Boston Lyric Opera is nailing it with its Opera Annex productions. Last year’s Turn of the Screw was a hugely anticipated smash hit and this season’s production of Victor Ullmann’s is something of a surprise hit, continuing the record of sold-out runs. Obviously, the BCA’s Calderwood Pavilion doesn’t make quite as interesting an annex as Turn of the Screw‘s , despite set designer Caleb Wertenbaker’s efforts with strings of work lights and sheets of white plastic to make the theater appear under construction, and the whole production ad hoc–like it is in some unheated South End warehouse. They’ve already meta-ized the whole idea of an annex production…but I’m sure constraints outside the scope of artistic merit limit location choice.
Although Emperor was an outstanding success, the first course of the night came off lukewarm. Commissioned to fill the hole Emperor, which only comes in at about an hour, leaves in a full program, Richard Beaudoin’s The After Image takes death much more seriously and much less embodied than the program’s feature. The music has chops, but the heady libretto, drawn from the texts of Rilke and the like, doesn’t mesh so well with the cabaret comedy of Emperor. Director David Schweizer attempted to connect Emperor with this story of a girl singing to a photograph of her dead father and the photo singing back, with a bit of performance art consisting mainly of mock ushers and some comic housekeeping announcements that did little but confuse people. What did work splendidly was The Emperor of Atlantis character of Death (Kevin Burdette) appearing on stage during the applause for After Image to applaud the cast with a superiority befitting of his character. The mock ushers returned again to tear down sheets of plastic, exposing Caleb Wertenbaker’s set that made the theater appear even more like an annex than it began as.
Soprano Kathryn Skemp (Soldier Girl), tenor Julius Ahn (Solider), tenor John Mac Master (Harlequin), and mezzo-soprano Jamie Van Eyck (Drummer) (Jeffrey Dunn for BLO)
Andrew Wilkowske gave a Chaplin-esque performance as a great dictator safely hidden away in several levels of well furnished scaffolding as he wages a bloody war against the world, giving orders over the phone. Frustrated with the Emperor’s “motorized, gas powered legions” Death, no longer able to keep up, calls it quits and refuses to let anyone die, leaving helpless legions of “living dead.” Here, they’re basically portrayed as contemporary zombies, sans the usual gore. (I guess Ullmann and his librettist Petr Kien beat that trend by about sixty years.) Death only breaks his strike when the Emperor agrees to sacrifice himself, thus ending his war.
Emperor was written while Ullmann and Kien were locked up inside Terezin concentration camp and, on top of that, they were sent to Auschwitz soon after trying to put it on. As much as the BLO has worked to produce the opera under its own merits, rather than as a piece of Holocaust art, it’s incredibly difficult to ignore its historical context. Satire can be a tricky thing to read, but the opera’s thesis on death as a relief from an in-between undead state is disturbing when one considers where it was thought up. The libretto has the walking dead begging for death, referring to it as holy law and as a means to teach life’s joy. “Thou shall not take the name of Death in vain” is even sung. When death does come, it’s lamely represented by a dozen or so zombies blowing out candles, but their undead state is gruesomely and simply represented by continual falling as they walk towards the front of the stage.
I don’t really know what to make of this and the other reviews I’ve read haven’t either. The opera’s satire is so complex that we wish death upon those it was initially unnecessarily thrust upon in war, through the noble act of the man solely responsible for that war. And the end of that war and the slaughters it would have caused, only come with the merciful slaughter of the undead. Where once the Emperor killed so many in malice that he provoked Death himself, his change of heart brings him to give the world back its death in an act of benevolence.
Burdette, Wilkowske, John Mac Master (as Death’s harlequin companion), and Jamie Van Eyck (as the pro-war Drummer and the Daughter in After-Image) all offered exceptionally well sung and acted performances. Vocal highlights included Kathryn Skemp as the Soldier Girl. The accessible music is more or less a pastiche of quotations of Weinmar-era cabaret, the relevant political anthems, Germanic themes, and Weill. It’s highly cinematic and was augmented here with some creative digital effects that played on the idea of technological warfare.
Tenor John Mac Master (Harlequin) and bass Kevin Burdette (Death) (Jeffrey Dunn for BLO)
