It’s interesting to reflect, at times, on what creative types of the future will do with the super-abundance of email correspondence, but if email represent anything like the treasure trove that handwritten letters have always been for those digging into the past, then we should not worry. Opening the Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s season was an epistolary opera of a kind.
Back in 2015, Kevin Puts received a commission from his alma mater, the Eastman School of Music, to write a work which featured another alumna, Renée Fleming. The intriguing subject for his libretto is Georgia O’Keefe’s correspondence with her patron/husband Alfred Stieglitz, much of it held in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. Everything is as fresh from the sources as the title of the work itself. O’Keefe claimed that her first memory was of the “brightness of light, light all around”. The framing is clever. An artist translates her thoughts into words (even though she claims that “words and I are not good friends at all”), which are translated into song: there are multiple alchemies at work.
In this semi-staged song cycle, Fleming and Rod Gilfry bring to life these strange and intense characters, with their strange and intense relationship, Fleming with her superb sense of flow and the limpid articulation of every word, Gilfry with his full, rich baritone. The score is fittingly strange and sour for two such impassioned creatives as O’Keefe and Stieglitz, who embraced strangeness as a life’s path, almost, the suggestion is, as a sacred vocation.
Their relationship was the very epitome of ‘it’s complicated’, and the score reflects its evolutions, its progressions and regressions, its jadedness as well as its vitality. The ritual, formulaic epistolary greetings “Dear...” opens onto dialogues, where they talk to, talk over, talk past each other, expressing what could never quite be fully expressed in words, merely suggested. The orchestral punctuation feels spot-on, particularly the percussive elements.
Vocally and thematically, the most interesting juxtaposition lies in the duet where they remind each other who they are or who they are becoming, that insistence that keeps them geographically and perhaps, in some senses, spiritually apart: she finds her wild soul in the desert southwest where her hands can be like “dark brown gloves” palpating the soil, he a New Yorker, surrounded by city ghosts. That’s the big divide, the cost of their apart-togetheness; an orchestral interlude follows when that dialogue dries up, during which we see her first uncanny pictures of cow skulls: the place of life also as a place of death, a “black cross against a blue sky”. Et in arcadia ego.
Alfred’s death follows in 1946 but O'Keefe lives on for decades, and Puts’ conceit is to have her compose letters without replies, questions into the void, musings. It reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line in one of his terrible sonnets: “dead letters sent to him who lives alas away”. I found this a moving section, jaded and yet fresh, as she allows herself to develop a sense of solace and peace. The work ends in her wonder at the beauty of the world, not a transcendent apotheosis, more like the response of a child seeing it for the first time.
The principals sang with feeling and conviction, but I almost felt short-changed – the work could have been half as long again, the better to tease out the complexities. There was enough to intimate depth and agony, but not enough to probe the wounds. There were a few – a very few – touches of humour, welcome in their brief depiction of the homely side of O’Keefe, the most notable being the rough and rustic violin playing, with a Southwest edge, from the concertmaster, in the letter where she describes her own awful violin-playing. A little more earthiness would help contextualise characters kept at a constant pitch of anguish and make us care more, in making them more relatable. Furthermore, their love apotheosis, unsung but played by the orchestra in tones never far from agony, was brought to heel all too neatly by the surtitles flatly telling of their marriage in 1924. I know they had to get basic narrative details across, but each time it disrupted the flow.
It’s not often that I would suggest video projections be larger but considering it was O’Keefe being portrayed, with her ability to monumentalise even the smallest of flowers, screening on a bigger scale would have helped us immerse ourselves in her gigantic-microscopic world, allow us to be saturated in her colours, see things her way. The close-up of her hands (from photographs Alfred took) were striking, and bore out the constant motif of the libretto: this was a woman who lived by her hands.
