Caedit nos pestis: “The plague falls upon us.” The dire opening of Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” should have had a chilling effect when L.A. Opera presented the work at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, on June 6th. The chorus sings of the Plague of Thebes over five darkly screaming chords in the key of B-flat minor, with an obdurate bass line grating against the upper harmonies. Flutes and trumpets slide from the first chord to the second in an anguished whoop. L.A. Opera’s orchestra and chorus executed a series of impeccable attacks, each sonority landing with a splendid thud. This is the sound of an inescapable catastrophe, one that leaves its human victims in a state of fear and fury. Stravinsky wrote “Oedipus” in the nineteen-twenties, in the wake of the twin disasters of the First World War and the flu pandemic of 1918. It sounds no less fearsome a century on.
My immediate reaction, though, was one of joy—and I felt a similar stir of pleasure in the crowd around me. Few of us could have heard unamplified music in more than a year. No big-budget American opera house had given a full-scale indoor performance since March of 2020. We had missed a particular kind of loudness, one that is the direct sum of human work, without technological enhancements. To hear such big sound after long silence brought me back to my first encounters with full orchestras in childhood: the National Symphony playing Mahler, the New York Philharmonic playing Richard Strauss. This loudness is also fullness: Niagara indoors.
James Conlon, L.A. Opera’s longtime music director, and Christopher Koelsch, the company’s C.E.O. and president, were wise to return to the theatre with something other than a repertory chestnut. “Oedipus” is grand, but it is not grand opera, or even opera in the strictest sense. Stravinsky called it an “opera-oratorio,” and its not very frequent revivals often assume oratorio form. L.A. Opera’s performance was essentially a concert version, although the projection of shadow-puppet animations, by the Manual Cinema collective, added a stark visual allure. In some ways, we don’t need to see the Oedipus drama played out onstage: thanks to Sophocles and Freud, it is already in our subconscious.
No matter how “Oedipus” is performed, its score is richly stocked with operatic allusions—so much so that some early critics dismissed it as pastiche. Leonard Bernstein once proposed that Stravinsky had derived that introductory motif from Verdi’s “Aida.” The Stravinsky biographer Stephen Walsh hears echoes of Puccini’s “Turandot,” which had its posthumous première in 1926, while Stravinsky was working on his score. Indeed, the Messenger’s announcement of Jocasta’s death strongly recalls, in both harmony and rhythm, the riddle-solving scene in Puccini’s opera. Such citations have an ironic tinge; Stravinsky, in his neoclassical period, tended to treat older music as found objects for quasi-Cubist collages. Yet the jumble of material in “Oedipus” is subjected to enormous expressive pressure: in the late twenties, the composer was emerging from a period of spiritual crisis, and in communicating Oedipus’ desperate plight he broke his façade of cool mastery.
Conlon, in spoken remarks before the performance, highlighted other haunting resonances. In times of plague, he said, people always look for malefactors, agents of destruction. I thought of René Girard’s 1982 study, “The Scapegoat,” which recounts the persecution of Jews during the Black Death. For Girard, the Oedipus story was an elemental case of the scapegoating ritual, told from the persecutor’s point of view: the patricidal, incestuous king must be expelled for the plague to end. At first glance, Stravinsky and his librettist, Jean Cocteau, follow the ancient sources in casting Oedipus’ downfall as the necessary outcome of fate. But there is wrenching sympathy in the music for Oedipus, particularly at the end, as a reprise of the monumental opening gives way to a gentle, murmuring farewell. The Manual Cinema team found a beautiful visual counterpart: an image of a human hand outstretched to the blinded, limping shadow-puppet king.
L.A. Opera fielded a superb cast for the occasion. The tenor Russell Thomas rendered the title role with the same disciplined, nuanced passion that he has lately brought to performances of Verdi’s Otello. The mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges made for an unusually youthful, vulnerable, fresh-voiced Jocasta. The bass Morris Robinson gave wounded dignity to Tiresias; the bass John Relyea lent marbled authority to the roles of Creon and the Messenger. The tenor Robert Stahley was a soulful Shepherd. The actor and author Stephen Fry, recorded on video in England, gave wry depth to Cocteau’s often coy narration. The chorus and the orchestra delivered unremitting intensity from the first bars to the last. An audience of six hundred and seventy-five people relished the sound of their own exuberant applause.
The arch-aesthete Cocteau seems an unlikely source of solace in times of global crisis, but he lay behind another production that has recently nourished opera-starved audiences in Southern California: Long Beach Opera’s presentation of Philip Glass’s “Les Enfants Terribles” (1996), based on Cocteau’s novel and film script of that title. This is the last of Glass’s three operas in homage to Cocteau, the others being “Orphée” and “La Belle et la Bête.” The cycle is a highlight of Glass’s sprawling and uneven operatic output—an intimate counterpart to the monumental trilogy of “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha,” and “Akhnaten.” The neon buzz of Glassian style proves a good match for Cocteau’s sly renovations of mythic motifs. “Les Enfants Terribles,” a tale of self-obsessed, semi-incestuous siblings, is scored for an ever-bustling trio of pianos—shades of the four-piano barrage of Stravinsky’s “Les Noces”—and calls for a quartet of dancers to mirror the four singing roles.
The staging was by the young director James Darrah, who recently took over as Long Beach’s artistic leader. The company has an extraordinary record of supporting contemporary work—Anthony Davis’s “The Central Park Five,” which Long Beach introduced in 2019, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for music—and Darrah appears poised to extend that legacy. He staged “Enfants” on the top level of a parking garage in a Long Beach shopping center. Spectators drove in, parked their cars, and watched the action unfold, either from their cars or on portable chairs. This conception was reminiscent of “Twilight: Gods,” Yuval Sharon’s astounding drive-through Wagner production, which was seen at Michigan Opera Theatre last fall and at the Lyric Opera of Chicago this spring. As it happens, Sharon had been Long Beach’s interim artistic adviser before he moved on to the Michigan company.
Even if “Twilight: Gods” is destined to remain the chief masterwork of the curious pandemic-era genre of the parking-garage opera, Darrah found his own way to theatricalize a dead-seeming space. He strapped on a Steadicam and followed the performers as they moved around the garage: we could watch the results on various screens, and at times the action took place right in front of our cars. The imagery was arresting throughout: Chris Emile, the choreographer, kept both singers and dancers in swirling motion, and Camille Assaf, the costume designer, enlivened the cement backdrop with splashes of vibrant color. The missing element—perhaps unattainable in this format—was a deeper engagement with the hothouse psychology of Cocteau’s story. The fact that the siblings Paul and Elisabeth wound up dead felt like an unfortunate accident rather than the doing of fate.
The best part of the show was the vitality exuded by the young cast. The baritone Edward Nelson gave a spectacularly lithe performance as Paul, and the soprano Anna Schubert captured Elisabeth’s seductive manipulativeness; Sarah Beaty and Orson Van Gay II gave warm musicality to the supporting roles. The conductor Christopher Rountree elicited a clear, driving performance from vocalists and piano ensemble alike. The honks of appreciation were loud and long. ♦
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