HIT OPERA: IDENTITY IN FLUX
Faust is back again in a modern-day operatic setting with a female Mephisto, thanks to composer Jake Heggie.
Is San Franciscan Jake Heggie the next Leos Janacek? In initiating ultra-dramatic opera when nearing the age of 60, Heggie’s path suddenly parallels that of that amazing late-starting Czech operatic master whose belated bursting forth had ushered in the 20thcentury.
Heggie, 58, had already created several operas marked by fluid story-telling and lyricism but little fire. Now, for the first time, he has turned the corner to a new dimension as the blood and guts and passion are spilling there at center stage with his Faustian world-premiere “If I were You” unveiled here Aug. 1. It’s a psychodrama, bar scene, murder tale, mass demise, fantasy flight, mystic foray and love story, all rolled tightly into 150 minutes. Now his heroine Diana is a dramatic mezzo, and his score is marked by powerful arias, duets and a trio, backed by a 32-piece orchestra. This one should silence critics sounding plaints about his one-dimensional orchestrations.
Springing up out of Gene Sheer’s image-rich libretto, this is a jarring psycho-opera about identity disorientation, extending ID trauma worked on by Britten, Kafka, Mallarmé, von Hoffmanthal, Schoenberg and Wagner over the centuries.
“If I were You” is Heggie’s break-through opera in his dazzling metamorphosis. This major American composer can’t simply be thrust into a cubbyhole category any more. This time he even offers a boy-girl love scene.
The timeless Faustian story goes modern as the bored and aimless hero Fabian, dying from a grievous auto wreck, meets the feminine devil (Brittomara) and is offered multiple new identities. The sole proviso: If he reverts to his original self, he is doomed. By a clever combination of lightning theater, shocks, and sound effects, he zips instantly into new personae traded with an older boss, a bar tough, a cop, a photographer, even a woman named Selena, all in sequence. His recurrent and unresolved question: Who am I?
His Margarete is the heroine Diana, who bursts out of her shell, all but becoming the main character of the drama (even if the magical Brittomara is omnipresent, stealing more than one scene).
The mystical libretto is that of a visionary, blooming with images of elephants circling, an infinity of stars above, a turning wheel of arcane symbols, and an array of Hindu deity names that transform Fabian into others’ bodies when spoken. Heggie’s orchestra meantime keeps changing its spots equally fast—now with a perpetual-motion theme, now a tattoo of drums, now with musical ferocity, now with mambo rhythms or quirky jazz. All working hand-in-glove, with the animated Nicole Paiement on the podium leading the charge.
The increasingly passionate Diana pours her heart out in a grand act-two aria, yearning for the return of the Fabian she knew, and all but inviting the disastrous end that the devil had warned about. This transformative moment as played by soprano Esther Tonea marks the high point of the opera prior to a chaotic finale with the return of Brittomara triumphant (mezzo Cara Collins), coming to collect Fabian’s soul in her hands. The enigmatic Fabian was tenor Michael Day, while Diana’s friend Selena was Patricia Westley in this double-cast production.
Despite the limitations of Herbst Theatre—a rehabbed meeting hall, hardly an opera house—the quintet of designers made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear with special effects and changes required through 13 scenes. In a confined space, with Fabian’s auto wreck dangling precipitously from a tree, Stage Director Keturah Stickann manipulated the nine solo singers and small chorus adroitly.
The production was by Merola Opera, a young-artists subsidiary of the S.F. Opera. The tale is loosely based on the eponymous novel by the 20th-century Frenchman Julien Green.
If people of another era would have been aghast at Diana’s planting a hot kiss on Selena, here it’s no shocker—especially since at that point, Fabian is occupying the body of Selena, and Diana knows it.
“IF I WERE YOU,” world premiere opera by Jake Heggie, Aug. 1-6 at Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. For info: (415) 864-3330, or go online.
