Karen Almond

Opera is about women. This is not news to you. There are whole books written about it (which I should certainly read). Men may have essentially shut women out of conducting, playing, writing, composing, and directing operas for centuries, but we know who the real stars are: the divas who take the stage, give voice to specifically female passion, rage, and sorrow, and then collapse and die at the end.

And you know who loves women? Composer John Adams, whose Antony & Cleopatra received its New York premiere at the Metropolitan Opera this past Monday. My dude is just crazy about ‘em.

There’s this theme running through the operas of John Adams—almost all of them, really—of history’s yang and yin, like public vs private, Man vs Woman, Occident vs Orient, Imperialism vs Indigeneity, and more.

His most dramatically effective works—his collaborations with librettist Alice Goodman—explore these binaries but also blur them. Goodman somehow makes Pat Nixon and Jiang Qing the stars of Nixon in China, even though they are largely sidelined from the negotiations that are ostensibly the subject of the piece. She gives us whole scenes of studious fidelity to the historical record starring the men of the hour, and intimate dreams and meditations from the women who were just as present but less “important.” And most importantly, her fluent pen is able to elide between these modes seamlessly, finding poetry in the gruff pronouncements of Tricky Dick and even creating a surreal moment of dramatic action for the FLOTUS.

Less successful are experiments like Doctor Atomic, whose libretto was not so much written as collated by Adams’s longtime collaborator Peter Sellars from Los Alamos transcripts (the scientists and generals all sing in quotations from the historical record) and assorted verse (the troubled Kitty Oppenheimer sings only Muriel Rukeyser poems). As my old, old, old friend Straussmonster (to use her nom de parterre) once pointed out to the composer, the effect of this is essentially Othering, reducing the opera’s only female characters to exotic, oracular archetypes.

And somewhere in the middle, we can locate a piece like El Niño, the Adams-Sellars collaboration devoted to the Virgin Mary, which at once participates in and complicates depicting the definitive Christian (and post-Christian) icon of the Eternal Feminine. (Special congratulations here to director and visual artist Lileana Blain-Cruz, who gave the piece one of Adams’s richest and most satisfying productions at the Met so far.)

Even his latest violin concerto, the awkwardly titled Scheherazade.2, is a tone poem that borrows the mythic figure of an exotic and alluring woman to imagine the power of art and beauty to challenge patriarchal violence and oppression.

No wonder that his new opera, receiving its New York premiere this past Monday, centers on one of our most powerful and persistent archetypes of femininity: THE seductress, THE exotic queen, Cleopatra herself. The traditional vision of Cleopatra is of a woman worshiped as a goddess whose political power was cemented by her personal beauty and the translation of that beauty into pageants of dazzling spectacle. The apotheosis of the Circe/Dido archetype, she is a symbol of the power of love (and of Woman) to thwart imperial ambitions, heroic destinies, and of course, sexual monogamy.

Karen Almond

Adams’s most recent librettist, acclaimed British poet and dramatist William Shakespeare (remind me to check out more of his stuff), has quite a way with words, but something is lost in translating his hit play Antony & Cleopatra to the operatic stage.

The plot is a winner: Cleopatra is so irresistible that her Roman emissary, Mark Antony, shrugs off a pair of wives one after the other to go native in Egypt and aid the Queen in her defense against Octavius Caesar’s invading armies. But she’s made him soft, they lose the war, and in an elaborate Romeo & Juliet-style mix-up, they both end up killing themselves before she can be taken prisoner.

And the composer’s knack for English text-setting means he can race through scenes of tongue-twisting dialogue elegantly and efficiently. But the drama still suffers from cuts in a way that Arrigo Boito’s Shakespeare libretti for Verdi never do; we get all the big scenes here, but in the play, they’re buttressed by long and meticulously constructed passages of rhetoric. With those stripped away, the edifice becomes unstable.

What we are left with is one impetuous change of heart, after another—not larger-than-life heroes being brought low by a few moments of weakness, but a pair of lovers speedrunning a long string of truly terrible decisions. And since we’re churning through the politics and war in the first half of the piece, the drama awkwardly bunches up with scenes of dialogue and action in Act I before finding a more operatic pace with all of the big numbers in Act II. Adams’s extraordinary skill with the fine mechanics of orchestral and operatic composition mean that every scene has a clear and elegant shape, thanks to constantly shifting textures in the accompaniment and deft dialogue between the voice and instruments. But on the global scale, things become ungainly.

Karen Almond

Adams also inserts a few passages from other sources into the text—for instance, Anchises’s speech from the Underworld in Vergil’s Aeneid. Anchises offers a vision of Rome’s triumphant future—Vergil’s present—under Caesar,which here delivered is by said Caesar (Paul Appleby) as a speech to the Roman masses. It’s not hard to guess why: Shakespeare’s Caesar is a key player in the action but doesn’t have a lot to say, so this gives us a big tenor aria with thrilling responses from the chorus. (Adams’s big choral flourishes are always welcome.) Vergil’s dark, ambiguous vision of Empire, presented here in the Dryden translation, charges Rome’s adventures in Egypt with the menace we now associate with more contemporary notions of Manifest Destiny, such as the genocide of Native Americans or the Fascist conquests of World War II.

But it doesn’t quite work for Caesar as a character. There’s no organic aria for him in the source material because Shakespeare’s Caesar isn’t a compelling orator in the way that his Antony is. He’s a calculating, if slightly micro-managing, conqueror—not, unfortunately, very operatic—and so this stirring, frightening Great Dictator doesn’t quite match up with the highly competent administrator we see in the rest of the piece.

Director Elkhanah Pulitzer’s gestures towards fascist imagery are among the least interesting visuals in a production plagued by visual flatness and often literal flatness: the changes of designer Mimi Lien’s sets are accomplished with black rectangles that open and close, like the blades of a camera aperture, to create mini-proscenia of different sizes and aspect ratios around the action. These panels double as screens for projections indicating shifts of time and place. The cleverness of these shifting rectangles notwithstanding, the piece—which is so much about spectacle and pageantry—demands a visual depth and richness that is simply lacking here.

Karen Almond

That said, the cinematic language of the visuals are a sophisticated reflection on the way Cleopatra’s power works. Promotional materials around the show talked up its “old Hollywood glamor,” but it wasn’t until I saw Cleopatra lounging on a spangly movie set, complete with old-timey film cameras, that I understood what they really meant. The characters in Shakespeare’s play are enthralled by the seductive power of the self-image Cleopatra projects; fitting, then, that this should be conveyed in the language of cinema—that is to say, in the literal production of projected images. And of course, the newsreel footage out of the Roman capital evokes the images we’ve seen from the early decades of cinema, documenting the rise of fascism.

Why not give us more of that? Why not let us wallow in the glitter and glamor the way Antony wants to do? Because beyond those moments, the visuals offer little to the production. Worst of all was the little ballet corps of Romanettes in boring semi-fascist uniforms (designer: Constance Hoffman), dancing out fight choreography (by Annie-B Parson) so preciously stylized that it left me thinking one Shark and one Jet could have sacked Rome in an afternoon.

Fortunately, and not surprisingly, the cast of the Met production is stupendous, easily navigating a mercurial, syncopated, minutely detailed score. Julia Bullock and Gerald Finley sizzle in the leads; I couldn’t blame Antony & Cleopatra for wanting to stay home and fuck each other all day instead of doing a bunch of boring imperial stuff. Neither of them is new to Adams’s music—Finley became the definitive Oppenheimer when that opera was revived at the Met, and Bullock was a spectacular Mary in that Met El Niño—and it’s obvious that he wrote the parts with these singers in mind (though Bullock had to back out of the San Francisco premiere).

As always, Finley brought his vocal authority and artistry, and his dramatic chops, to a heartbreaking performance. There was one awkward moment: just after Antony committed seppuku in mourning for Cleopatra, he was informed that his Queen yet lived, and he responded to the shock by suddenly jolting to alertness, as if to convey the thought, Say what?! (There were titters in the crowd around me.) But his death scene was a real Moment of the sort we’d been waiting for all evening.

And Bullock simply devoured her role. She gave us an empress losing control of her emotions—the part swooping up and down between her highest and lowest registers—while the soprano yet held control of her voice, making brilliant sounds at either end of her range. The stage business had Cleopatra rolling around the stage, letting loose with a full-throated scream upon learning of the death of Antony, and otherwise engaging in full-on diva behavior. In one scene, she literally did the RuPaul laugh-then-slap from Season 2, and then threw her martini in somebody’s face, in two separate moments just seconds apart.

Oh, and, at the risk of sounding shallow, she looked gorgeous all night.

My only quibble with her sound wasn’t with her sound, per se—Adams has been writing for amplified singers since the beginning, to balance the voices against huge walls of orchestration and mix them with electronic elements. While I appreciate that this is the 21st century and I just have to accept that it’s part of the piece, I was occasionally annoyed when her sound took on a slightly uncanny quality through the sound system. The same was true during Paul Appleby’s spectacular “speech”—brilliantly sung in wild extremes of register, but just as Cleopatra’s music is appropriately serpentine, sensual and free, the music of Rome is martial, heavy with brass and percussion, and the part clearly needed a little oomph throughout to remain clearly discernible in the face of its thunderous accompaniment. Although, actually, it kind of helped convey the Fascist Demagogue vibe Adams was going for.

I wish I had more to say about the singers in smaller roles, not least because we were informed just before the performance that Kevin Short had been replaced by John Hancock in the role of Lepidus, and I had a ton of terrible “John Hancock” jokes lined up. But the writing for many of these parts isn’t designed to flatter the voice, but to create a character and tell a story, and so the most I can say about many of these singers is that they were uniformly excellent, putting across the score and the text but disappearing into their roles.

I did especially appreciate Elizabeth DeShong as Octavia, Caesar’s sister and Antony’s second wife. Adams’s writing for her conveyed exactly the sort of stability and clarity Antony was abandoning in favor of his feverish passion of Cleopatra, and her vocal performance was at once highly individual and warmly sympathetic. Jarrett Ott made a solid Met debut as Caeasar’s steadfast ally Agrippa, and Alfred Walker, lively and dependable throughout the piece as Antony’s advisor Enobarbus, did get his own moments to shine. I could easily see Adams writing another role for him; Walker has a clear affinity for this repertoire.

But beyond the title roles, the real star here was the orchestra, led by the composer. If you’re wondering whether it was really worth having to amplify the singers in order for the Adams to be able to cut loose with the accompaniment, please let me assure you that the answer is yes, yes, GOD yes. The responsiveness of the instruments to the text—undercutting a line of dialogue here, affirming another one there, doubling a strange vocal melody there—shows a deep understanding of the orchestra as a tool of the musical dramatist (could somebody at Boosey & Hawkes please hint-gift copies of the full score to Kevin Puts and Jake Heggie? Thanks!) and the orgasmic fanfares and climaxes that helped make Adams’s name as a composer for the symphony orchestra are in abundance.

The sheer profusion and interplay of musical colors, some of the richest and most vivid of his career, make this score an especially satisfying listen. Me and the boys were hootin’ and hollerin’ when the orchestral brass, in one transition, marked a pivotal naval battle by evoking Wagner’s Rhine motif. Chester Englander’s cimbalom playing, as heard in the aforementioned Sheherazade.2 and the El Niño sequel The Gospel According to the Other Mary (Met staging when???), made me feel at this performance as if Adams had finally found a sonority that he’d spent half his life looking for. And of course, that exotic sound is key to the composer’s characterization of Cleopatra’s Egypt.

What does that mean, though, “exotic”? Well, I’m sure that Adams has read Saïd, and I have most definitely not. While it’s clear that the creators’ hearts lie with Cleopatra and not with their proto-fascist Rome, it’s also clear that Rome is Us—the Western world—for better and (mostly) for worse, and Egypt is still, in some way, Them. Is the complexity and humanity that Shakespeare writes into Cleopatra, and that Adams and Bullock breathe into this adaptation of the character, enough to challenge this Othering binary? Can we, as opera queens, put opera’s women—divas like Cleopatra (and like Bullock)—on a pedestal, as ideal expressions of our feminine selves, without also viewing them as something apart?

Well, I’m going to have to keep thinking about that. In the meantime, I’m grateful that Adams and Bullock have created the sort of role that opera is for—notwithstanding the imperfections of this substantial and ambitious work.