A dystopian future. A society at war and under night-time curfew. A rural family struggling to make ends meet as food – dropped in by helicopter – becomes scarce and life turns into a fight for survival. Enter the world of Dog Days, the opera by US composer David T. Little that caused quite a stir at its New Jersey première in 2012, has already spanned the States and has just gained its first European production in Bielefeld. With a gritty libretto by Royce Vavrek, it is based on the short story by Judy Budnitz and attempts to explore what it takes for man to return to his animal instincts.
In this post-apocalyptic world, a man dressed as a dog has latched on to the family and become the pet of daughter Lisa. Dad, Howard, spends his days out hunting for food; Mother attempts to keep the household together while the two sons, Pat and Elliot, lay about the house and smoke weed, and Lisa sends unanswered texts to her best friend, Marjorie. The sense of a society on its knees and the family unit the only thing holding together is palpable. The food runs out in the dead of winter and the boys casually remember that they eat dogs in China, don’t they…? Howard gets his rifle. The men have been pointing out all along that ‘Prince’ is a man in a dog suit, but that no longer stops them. The gruesome final scene, entitled ‘The Three Ravens’, sees the three tearing into his flesh as Little’s music reaches body-churning volumes and the army arrives to arrest them and hand over their house to a new family. Will the same cycle happen again?
Klaus Hemmerie’s fluid staging, aided by the multi-room house of Tilo Steffens’s revolving set, keeps things moving dramatically, even though much of the ‘action’ is actually quite static and even contemplative at times – Little’s opera is divided into self-contained scenes and musically is almost in number form, with discrete arias, duets and ensembles. The music itself draws in influences as wide as Coplandesque folksiness and Heavy Metal, and the ten instrumentalists – clarinet, four strings, piano, electric guitar and percussion – engage as much with lyricism as frenetic energy. Little’s largely diatonic language doesn’t stray too far harmonically, setting up short motifs that build into riffs that in turn expand rather than develop, in Minimalist style. Hints of gamelan intrude in Lisa’s aria with the dog in the ‘Friends’ scene and the squealing rock guitar takes over when Howard breaks down in a home-wrecking fury in Act II. It is perhaps at its most effective when ‘music’ gives over to noise in the denouement.