Music as Part of the Stage Set

All right, fair enough. If you want to call this an opera, I can accept that. I’m not rigid. It doesn’t do what I want it to do, but I’m sure it fits other people’s definitions.

The Righteous reminded me of Meistersinger, Manon Lescaut, and Rosenkavalier. These are all interesting stories, and I would be happy to see them presented as a conventional stage play. Conventional in the sense that they don’t need any music, or at least what the composers have done here doesn’t seem to go very far in exploiting the power of music to enhance a spoken play.

Most of the time, Spears is using his music as a background effect, just like the changes in the lighting on the stage, and the placement of the furniture, and the wall decor. It’s not a bad idea, and maybe that’s what those other modernist composers were doing 120 years ago. But evocative backgrounds supporting a stage play does not, for my money, qualify the show as an opera.

Looking Around for a Concert…

In its best usage, this kind of sound environment delivers an emotional feeling, and in The Righteous it is used periodically to generate senses of awe, wonder, danger, or conflict. Spears seems to know how to tint the background with chords or dissonance or volume changes that pull you in and change your mood.

Occasionally, the music also helps when a soloist has a poignant message to deliver, or the choir is building anticipation or a sense of global togetherness, or the final resolution of the complicated story. Great! for those occasional moments, and hats off to Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi for showing us how music can triple the emotional effect of the spoken word, song after song, and scene after scene.

Granted, the composer has some unusual content, and I like and respect that. In fact, I wouldn’t mind listening carefully to a concert – just the music. I tried to, last night, but I kept getting distracted by all the things they were doing on the stage, because that was interesting too. One thing or the other, please, but not both, because they aren't going together very well.

… or an Operetta

But look here, why are we using music when the actors on the stage are just trying to say hello, or specify the dinner menu, or banter about turkey hunting, or argue about hippies? In these cases (and this makes up 60% of the stage time), it seems pointless to have their voices going high and low and high again, or wavering around in tuneless intonation. If your character needs to make a strong point, have them say it slowly and clearly, facing the audience, and with a pause afterwards. You don’t need to put them on an F# hold for 20 seconds; what’s the use of that?

Give yourselves a break, Gregory Spears, Wagner, Puccini and Strauss (yes, all into same boat!): nobody’s requiring that you write musical notes for every minute of your show. Just let the people talk, because that’s all that’s necessary with these prosaic librettos. If you’re feeling insecure about all this, give us an extra dollar and we will agree to call your thing an opera, if that’s what you need to hear.

Trying to Keep it On Topic

The Righteous is about several subjects, running at once and sometimes intermeshing with each other, most of them engaging and important. In fact, they’re all rather heavy and momentous, to my mind; this is a lot of gravity with only a little humor. Here we see…

• a man finding his purpose in life

• questions about the helpfulness of public and organized religion

• ridicule of self-serving politicians

• the ambivalence of true love in the context of marital infidelity

• sad mishandling of the AIDS crisis

• segregation and social injustice in the city

• the challenge of serving one’s family if your service takes you away from them

• the question of whether money can really buy happiness

 … and on it goes.

Oh boy. That’s a lot. They should stop once in a while and let this strange evocative music give us a refreshing and uplifting break, or a pause for reflection.

Mainly, I Liked the Stage

Santa Fe and the other opera companies have to try out things like The Righteous, I suppose, to keep their programs fresh, to encourage new composers on their paths, and to discover what will bring in younger, more diverse audiences. Maybe that’s working for them; I don’t know. For me, this production is just a huge salad of well-known modern issues presented under the heading of “Tuesday Night Opera”. With lots of unusual background music.

Nevertheless, worth the trip, for me. Aside from the intriguing tonalities going on down there in the pit, I got to see them open up the back of the amazing Santa Fe stage before the sun went down. You can see straight through to the panorama of the hills with the desert plants and the fading sunlight on the red rocks. Good Lord.

You know me. I’m hoping they’ll open it up on the glowing landscape on Wednesday night, so we can look at that while we listen to Donizetti’s happy, energetic tunes and his crazy story about Nemorino and Adina.

For me, Dr. Dulcamara and his phony elixir of love will provide more of what I need than a musical treatise on 20th century social issues, any day of the week.