Fatally Wounded

Swarms of new and returning students clogged the streets around UC Berkeley Thursday evening. What to do: Attend a free opera or check out frat-house receptions? Considering the state of art music in the U.S. today, you can guess where they went. Nevertheless, about a hundred or so did show up for Our American Cousin in Hertz Hall. Their reward was the sad spectacle of fine musicians and singers performing a work fatally wounded by two decisions: to present excerpts rather than the entire opera, and to accompany singers with piano only. The opera was sponsored as part of the "On the Same Page" program that, according to the (Web site), "gives new students in the College of Letters and Science something to talk about" in Welcome Week discussions and later courses and seminars. Over the summer, students had been sent a copy of Garry Wills' book Lincoln at Gettysburg, as that "something," so an opera by two professors about the performance of the play during which President Lincoln was assassinated seemed like a natural adjunct. The challenge with the subject matter lies in the fact that the antiquated, cornpone comedy of Tom Taylor's Our American Cousin is poles apart from the timeless tragedy and consequences of John Wilkes Booth's act. Tying the two together requires great insight and delicacy. One way librettist John Shoptaw tries to meld the comedic parts with the tragic is to give comic characters serious lines like "Are not the arts of theater / like the arts of war? / Each company musters its troops / and parades them in sabers and plumes to the music of fifes and clarions." Shoptaw also adds puns and ironies (Amputees' Chorus: "We laid down our arms"; Businessmen's Chorus: "We fortify our work with backs of green"). But the flow between antipodal components of this kind of libretto is destroyed when only excerpts, however sizable, are performed. The result left me with distasteful, wrenching memories of a rube singing "I was droopin' kinda low myself, a-shooin' this devious herd o' possum through the Cumbersome Gap," followed later by Mary Lincoln wailing over the president's body "and now, my God, am I to give my husband?" If the purpose of the libretto is to reproduce the emotions of that evening in April 1865, the excerpted version may succeed, but deeper and more significant meaning will be lost without connective tissue. Not having access to the complete libretto, I can only hope such exists.

"Aside from the Music, Mrs. Lincoln ...

Composer Eric Sawyer had better be a fine orchestrator, because the piano reduction of his score gave no indication to my ears of its merits. The arioso lines fit well into the voices but rarely were of melodic interest. Whatever other niceties may have been present were constantly disrupted by mannerisms from the piano: spiky, dissonant chords, no matter how lyrical the subject matter, and seemingly irrelevant tremolos and trills. Aside from several instances of melodic imitation, I heard little counterpoint and no apprehensible melodic motifs that, with repetition, could build musical structure. Perhaps a study of the score would reveal hidden glories — but if there is no spoonful of sugar from time to time, why analyze the medicine? The only sucrose I heard was a brief reference, permeated with detracting and unnecessary extra notes, of Hail to the Chief. Surely more could be added to justify what, to me, remains a false claim in the program, namely that "Musical period references and operatic genre pieces are incorporated with a language of lyrical extended tonality." Maybe in the score, but not in the ear. In what was essentially a concert performance, the cast acquitted itself remarkably. The male roles, sung by Alan Schneider, Drew Poling, and Mark Sullivan, were especially well-done. Despite librettist Shoptaw's admitted goal in his preconcert introduction to "deflate Booth," Sullivan was given an Iago "Credo"-like scene that he brought off with impressive power. Janna Baty and Angela Hines Gooch were more than adequate in their several female roles. The chorus, under Thomas Busse, provided welcome, a cappella relief from the piano.