Sean Chee

There’s nothing new or unusual about presenting more than one opera in a single performance. It was once traditional to insert a comic intermezzo between the Acts of an opera seria, and today most companies will present one-Act operas on a double or triple bill to piece together a full evening’s entertainment.

But I was startled and a little skeptical when I heard of Yuval Sharon’s decision to premiere a brand-new opera, George E. Lewis’s The Comet, on the same stage, at the same time, as Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea. How would it work? Would it work?

Short answer: yes. Because I am stupid and put off reserving my press ticket until the last possible moment, I couldn’t make it into the opening night of the New York premiere at the American Modern Opera Company’s Running AMOC* festival at Lincoln Center, but the final matinee performance last Saturday, interleaving and overlapping alternating scenes from the two operas, was a thrilling, startling, deeply moving experience.

Seats were so scarce because of the nature of the staging. Instead of placing the audience in the house, with eyelines focused on a single plane of action, Sharon packed us all in, elbow-to-elbow, on the stage of Koch Theatre, so that we could sit on either side of a rotating set, with a posh Art Deco restaurant on one side and a stylized Roman bath on the other.

The conceit of this production loosely evokes W.E.B. Du Bois, the author of the short story on which The Comet is based, and his concept of “double consciousness.” Du Bois observed that in America’s racially enforced social hierarchy, the Black subject must, by necessity, see from two points of view: their own, and that of the dominant racial class. Sharon borrows the term in his recent treatise, A New Philosophy of Opera, which argues that the strength of the form derives not from tidy hierarchies of text, music, staging and performance, but from the strange and complex ways in which the different dimensions of the form complement and subvert each other.

In Poppea, the sordid goings-on in the court of Emperor Nero (Anthony Roth Costanzo)—treason, adultery, blackmail, suicide—become a play of abstract ideals. Virtue (Amanda Lynn Bottoms), Fortune (Whitney Morrison), and Love (Joelle Lamarre) appear in an allegorical prologue to claim mastery over human events, with Amore/Cupid claiming that the story we’re about to see proves that Love conquers all. Well, sure enough, the drama that unfolds in the masterfullibretto of Giovanni Francesco Busenello only deals out bad luck and punishes virtue, but the love it offers in their place is the debased cupidity of selfish love between a pair of conniving monsters. Perversely, Monteverdi sets the story to some of the prettiest music in the operatic repertoire, so that the grasping Poppea’s (Kearstin Piper Brown) final ascent to the throne somehow becomes the happy ending that it pretends to be.

Sharon takes his cues for this side of the piece from that deceptively abstract, tidy surface, down to the gleaming white of the toga-like costumes by Oana Botez and of the tiled set by Mimi Lien. Even the rejection of reason, when Nero rebukes his conscience in the person of his counselor, the philosopher Seneca (Evan Hughes), plays out in abstract symbols, the Emperor triumphantly scattering the pieces in their game of chess.

Lawrence Sumulong

In classical drama—which the first operas, such as Poppea, were expressly designed to emulate—all acts of violence take place offstage, with the dead bodies revealed after the fact, and this staging toys with that tradition. After Nero orders Seneca to kill himself, the audience is treated, briefly, to the gruesome, Death of Marat–like tableau of the philosopher slumped in his bath, his vermilion stage blood spilling across the white tiles, but before the stage can rotate a second time, every drop of red has been mopped up, and the body has disappeared as if sucked down the drain.

Meanwhile, on the flipside of this subversive drama of barely repressed violence, a literal horror story is unfolding in full view. A comet, its path intersecting with the orbit of the Earth, has apparently wiped out nearly all human life with a stream of toxic gas, and Jim Davis (Davóne Tines)—a Black man working in a demeaning job as bank messenger—has emerged from a subterranean vault, covered in filth, to find himself the only living man in New York. Monteverdi’s facetious prologue, playing out in the background, takes on yet another facet, as we are invited to consider the perverse turn of Fortune that could kill a man’s entire world, but (lucky him!) allow him to sit in a restaurant that never would have served him yesterday.

He is soon joined by Julia (Kiera Duffy), a rich, white young lady who survived the calamity because she had sealed herself in a downstairs darkroom to develop last night’s photos of that spectacular comet. A coddled member of the leisure class, she is suddenly alone in a world where money won’t buy her food and shelter, and where whiteness affords her no advantage.

In The Comet, there is no one to clean up the mess. Jim and Julia have to haul the corpses out of the restaurant by themselves, and the debris they knock over in struggle or frustration litters the stage as they go on. The singers even acted in different dramatic registers, with the Comet cast giving naturalistic performances instead of flagrantly cheating full-face towards the audience and doing melodramatic opera hands like the singers of Poppea. The Comet set and costumes were period-accurate, contrasted to the highly stylized Rome and Romans on the reverse.

Lawrence Sumulong

Of course, some compromises had to be made to fit both pieces into a single presentation, most significantly: time. The Comet is 45 minutes of music, and Poppea runs about four times that long, which means that the Monteverdi had to be slashed down to a highlights album in order to fit on the same 90-minute bill, while the pacing of the new opera had to be shattered completely. This is the sort of liberty I’d usually abhor—and, to be honest, I’d still love to see The Comet on its own terms, to see how it works when each moment follows directly on from the next without interruption—but here, it’s surprisingly effective. When The Comet interrupts Poppea, it fragments the piece into a series of abstract musical episodes, and when Poppea interrupts The Comet, it stretches the piece out to something like real time, heightening the dramatic strategy of each staging, and the alternating bites of cool, refreshing Monteverdi and hot-’n’-spicy Lewis cleanse the palate for what’s to come.

Obviously, two pieces were composed in vastly different musical languages, as well. Lewis is a master of chaos and dissonance, his scores dense with frenetic gestures, in an eclectic language capable of accommodating the alien sounds of high modernism as well as deep pulls from Black musical traditions, while Monteverdi is, well, Monteverdi.

But this divergence seemed to make the pairing more, not less, effective, as the 17th-century score proved lucid enough to cut through the noise, and the 21st-century score is noisy enough to accommodate any other music you layer on top of it. The eclecticism of his musical milieu often has the sense of a radio dial being flipped between stations, so that the shifts to Monteverdi had the sense that he was merely tuning in to a strange new frequency. (In one clever moment of the production, Julia, standing next to the restaurant’s wireless set, starts dancing along to a lively number from Poppea, as if in her grief and shock she imagines she can hear it playing over the dead airwaves.) Even the incredibly fine pit orchestras dovetailed conveniently, since one of them was a continuo band from the 1600s, and one of them—deftly led through the bafflingly complex score by Marc Lowenstein—was a new music ensemble on modern instruments.

Lawrence Sumulong

At a turning point in both pieces, The Comet punctures through to the other side of the metadrama. For one transcendent moment, Julia sees Jim not as a “Negro,” but as a man, as her protector, and as the Adam of a new human race. The opera stops, and instead of adapting Du Bois’ prose into verse, the piece presents it as spoken narration. Instead of accompanying Monteverdi, the harpsichord (Elliot Figg) gives an outrageously virtuosic extended solo. And Jim and Julia step through the set to emerge on the other side, adorned with crowns befitting an emperor and his empress.

Then everything collapses. In a final, bitter denouement, we learn that only (“only”) New York has been killed by the comet. Julia’s father (also Costanzo) has just come back from taking a spin in the country. At first shocked to find his daughter sheltering with a Black man, he finally tosses Jim some charity by way of thanks: “If you need a job, call!” (That hollow gesture, rhyming thematically with the characters’ attempts to tune in dead radios and rattle dead telephone cradles before finally shooting rescue flares from the roof, feels fantastically insincere.) The racial and economic distinctions of the outside world have rushed back into the vacuum. Finally, Jim’s wife Nellie (Lamarre) appears. Miraculously, she too has survived—but she holds their dead infant in her arms.

Lewis’s scores are often difficult for me to parse intellectually. Paradoxically, it might be his densest works that I appreciate the most readily, such as his massive one-movement Minds in Flux for large orchestra with live electronics, where the sheer overload of information comes to take on a more clearly comprehensible sort of macro-compositional quality, like a Julie Mehretu painting. (Full disclosure: I was working for Lewis’s publisher when we decided to publish him, and when this opera was commissioned, and thus have done a fair amount to promote his music, but I don’t work for them anymore and am thus totally impartial. Also, PLEASE HIRE ME, somebody.)

Sean Chee

Here, however, my favorite moments were the lyrical numbers. Jim’s commingling despair and relief at finding himself free and alone in a dead world become a compelling blues, and Nellie’s spiritual-like lullaby for their dead child is heartbreaking. In an especially sophisticated moment of musical drama, Julia has a strange, pretty aria, reflecting on her cosseted experience as a young woman of privilege, that turns her into a sensitive, interesting, and well-rounded character, rather than some damsel in distress or post-apocalyptic Karen.

Much of the credit is due to librettist Douglas Kearney, who has turned in one of the most elegantly crafted new libretti I’ve heard in quite a while. His text distills Du Bois’s story down to a unified drama, preserving some of the most elegant language, penning new material, and switching register masterfully between lyricism and drama. Take these lines from Jim’s opening number, sung while he pours himself coupes of champagne in a restaurant strewn with dead bodies:

Rot’s not rotten if it’s got in oaken casks
Fate lets others drink that liquor
I just look at the flask
Today I fill my glass with whisky, wine, champagne and tears
but yesterday they would not have served me here.

The last line comes straight from Du Bois, but Kearney manages to find the blues in it and weaves it into a song that manages to overlay emotional weight, intricate wordplay, and wry wit on top of persuasive characterization.

It was admirably sung, as well. In his higher registers, Tines’s dark tone can take on a hooting, bellowing quality, but his vocal power and musicianship could hardly be faulted in what must be an incredibly challenging sing, and the same can be said of Duffy’s bright, lovely coloratura instrument.

I have to admit that the Poppea prologue had me worried about the singers in that half of the piece—Bottoms and Morrison, in their roles as bickering abstractions, sounded harsh and unpleasant and even a bit sharp. One is tempted to blame the usually brilliant sound designer Mark Grey, whose amplification was necessary given the unusual 360° staging, and whose recent work on Antony & Cleopatra was far below his usual gold standard.

Sean Chee

But if so, both he and the Poppea cast gave me far fewer reasons to complain as the piece went on, settling into pitch and giving performances as lovely as they were persuasive. In A New Philosophy of Opera, Sharon singles out singers like Leontyne Price and Waltraud Meier for whom vocalism, musical interpretation, and dramatic performance all converge to transform the singer into her character.

He includes among their number Whitney Morrison, whose hapless Ottavia in this double opera delivers a heartrending“Addio, Roma!” just as Jim and Julia find themselves expelled from their macabre Eden. But the same could be said of every singer in this staging, who foregrounded text and drama throughout to disappear into their roles—even as some of them played multiple roles, either doubling parts in Poppea or splitting between the two operas, as Costanzo alternates between his ethereal performance of the sybaritic Nero into a down-to-earth turn as Julia’s bourgeois dad.

Doublings upon doublings: Sharon gives the Baroque opera the last word in Comet/Poppea but turns the prettiest music in Monteverdi’s oeuvre from a duo into a quartet. In his program note, Lewis points to a strain of Afro-pessimism in Du Bois’ story, but in his opera, the beauty of Nellie’s lullaby hints at the possibility of some spiritual transcendence. Sharon doubles down by making “Pur ti miro” a crushing coda to the dual work, one that underlines that possibility as well as throwing the bleakness of Jim and Nellie’s situation into stark relief by the ironic loveliness of the music. Both members of both couples left standing at the end of the operas, Nellie and Jim as well as Poppea and Nero, pledge their love for each other, trading lines in English and in Italian.

Lawrence Sumulong

This is the only moment in the otherwise bulletproof Comet/Poppea libretti where the text lets us down. The clunky English singing translation has Jim and Nellie telling each other “Yes, yes, yes, yes!” which, in American, is something you’re less likely to say when you’re pledging your devotion than when you’re trying to get somebody off the phone. But the dramatic and vocal commitment of the singers smoothed over this blemish to produce a deeply moving ending to the piece.

The Comet/Poppea is an experimental work, and good scientists know that we can learn almost as much from the failure of an experiment as its success. If I had hated the piece, it still would have sent me home with a lot to think about. The abundance of visual, sonic, and intellectual riches would alone have been worth those moments when the strange storytelling began to drag, when it became impossible to focus on the individual scores, or even when the stage turntable seemed to malfunction (it stopped turning a couple of times, and on the off chance that these pauses were intentional, they seemed… poorly timed).

But this was a rousing success. I don’t think I’ll ever be as moved by the death of Seneca as I was in this staging of Poppea, or as filled with dread by another staging—should I ever get the chance to see one—of The Comet. Sharon is quite the star in the opera world these days, with a Tristan coming up on the next Met season, and a Ring to follow soon thereafter. If he’s capable of achieving with those pieces even a fraction of what he was free to do with this staging, they’re sure to be nothing short of revelatory.