In contemporary opera, the desire to seek out “pre-vetted,” successful source material seems to be ever-increasing, sometimes turning to novels of shocking length. Karl Ove Knausgård's The Morning Star, weighing in at a symbolic 666 pages in its native Norwegian, was a tremendous hit throughout Nordic countries with respectable sales and acclaim in other markets.
An unidentified celestial body appears in the sky, bathing the city of Bergen in a strange new light. The animals are acting a bit off. But people still treat their loved ones poorly, everybody shows up for work and nobody sees a reason not to have another beer. It might be the end of the world, but have you thought about the real problem? That is to say, whatever is bothering the individual. The novel alternates between the viewpoints of a broad cast of locals over two days as they deal with their sundry issues… or ignore them.
Light on both dialogue and plot, heavy on philosophy and other interior musings, the book at least suggests room for operatic interpretation. At Finnish National Opera, composer Sebastian Fagerlund, librettist Gunilla Hemming and director Thomas de Mallet Burgess all seem to have different ideas about what is important to deliver.
Fagerlund voices the star with the inharmonic waterphone, increasing its presence in the score as the evening progresses. Unfortunately, other elements of the musical landscape are not nearly as clear. The few memorable phrases are all tied to sung words. While Fagerlund is known for creating impressionistic music, the work lacks an auditory arc to justify the vibe.
Hemming deftly cuts “loose” characters and creates meaningful composites to reduce the story without wrecking the thin plot. Outside material lifted from the novel or crafted to summarise invisible actions, she inserts her own poetic voice. Indeed, the most thoughtful and stimulating portions are those where Hemming offers her interpretation of the work’s deeper questions.
Thomas de Mallet Burgess’ minimalist, effective staging utilises a circular conveyor belt (set designer Leslie Travers) to move between and layer subplots. This glorious new star is depicted as a glowing, smoky moon, behind a collection of evergreens “rooted” above. As the show progresses, these inverted trees are lowered until their tops nearly touch the ground, along with the star.
The cleanest performance and most stunning voice belonged to young tenor Jere Hölttä in the role of Ole, son of Jostein and Turid. His voice, rich and precisely controlled, turned the small role of a teenaged “loser”, glued to his gaming chair, into a character with implied depth that it felt unjust for the story to avoid probing. One wishes that he had been given more to sing. More surprising, if not jarring, was the tremendous voice that came forth from “Doctor 2,” mezzo Anu Ontronen. An absolutely luxurious sound, the scene fell into her powerful tone as naturally as the earth is shadowed during a lunar eclipse. To have such significant voices in such small roles shifts the gravity of the opera in a way that can’t be ignored.
Of the main characters, Tommi Hakala beautifully carried the role of Egil, the socially awkward freewheeling philosopher who is sharply reduced in the opera to a deadbeat dad. Hakala’s baritone has the substance and texture to invoke nuance even in lines that are quite flat. Yet, there were parts of the score where Hakala failed to meet the demands of a particularly harsh transition between both pitch and dynamic extremes. These parts were plentiful enough among the principal characters that one wondered whether the vocal writing was simply too difficult for the singers to sustain, or was deliberately bizarre to pair with Fagerlund’s instrumental routine of choosing to break a pleasant melody at its neck, inserting sharp or atonal musical ideas.
The chorus pulled a great deal of weight in giving the story a conceptual backbone, often inviting moral stakes otherwise absent. Flight crews, emergency responders and medical workers came together as sort of “NPC” choirs, underscoring the outsized self-interest that plagues each character. Those selves, in Fagerlund’s presentation, are both simple and oblique. Hannu Lintu conducted the orchestra with no apparent flaws in their playing, and those moments where soloists struggled on stage seemed unsalvageable from the pit.
Does Fagerlund’s creation amount to a viable opera beyond its role as fan service for those who liked the novel? For someone who hasn’t read the book, it’s perhaps best to approach this adaptation as a bunch of aesthetically compatible little operas cobbled together onto a stage that is largely indifferent to them. That may well be the point. While not every opera needs to be steeply didactic or musically beautiful, a series of vignettes vaguely gesturing to man’s search for meaning and the isolation of the human mind feels unlikely to earn a place in the repertoire.
