“I have a terrible, terrible disease,” sings the heroine in the opening measures of Jacqueline, an operatic fantasia on the life of cellist Jacqueline du Pré (1945–1987). In soprano Marnie Breckenridge’s stunning, fully embodied performance, there’s an unnerving coy glibness to the line, as if the only way to handle the multiple sclerosis that withered du Pré’s blooming career and took her life at 42 is to stare it down with a cheeky grimness.
There are, as the opera develops over the next two hours (including intermission), many other notes in the scale of living with a death sentence lurking in the future and gradually coming into view. Scored for soprano and onstage cello (played here by Matt Haimovitz), Jacqueline is a danse macabre duet, by turns frank, poignant, off-putting, emotionally raw, funny, agonizing, and terribly sad. It can also be elliptical, redundant, and musically wearisome. Nothing settles easily or consolingly. Director Michael Hidetoshi Mori’s staging for West Edge Opera opened on Saturday, Aug. 10 at the Scottish Rite Center in Oakland.
Structured in four discrete “movements,” Luna Pearl Woolf’s music and Royce Vavrek’s libretto take the full measure of an artist’s fierce humanity. How well or fully the du Pré of Jacqueline conforms to the reality of the cellist’s life is one of the many provoking questions the opera raises. What can we ever know of another’s nature, even when unflinchingly observed? For that matter what can we know of our own?
After the blackly joking tone at the outset, the precis of the cellist’s life turns to her early fascination with the instrument, the young du Pré insisting to her “mummy” that she can wrap her arms around it at age 5. Her enchantment is reflected in some musical playfulness, with the singer and cellist trading gliding figures that the character happily diagnoses as “glissanditis.” Soon enough, she falls in love with the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim and converts to Judaism to marry him. This important development flies by too quickly.
A few costume pieces, which Breckenridge fetches from an upstage swarm of black chairs, mark time — a little red jacket for the child, a wedding veil. A richly patterned blanket serves double duty as a childhood memory of the wild herbs du Pré and her sister loved and the enveloping sensuality of lovemaking. The nature imagery, with the cello busily churning and swooning, brings Hamlet’s Ophelia to mind.
Du Pré pictures herself as the more powerful yet vulnerable figure of Samson. Before the MS makes its presence felt, she’s full of vitality and ambition. She revels in her first recording (of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto), crossing the stage to show off the LP to Haimovitz and softly caress him as he plays on.
Breckenridge’s voice is a gilded thread, gleaming from top to bottom but never self-indulgent, always with a dramatic purpose. Her acting is perhaps even more impressive, whether she’s feeling the pulse of music through her mobile torso, delighting in a dirty joke about naked Buddhist monks, or bumping her way up a set of stairs on her “bum” when the MS has made walking impossible.
Through it all, Haimovitz blazes away. Woolf’s score sometimes puts him in directly echoing musical exchanges with the singer, occasionally quotes from Elgar and other composers, but for the most part comments on or veers away from the text, not always productively and at times distractingly.
The closing two movements take Jacqueline to an excruciating new level, with sex and disease, the delights and ravages of the body intertwined. Confined to and desperately lonely at home, du Pré calls her mother, longs for Barenboim, and feels her life dwindling. The animating erotic force she felt in her pre-MS years curdles. Breckenridge can make a reference to the “F-holes” of a cello sound positively obscene.
With the black seats now heaped into a kind of battlement, the character stares into the abyss. “What is left?” she asks. At one point, when she snarls her rejection of the cello she can no longer play, Haimovitz lays down his instrument and leaves the stage. Yet in all the bleakness, some tender moments shine. One comes in a sweet strophic melody, almost like a nursery song, that du Pré sings in summoning back her childhood.
The music rises again, quite literally, when Haimovitz returns and takes a place high on the battlement to play on. In a scene that might feel heavy-handed with a lesser performer, Breckenridge struggles onto a chair and scissors off chunks of her hair, her doomed Samson made powerless by her own hand.
A smallish crowd made a big noise at the final blackout. Whatever misgivings it might have had, the audience knew it had witnessed, from Breckenridge, a remarkable, uncompromising alchemy of body, voice, and soul.
There are two more performances of Jacqueline, on Aug. 16 and 18, in repertory with West Edge Opera’s other two productions this summer, Bulrusher and Legend of the Ring.
