'ELMER GANTRY': MUSIC TO OPERA'S EAR

I have this theory that opera has been holding a grudge against music. Over many years opera figured out the show works best when the music serves the drama. Then musicals came along and made it big doing what opera used to do - stopping the drama to have the actors sing for the audience. That's when opera, in a seeming huff, stopped having songs or melodies at all. New opera became an avant-garde art form, and opera fans decided they would rather see La Traviata 38 times.

In that context, Robert Aldridge's Elmer Gantry, getting its second booking over the weekend at Milwaukee's Florentine Opera after premiering in 2007 at the Nashville Opera, felt like a tent revival in more ways than one. Replete with fight songs and spirituals and hand-clapping, this was anything but the priestly experience audiences have come to expect from a modern opera. At the end of Sunday's second and final performance in Milwaukee, the people stood and cheered as if they'd been saved.

This opera has moments that are positively show-stopping, like the delicious, epithet-laced aria at the end of Act I in which revenge on the thunder-stealing evangelist Gantry is sworn by the ostensibly respectable preacher and YMCA president Eddie Fislinger, sung at the Florentine with exquisite venom by tenor Frank Kelley. (That this smarmy antagonist gets the high notes against the title role's baritone instead of the other way around is one of the show's many smart compositional strokes.) There are also subtler moments that move the audience not just at the end but throughout, as in the middle of Act II, when Gantry's former seminary sidekick Frank Shallard (tenor Vale Rideout at the Florentine), now a properly ordained minister, has a convincing crisis of faith under a starry sky.

But this is no musical. The piece is deftly through-composed. The dialogue is thoughtfully orchestrated at every turn. Spoken words are scarce and purposeful. Never is the drama interrupted to patronize the audience with a big number. Given the source material, it's far from surprising when Aldridge pays homage to the hymns and spirituals that run through the heart of American music. But he quotes from the history rather than pandering to it. The music is accessible, yet distinctly modern, and recognizably operatic for anyone who loves the form.

As if that isn't enough, Herschel Garfein's libretto is in some ways more complex and provocative than Sinclair Lewis' 1927 novel of the same title, and certainly more relevant to our time. The novel is an indictment of rank evangelism and religious fakery. But the opera is a question about the nature of belief, with no clear answer at the end. The climactic, chilling and classically operatic funeral pyre consumes hero and villain alike, and mixes their ashes beyond delineation. Only in the end does Gantry live on as the huckster Lewis portrayed.

Elmer Gantry has its drawbacks. Like much of the repertoire it aspires to join, it's too long - it's not hard to identify passages that go on well after their point is made, and even a scene or two that might be cut  without much sewing-up. (This flaw was not alleviated but exacerbated by the Florentine's single tiny and uncivilized intermission, not nearly one gin-and-tonic in duration, a grievous sin in a venue with long rows and no aisles for fast escape.) If you're comparing this opera to Verdi or Puccini - unfair but obligatory - for all its tunefulness it seems to lack the signature melody or motif that echoes in your mind as you leave the house. Perhaps that will emerge with the future bookings this show is sure to get, not to mention the release of the debut recording Naxos made of the Milwaukee run. Either way, I felt the leads got rooked out of much of the show's best music - this seems destined to be a ladder opera for supporting actors.

All in all, though, Elmer Gantry is (so to speak) a revelation. With due respect to the minimalists and atonalists - and I have recently enjoyed Doctor Atomic and Lulu at the Lyric in Chicago - opera is in pitiful need of new shows that are closer to entry-level for audiences. Elmer Gantry is proof that's possible while remaining unmistakably operatic. Let the grudge against music be lifted. Amen.

Comments

[resume writing services]

As for me I do not appreciate opera music. You can even say that I DO not like it, but still it deserves attention and respect. I doubt that any of modern pop or hip-hop singer possess the same strong voice as those opera performers.

[Polatlı]

Good post. I like to read your posts. well written. thank you.