Relief may be the main emotion experienced by those committed to the cause of new music in Chicago this week, following the Lyric Opera’s much-hyped première of Bel Canto, the first opera commissioned by the company since William Bolcom’s A Wedding in 2005. For (such a person might reason) it could have been much worse: some anodyne story about love or loss, guided deftly to its redemptive finale through singing that lives up entirely to the opera’s name.
Yet Bel Canto, the first opera by Peruvian composer Jimmy López, with a libretto by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, manages the nearly unimaginable: it is a contemporary work with a musical idiom that is both emotionally direct and musically interesting, piecing together minimalism and intricate polyrhythmic structures in an overall sound that would be at home in Hollywood. What is most impressive about these various influences is how seamlessly they are interwoven into López’s style – there is no cognitive dissonance whatsoever as he moves from a careening, percussive texture to an indulgently lyrical one. It sounds like the accumulated riches of the 20th century, spoken as a native tongue.
The opera is an adaptation of Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel of the same name, itself an inspired-by-a-true-story account of a hostage crisis, beginning in Lima in late 1996 and ending the following year, in which members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement took hundreds of high-level diplomats hostage for four months at the house of the Japanese ambassador to Peru. One of Patchett’s transformations to the story was to make one of the hostages an opera singer – Roxane Coss, sung charismatically by Danielle de Niese – thus readying the path for the Lyric’s adaptation. The production’s tone is strikingly realist, with commandos dropping from the sky and genuinely terrifying gunfire. The vision is completed by David Korins’ set, which features the most beautiful kitchen seen on the Lyric’s stage since last year’s Rusalka, and beautifully disorienting photography projected onto a blank proscenium by Greg Emetaz, which constantly shifts the stage action’s frame.
Perhaps inevitably, singing and the hostage situation become entangled thematically. Yet there is something uncomfortable in some of the allegorical uses to which opera singing is put in the libretto. Cruz’s poetic impulse leads him to make connections that would have been better left alone. For instance, a terrorist contrasts Coss’ expressive voice to the silence of oppressed people. How does this comparison work? In what sense is a single individual’s well-trained operatic voice a suitable corollary to the metaphor of silence as an indication of oppression? The realist dramaturgy makes some of the claims about opera’s power in its midst especially egregious. Coss’ voice is apparently so potent that the terrorists are nearly lulled into abandoning their cause. Like Odysseus with the sirens, the terrorist leader must constrain the voice’s effect to keep the revolutionary plot on course.