare Blues.” The idea was that he would fit familiar Shakespeare couplets into a twelve-bar blues pattern, and the result worked like a charm. Needless to say, twelve-bar blues never finds its way into Adams Antony and Cleopatra score!
More importantly, however, yesterday’s seating gave me a much better perspective on Adams’ approach to instrumentation. I realized that the ensemble was far larger than I could take in from my angle of viewing. However, as had been the case a little less than a year ago in the SFO production of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 72 Fidelio, Music Director Eun Sun Kim clearly put a good deal of thought into how all of those instrumental resources should be configured.
From the audience point of view, almost the entire string section was grouped on the left. The right was then divided into parallel ranks with the winds closest to the podium and the brass behind the winds. Behind the brass one encountered a generous panoply of percussion instruments. Finally, the center-rear area was shared by Chester Englander on cimbalom and Laura Poe on celeste. From the listener’s point of view, Kim’s configuration afforded greater clarity for the winds and brass, which tended to develop the thematic lines with textured accompaniment from the string passages. Needless to say, Kim knew exactly how to balance these resources against the many different vocal dispositions on stage, including those of the SFO Regular Chorus, directed by John Keene.
While my experience of the orchestra was enhanced from by vantage point, my impressions of both the libretto and the staging tended to decline with my second encounter. Most important is that the sense of “experienced time” tended to drag out as the narrative plodded its way to the deaths of the two protagonists. To some extent, these deaths are overshadowed by what is probably the most chilling episode in the entire opera. This is a rousing speech that Octavian (tenor Paul Appleby) delivers to an audience that hangs on his every word. As I had previously observed, this marked the beginning of Octavian’s rise above the other members of the triumvirate, Antony (bass-baritone Gerald Finley) and Lepidus (bass-baritone Philip Skinner); and Director Elkhanah Pulitzer staged this as an object lesson in how fascism is born.
Bitten by the asp, Cleopatra (Amina Edris) faces death in her most regal attire (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)
The problem is that this episode was so intense that the subsequent deaths of the two title characters almost seemed inconsequential. Mind you, there is all that confusion about who dies when that turns the narrative into a rather frustrating muddle. However, once Cleopatra (soprano Amina Edris) knows that Antony is really dead, even the most attentive viewer would be forgiven for wishing that she would “get on with it” and let the asp do its thing!
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