Murder, Incest, and Arias All In a Day’s Work at the Long Beach Opera

GELFAND’S WORLD-The most emotionally engaging art is to be found on the operatic stage. It is a combination of live action accompanied by the full breadth of orchestral music. Add the human voice, and the experience can be powerful. This coming Sunday in San Pedro, the Long Beach Opera will perform Therese Raquin, based on the racy 19th century novel by Emil Zola and adapted by composer Tobias Picker and librettist Gene Scheer. I discussed the opera with its composer the other night following the opening performance.  

Tobias Picker is a composer who actually gets his operas performed, and in the United States at that. His works have been performed by the Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera, and the Los Angeles Opera, to mention the bigger houses. His work has also been performed at the prestigious Santa Fe Opera. 

Picker was gracious enough to talk about  what has influenced his own work and the state of opera in the United States. What was particularly interesting for Los Angeles area readers is what he said about the Long Beach Opera. 

Just to provide a little orientation, the LBO has been a Southern California institution for 35 years. As the LBO likes to point out, it is the oldest opera company in the Los Angeles area, but it adds, a bit tongue in cheek, that it is also the youngest. What the LBO website witticism is really getting at was explained by Picker: "The Long Beach Opera and Chicago Opera Theater are the two most important companies in America for contemporary opera, the opera of our time." 

Long Beach Opera and Chicago Opera Theater exist in cities that support full size grand opera companies, the Los Angeles Opera and the Chicago Lyric Opera respectively. What the big houses do for the traditional masterworks like La Boheme, these two smaller companies do for modern works, avant garde works, and argumentative art. When LBO did The Death of Klinghoffer last season, we wondered if there would be protests, as have happened in other cities. Instead, the people of this area had a remarkable musical experience which clashed in its own way with the underlying political arguments. 

The modern opera Therese Raquin isn't political, but it follows in the footsteps of recent LBO productions in considering illicit sex, guilty violence, and incestuous relationships. The plotline is a bit reminiscent of Shakespeare's Macbeth with a little of Hamlet tossed in. The setting is Paris in 1945, set forward from Zola's 19th century story. The title character Therese and her secret boyfriend Laurent become racked with guilt over their murder of the woman's first husband, Camille. (Therese has a worse case of guilt.) Along the way, they are visited by Camille's ghost, who gets a great aria even though he died of drowning in the first act. You get to do that sort of thing in Shakespeare and in opera. Therese and Laurent remain unaware of the ghostly visit, but the victim's mother hears the terrible truth and is at once physically stricken. She survives long enough to extract a small amount of revenge. The ghost aria is one of the highlights of the performance, as is the murder scene itself. The final scene builds musically and dramatically towards the murderers' double suicide. 

When I explained to the composer in my own naive way that I recognized a Wagnerian influence in some of the music, he explained that Richard Wagner had a strong and early influence on him. Who else, I asked? "Brahms, the Beatles, Gerschwin." The music critics from the area newspapers made it a point to cite Picker's 20th century educational influences including Elliot Carter. 

Musically, the score finds its own rhythms, while providing a certain amount of tonality without going full bore Puccini or Broadway. As Picker explained in a pre-performance talk, the guilty second act is written to be more jarring and less tonal, as the murderers fall apart emotionally and the music comments on their descent. 

To LA area residents, it has been a small miracle, but a miracle nevertheless, that we have two powerful opera companies available to us. It has not always been so, as those who lived here well into the 1980s are aware. Los Angeles hosted visits from the San Francisco Opera and the New York City Opera for a while, but it wasn't the same as having resident companies who perform on a regular basis. 

The Los Angeles Opera has a steady home base at the Music Center. The Long Beach Opera has used the Terrace Theater in Long Beach since its opening season of 1979, but this has been a sometime thing in recent years. The Long Beach Opera has therefore put on performances in borrowed spaces such as the Cruise Ship Terminal at the Port of Los Angeles, and has been using the Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro for some performances beginning last year. 

To harbor area residents, the visits to the Warner Grand Theater are particularly appreciated. The WGT is a former movie palace built in 1931 which is graced by lofty art deco interiors and substantial seating capacity. The WGT anchors the historical center of San Pedro on 6th Street at Pacific Avenue. First time visitors comment on the architecture without being asked, and we locals proudly explain that it has been an ongoing battle led by the Grand Vision Foundation and the neighborhood councils to get the city to keep the theater open and available for performances. 

It was therefore particularly exciting to see a real operatic production working effectively at the WGT. There was a simple but appealing backdrop, with sets that were movable amid the not-deep expanse of the stage, and there was an artistically effective rendition of the interiors and of a boat trip on the Seine river. The boat trip is important to get right, as the murder happens by the victim being thrown overboard and drowned. This production created the scene effectively. Add some building musical momentum, and the scene lived. 

Let's return for a moment to Picker's remark about the LBO and the Chicago Opera Theater. The Chicago company has been around some 39 years, just a bit longer than the LBO. A strong connection between the two was established when the LBO's director Andreas Mitisek was hired by the Chicago company to be their director too. Therese Raquin will be performed by the same company at the Chicago Opera Theater beginning a week after the final performance in San Pedro. In this way, there is a symbiotic relationship between the two companies, in that the costs of creating the production and of rehearsing the cast are shared equally. 

Shared productions have become more and more common in the operatic world, so it's encouraging to see that LBO is making good use of the process through what promises to be, in effect, something of a shared company spanning Los Angeles and Chicago. 

In making the opening remarks in this discussion about the emotional impact of opera, I don't mean to leave out the American musical theater, which uses much the same elements as grand opera. The fact that huge audiences are devoted to Phantom and Les Miz speak to the future of art at the full bore level. 

You can read reviews of this performance by Timothy Mangan of the Orange County Register and Mark Swed of the L.A. Times, both available online. Mangan finds the opera to be more of a sung play than a traditional opera, and gave a distinctly mixed review. Mark Swed found much to like, while being somewhat critical of the way the opera takes a while to develop in the first act.

 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw

 

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CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 8

Pub: Jan 27, 2015