The foxy old dame in the designer sunglasses behind me had it right. “I want to hear something new!” she exclaimed as we all sat in McCaw Hall, awaiting the world premiere of Amelia. She regaled her friends with details about last week’s world premiere of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick at Dallas Opera. I, too, wanted to hear something new.
Under the quarter-century reign of general director Speight Jenkins, Seattle Opera has established itself as a sturdy, conservative home for the 19th century. It hasn’t commissioned a new work since 1972—anyone remember Thomas Pasatieri’s Black Widow?—and the foxy old dame and I were hoping Amelia would accelerate the company’s slow, creaking tilt toward innovation. That slow tilt, which began in the late 1990s, could move Seattle Opera from a locally respected and beloved organization to a well-rounded, world-class company: one that not only serves up the operas everyone loves (Così fan tutte, Carmen, etc.) and singularly champions a composer (in this case Wagner, with an international-caliber Ring cycle before it was fashionable), but also is an obvious locus of new ideas and new works.
Announced in early 2007, the commission of Amelia followed in logical sequence after second runs of the exotic, steel-drum-inflected Florencia en al Amazonas (1998, 2005), Marvin David Levy’s revised “re-premiere” of Mourning Becomes Electra (2003), and Heggie’s The End of the Affair (2005). In 2009, Jenkins gave us cause for hope by importing Robert Lepage’s gruesome and harrowing double bill: Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Bartók’s Bluebeard. Seattle Opera was crawling, slowly, toward the present.
Commissioning new operas is an important but risky business—they seldom survive. Comparatively lucky with Mourning, Levy recalled that two seasons after the opera’s 1967 debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, “it vanished.” Like blockbuster movies, operas cost millions of dollars, but without the promise of stratospheric profits. And since most people can name more brands or “creative properties” in film (Disney, The Lion King) than marquee composers (quick—name a living opera composer besides Philip Glass or John Adams!), a “big name” means nothing.
So Amelia is an event, and a sumptuous-looking one. Swathed in azure, cerulean, bluebell, indigo, teal, and other vivid hues of blue light, the main set (designed by Thomas Lynch) is an elegantly open wire frame that serves as a suburban home, an aerospace firm, and a hospital—all places where Amelia, the daughter of a pilot killed in Vietnam, grapples with anxiety and explosive hysteria spurred by the loss of her father, whom she keeps calling “Daddy.” It’s a conspicuously odd word choice, spoken so often in Amelia that it feels unwittingly Freudian—the only people I know who still say “daddy” are either over 50 or work in porn. But for all its “daddy” dropping, the opera is bizarrely devoid of sexual tension.
Instead, loss is everything and so occludes the relationships among the other characters (including Amelia’s husband, Paul) that it is hard to connect to any of them. There’s so little else to Amelia’s life that she becomes a caricature of grief.
The story succumbs to melodrama, subjecting characters to events and emotions rather than revealing much about who they are. Paul is a nice guy, an aerospace engineer, and seemingly the perfect husband—so why is he married to Amelia, such an obvious head case? Disparate pairings are commonplace in real life and usually reveal more about people than Amelia‘s shallow characterizations. When she learns that Paul is designing a new plane, Amelia simply sings, “The past taught me that all planes are bad.” (Is she kidding? Has she never flown domestic?)
The libretto, by poet Gardner McFall, sometimes hovers poetically, as when Amelia’s father sings, “Fear is worth feeling to know that sky.” Author and director Stephen Wadsworth brings his love of symbolic parallels to this opera, setting its events in multiple times simultaneously. In the first scene, Amelia plays with “Daddy,” while the chaplain conveys the news of the death of “Daddy,” while above, Amelia Earhart tells her story—but the character development comes to naught. After umpteen episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Lost, concurrent chronologies are common. But these events are blurred by the presence of Earhart (also called “The Flier”) and other archetypes such as Daedalus and Icarus. Amelia, her father, and Paul should get to tell their own stories deeply rather than relying on the archetypes to parallel and amplify their emotions.
The music by Daron Aric Hagen is lyrical, roiling, and complex, similar in spirit to early-20th-century composers like Howard Hanson and Ned Rorem (with whom Hagen studied). Hagen has girded his sweeping, voluptuous melodies with a smattering of techniques from the avant—dissonance, incongruous inserts, anything to whip up a rapturous frenzy when needed. But the music so seldom stops that any emotional buildup gets steamrolled by more music. The few sequences without (much of) the orchestra, notably Amelia’s mad scene, offer relief to the ears, not drama.
Conductor Gerard Schwarz and the band excel at Hagen’s music. The singers are uniformly good, though the gale-force pipes of Jane Eaglen (as Amelia’s aunt Helen) blow everyone out of the water, rendering most of the words completely unrecognizable—the English supertitles are necessary not only for international tourists, but for us Anglophones trying to decode an overblown, underdirected voice.
Even if I’m wrong and Amelia is a landmark work (or just a decent opera), Seattle Opera has still put the proverbial cart before the horse. Before Seattle Opera adds to the 21st-century repertory, it needs to pay some dues and spend some time with core works of the 20th century that embrace new movement, singing, staging, and ways of telling stories. Otherwise, it will continue to tarry with subpar—and obviously derivative—works like Amelia.
Consider the following list of 20th-century operas (and their composers): Wozzeck (Alban Berg), Lulu (Berg), Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District (Dmitri Shostakovich), The Rake’s Progress (Igor Stravinsky), Die Soldaten (Bernd Alois Zimmermann), Le Grand Macabre (György Ligeti), Einstein on the Beach (Philip Glass), and Nixon in China (John Adams). All of these works have had multiple productions around the world and are considered classic, compelling, or at least good; each is over 20 years old, yet none have been mounted by Seattle Opera.
Amelia is a step in the right direction, but it is a feeble one. No company should bother with anything so starkly new without an understanding of—and long-standing struggle with—20th-century opera. Before commissioning more new work, Seattle Opera should continue its admirable devotion to giving recent operas a second life and fulfilling opera’s fundamental mission: to make a place for grand music and grander voices to move souls. 
You are far kinder than the group of people I walked with after the show, and the group of people I waited at the bus stop with. Stupid, drivel, inane, and irritating. And, that was just about the lyrics. “I was never bored” was the opposite of the truth.
I still can’t believe “I was never bored” was actually part, and so crucially, of the libretto!
Grind axes much?
Re: “Daddy”. Librettist Gardner McFall is from Florida. Kate Lindsay (Amelia) is a native Carolinian. In the Southern U.S.it is still quite common to refer to one’s father as “Daddy”. It was even more common 15 years ago and pretty much all you heard back in 1966 when the scenes in question are set.
Your dismissive “porn star” remark is a typical cheap swipe in yet another Stranger drive-by “review”.
Compared to all the other measured, thoughtful, (and yes, mostly positive) reviews this production is garnering in established national outlets (NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post), regional press (Seattle Times, Everett Herald, Seattle Weekly) and new media (Opera Tattler, SunBreak, The Gathering Note) your begrunging, polemic piece sticks out like Freud’s cigar.
We get it. You want S.O. to produce late 20th-Century material. Why can’t this early 21st-Century work be judged on its own terms?
@4 Your reliance on “established national outlets” demonstrates either embarrassing gullibility or yet another example of the cheer leading provincialism that rules Seattle. Those reviews are by the same hacks who give high fives to whatever Jenkins does.
This is by far the most perceptive review of the mediocre and pretentious Amelia.
@5, of course, whatever Seattle thinks is right, and the established art world is way off-base. Why don’t you go out to the airport and film some salmon flown in from Alaska.
The first honest review of this sorry opera I’ve seen. You’re still generous on the music though. Boring, meandering and not well planned is what I would say. The opening aria showed promise, but that was quickly left behind. All in all a snooze-worthy and wholly forgettable attempt at what amounted to a very expensive workshop of a new work. It’s sad, especially when you point out the canon of modern works SO has left out. I would leave Glass out (blech) and add in Adams’s Death of Klinghoffer and any of Kurt Weill’s German works too!
@3 In this review, I’m only grinding an axe for Seattle Opera to broaden its repertoire before adding new operas to the repertory. Or to reverse an already wooden metaphor, SO should survey the woods before planting more trees.
I bear no ill will against Seattle Opera; instead of the tongue-lolling, let’s-give a-standing-ovation-to-everything adoration so prevalent in Seattle (which I railed against in the penultimate paragraph of this column), I love the institution enough to offer quite publicly what I believe to be a blunt prescription for a mediocre opera and a mediocre approach to the new. Longtime readers will recall that my reviews and previews of Seattle Opera productions since 2002 have ranged from eager, ecstatic, and positive to somewhat negative, derisive, and deeply critical.
@4 Read my review again; I did judge Amelia on its own terms, mainly by its shallow characterization. Had I compared the work specifically to other, more adventurous operas, the piece could have required several thousand more words as well as concrete suggestions to make (the) opera new. I purposely have not read any other reviews of Amelia; indeed, after attending the first dress rehearsal in preparation for the premiere, I avoided the cranky opinions that began percolating in the blogosphere that same night.
Everyone from the composer and librettist to the potential ticket buyer benefits from a range of views. Any writer worth a damn is willing to be considered idiotically wrong; just make sure you read the piece. And read it again: I do not “want SO to produce late 20th-Century material.” See my response to @3, above. Note that half of the operas in my list date from the first half of the 20th century while the second four are at least 20 years old. Had SO produced at least some of the operas on my list, you might have known that!
As for “Daddy” still being common in the South (or just Florida?): assuming it is true (I have never heard any of my Southern friends use the word) good storytellers know that regionalisms do not necessarily translate well to a broad audience. In any case, “Daddy” was heard so often in the opera that it reduced a character to a verbal tic.
@7 Death of Klinghoffer is on my list of operas I love but I didn’t want to lard my list with too much John Adams; otherwise I would have had to add Doctor Atomic, (despite the fact that the second act makes me queasy). And I do want to see Weill’s Street Scene.
I don’t understand why not placing lots of 20th century work on the boards should impede commissioning new operas. Good opera production is good opera production, and it can be applied to opera of any time frame. If Seattle wants to take risks and try to contribute by commissioning a new opera, that’s great.
“Amelia” may be a failure in this town, which never has dealt new or modern opera very well (you sat in the empty opera house for “Satyagraha” didn’t you?). But I am happy Seattle Opera chose to do it.
For Seattle Opera to be moving toward more modern opera, the choice in this town seems to be put on a “modern” war horse, watch it fail artisticly or financially, and ultimately contribute nothing to opera here or anywhere else by that OR try to make something new that can be a contribution.
Sometimes you commission something, and in the end it sucks — you don’t know until it’s done. Sometimes it’s great. You don’t make the commission, and the world never has the modern operas the reviewer is pining for Seattle to put on — because no one ever commissioned them.
It is unlike a “Stranger” reviewer to advise timidity. Producing more war horses, even though they are comparatively recent warhorses, is timid. If you need to see Nixon in China, I think they did it in Vancouver like 20 minutes ago, and you can get a DVD at the record store. How safe is that? Can opera afford to be timid anymore? Even if we ultimately fail at getting to good modern opera, I am glad we do not go about trying to move forward timidly. That will kill opera in the end. -Roger Ost
I have attended four performances of “Amelia” and been moved to tears each time I’ve seen it; I have also been very touched by the number of people sitting and weeping quietly in the lobby during intermission, or speaking pensively about the piece, or who are back for a second or third performance because they “get” it. During the quieter sections of the opera I have clearly heard people sniffing back tears. This is an amazing reaction to a contemporary opera. That is why I find the observation that ‘”Amelia” may be a failure in this town’ to be at odds with what I myself have witnessed. Furthermore, the audiences have been at least three-quarters. (Did you see that many folks at “Falstaff” on a Wednesday night?)
I am an unashamed opera lover who knows the repertoire (including the oratorios that call themselves operas penned by Adams and other premieres of the past thirty years) and would simply like to report that this opera is extremely sophisticated: it has the musical craft to conceal it’s craftsmanship: every time I hear it (and this is why I keep returning) I hear new felicities and psychological cues in the orchestra, more inter-relations between the musical ideas, and have more admiration for the lovely tunes Hagen has penned.
@9 I don’t want Seattle Opera to place “lots” of 20th century work on the boards but instead hope for a bit of catching up in order to familiarize the institution (not necessarily the folks who work there, some of whom have told me off the record how much they adore new and recent operas) and, more crucially, audiences (and SO donors) with new work. Then, any commissioning money could be spent on something brave and bold.
I disagree that “good opera production is good opera production.” Relatively contemporary operas such as “Lulu” place different demands on the musicians (Berg demands a different kind of technique than, say, Mozart) and production (the libretto of Lulu requires the inclusion of a film) while more recent works challenge the facility itself (to my ears, McCaw Hall has fared poorly with electronic reproduction which operas such as Dr. Atomic and Nono’s Prometeo require).
I don’t think I’m advising timidity but rather a gradual long-term inclusion of more recent and contemporary operas. And though audio recordings can sometimes equal or exceed the concert experience, opera on DVD doesn’t cut it for me (though the Met in HD comes close) – and not everyone can hike up to BC (and hope to cross the border in time) for Vancouver Opera.
ps As for “Satyagraha” I have a ticket stub lying around here somewhere but don’t remember a thing about it; back then (almost a quarter century ago!) I was vehemently opposed to Philip Glass as I foolishly believed “Einstein on the Beach” and his subseqent pieces were dwarfed by “Two Pages for Steve Reich” and “Music With Changing Parts.” I just sat there fuming.
@10 While I’m astonished by the reaction (I didn’t see much of that on opening night or at the first dress rehearsal), I appreciate your report!
Now, after a few months have gone by, I find your review even more off-base and ridiculous. I think it is fair to say that having attended AMELIA the opera changed my life. I am profoundly grateful to Hagen and McFall for what they have created. Your review does a profound disservice to what may be the finest American opera of the first decade of the 21st century.