The pattern changed decisively with Inferno, an ambitious two-part opera based on Dante’s epic poem. This was Robles’ idea from the start, a dramatic work in which hell is treated as a music-theater analog for the psychological stages of depression. “It might have been called Melancholia,” noted Josheff. “The spirit is immobilized.”
Previewed in an instrumental suite that was performed at San Francisco’s Temple Emanuel-El in April, the first half of Inferno receives its theatrical world premiere June 17, 18, and 21 in a San Francisco Cabaret Opera staging at the Live Oak Theater in Berkeley.
Tenor Adam Flowers and soprano Eliza O’Malley star as the doom-kissed lovers Paolo and Francesca, with bass Richard Mix cast as Hell’s Wind, the story’s detached, demonic force. An ensemble from the Huckabay McAllister Dance troupe embodies the chorus. Eric Zivian, Josheff’s comrade in the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, performs the piano-reduction score. Cabaret Opera’s Harriet March Page directs, with choreography by Jenny McAllister. Robles designed the urban, dead-end alley set.
Josheff’s musical touchstone for his Inferno – The Second Circle of Hell: The Lustful is “popular song and the way it influences our emotions.” When Paolo launches into his doo-wop inflected crooning, the composer wants listeners to feel complicit in the seduction this “washed-up singer” is spinning for his beloved.
Francesca, by contrast, “is very aware of what’s going on. She’s stuck in hell, and pleading — sometimes directly with the audience.” Josheff likened the characters to a street person, “someone who’s in this loop of telling her story over and over again. You can identify with her pain and still mistrust it a little.”
As for Hell’s Wind, the final singing role of this operatic triad, a slight resonance with Baroque recitative and aria is meant to characterize a figure who is both tormenting and commenting on the lovers. “The characters are blown about by a wind,” said Josheff, “an infernal wind that represents the passions they could never control in life.”
Josheff, a noted new-music clarinetist as well as a composer, and Robles, a writer and editor/publisher of the Five Fingers Review, have been approaching the idea of a full-length opera since the early 1990s, when they contemplated a project about the first Gulf War. Getting Inferno up onstage after a long wait has Josheff feeling “ecstatic. It’s a fulfillment of something that’s been developing for a very long time.”
Writing frankly lyrical vocal music for this 70-minute opera has freed Josheff to give his musical ideas “their natural size and length.” He continued, “I make my living playing complex, virtuosic, contemporary music. The music I compose is in some sense therapy for the music I perform.”
Further treatments await. Inferno – Part Two: The Ninth Circle of Hell is already in the works, with hopes for a production sometime in the next several years.