I’ve been to quite a few world premieres in my time, but being in the audience for the first night of the new remarkable opera The Phoenix Friday night was really a memorable experience and something that I doubt I will forget. 

No doubt Lorenzo Da Ponte would love this opera, as although he is largely remembered for his collaboration with the crazy young composer Amadè (Mozart), who had brought him to fame as a librettist with the operas Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni (which is being performed alternately with this new opera over its two week run at the HGO) and Cosi fan tutte, that is actually just a fraction of this man’s work, as he wrote 28 librettos to operas, along with whole volumes of poetry.

But more to the point, his life was really interesting, something that only musicologists were previously aware of.

That an opera of this importance was playing to a half-empty house speaks to how “modern” opera seems to turn the general public away, but in this instance my task is to assuage any fears about this opera you may have and to persuade you to see this masterpiece as soon as you can.

No doubt New Yorkers will get the chance to see it sooner rather than later too, as I can’t imagine that an opera which has so much relevance to New York would not be performed there at some point.  If you really want to be sure of seeing it though, book your tickets and come to Houston for one of the remaining 3 performances!

So let’s start with the music, which was composed by Tarik O’Regan (who is originally a Brit but now resides in the US), a rising star in the composing world – and this opera will definitely put him firmly in the operatic spotlight.

From the opening xylophone and strings to the emergent chords in the brass with their Tippett-like sequences and rhythms, the soundscapes that the music evokes is firmly rooted in is 20th century English opera. Other elements of Sir Michael Tippett’s composing techniques are also apparent, and some of the music in the social scenes are reminiscent of Benjamin Britten’s operas.

The choral writing was extensive, and the chorus had perfected a clean choral sound that was almost absent of vibrato (and thank goodness, as I hate those vibrato loaded choruses in opera which just sound like a great mush of warbling sound.)  The choral writing itself had a beautiful Eric Whitacre ethereal quality.

The opera is in two acts with act one covering the time that Da Ponte was in Europe, and the remainder addressing the period after the Da Ponte brood emigrated to America; so after the intermission suddenly the music became less layered initially with echoes of Copland and Barber coming through particularly in the social scenes again.

Patrick Summers, the artistic and music director of HGO did a truly magnificent job of laying bare all the different layers in the music, and making sure that the percussive elements in the score came to the fore when required.

The libretto was written by John Caird, a Brit, and here we might as well get into the story, which is all about the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, but depicted as an opera performed as a dress rehearsal for an opera (which made me think of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream) based on that life.

That fictitious opera was to put on to raise funds to build an opera house that became—in real life—the predecessor of the New York Academy of Music and the New York Metropolitan Opera.

Da Ponte was born in Ceneda, Italy, in 1749 to a father who converted from Judaism to Catholicism to marry his wife, and Da Ponte first took minor orders in 1770 and was then appointed as Professor of Literature, and became a priest and moved to Venice in 1773.

Obviously the life of a priest was not suited to Da Ponte and so after taking a mistress and then moving into a brothel so as to help organize the entertainment, he was arrested and tried for “public concubinage” and “abduction of a respectable woman” and banished from Venice for 15 years.

Da Ponte moved to Vienna with two illegitimate children  and while there he started writing libretti after being introduced to Salieri, and then subsequently through a banker benefactor called Von Plankenstern, to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself.

When Emperor Josef II of Austria died, the money dried up, so after several further scandals broke, he fled to Trieste first, and then via Prague to London, where he lived for 12 years and worked as librettist at the King’s Theatre in London.

In the opera within the opera, the period in London is depicted as a relatively unhappy period, although by this time he was married with Nancy Grahl and had a further four children, of which one, Enzo, became a composer (for the purposes of the story).

As things start to unravel in London with sponsorship of a major libretto in London by a Member of Parliament suddenly evaporating and no recourse to getting paid given that the sponsor was a lawmaker, Nancy Da Ponte decides that it is best to go join her mother who has emigrated to America, and Act 1 ends with an amazingly uplifting chorus as the passengers board the ship in the London docks.

As you can already tell, the real life story of Da Ponte is quite interesting and actually turns out to be a quintessentially American immigrant story in act two, with Da Ponte only reluctantly embracing his new country when the Phoenix rise for the last time to enable him to do what he loves, writing, but in the context of his new home, and about himself.

At any rate, I am not going to reveal much of the content of Act two as I want you to go see the opera, but suffice to say that in this opera we are given a somewhat whitewashed version of his life (as perhaps he might do as supposedly it is based on his own memoirs.)

The second act, while not as riveting as the first, definitely contains some memorable moments.  The choral setting of the Oath of Allegiance was a remarkable piece of choral writing, and I would urge the composer to release it as a separate choral piece.  Nancy’s death scene and the final scene of the opera within an opera regarding the restorative power of the creative arts, were also both very moving.

The libretto was tastefully put together with so many moments of humour injected into the writing that it managed to draw the audience firmly into the professional and family relationships that it depicted.

In the opera within the opera, the young Enzo (superbly played by Luca Pisaroni) played his father, Lorenzo, in the first part of the opera within an opera, and they they swapped roles for the second act.  Thomas Hampson, who played Lorenzo, just lapped up the role of raconteur and Italian father-figure, and filled the opera house with a beautifully sonorous baritone voice that suited the bilingual libretto down to a tee.

Rihab Chaieb played Maria Malibran (noted soprano of the day), Mozart and Nancy Da Ponte, where she really shone in the latter role.  Chad Shelton played five different tenor roles with skill and help from the costume department (led by David Farley from the UK, who also designed the flexible set), and sopranos Lauren Snouffer and Elizabeth Sutphen, playing Da Ponte’s niece and half-sister, wowed us with weaving vocal acrobatics at various junctures.

So let me end by saying that this opera is a remarkable piece of work – it mirrors the unique life of it’s subject, and incorporates themes that resonate even today – that of the immigrant escaping the tyranny of their homeland, the extended family and diaspora, and the blending of identities that comes from living in a globalized world.

The creators of this work clearly took inspiration from their subject matter as well – lines like “we live as we may, and we die as we must” linger long after they are sung, and could only be honed by a close association between composer and librettist, something that Da Ponte knew only too well.

Indeed, perhaps the most memorable line from the opera for me was “opera is the richest food that money can buy” – and in this instance I’m just glad I had my pepto-bismol handy, because describing The Phoenix as “rich” may be an understatement!

Photo: Lynn Lane