The Immolation of an Opera

By M.D.

Dominick Argento's new work has more trills than excitement

Near the end of her 20-min. mad scene, Miss Havisham cries out, "I am tired!" There is a derisive titter from the audience. They have sympathy for Soprano Rita Shane, who plays Miss Havisham. She has flung her voice valiantly through trills, runs, arpeggios, and sung paragraph upon paragraph of words that dwarf the great mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor. But the audience is tired too, because this kind of listening, when most of the words are unintelligible, is also hard work.

Miss Havisham's Fire is the ninth opera by the American composer Dominick Argento, 51, who has at least two major successes, Postcard from Morocco and The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, to his credit. The new work, which had its premiere last week at the New York City Opera, is in almost every way a disappointment. Argento and his librettist, John Olon-Scrymgeour, say that their work is "after Dickens," not to be compared closely to Great Expectations.

The focus has been shifted from young Pip to the vindictive harridan who teaches him his first lesson in cruelty and deceit. In Miss Havisham's Fire we see her on her calamitous wedding day, deserted by her bridegroom. (The young Miss Havisham is sung by Gianna Rolandi, who has a generous mad scene of her own.) There is a brushstroke plot involving an inquest into Miss Havisham's death, but the opera is really a star vehicle for a coloratura. Argento had Beverly Sills in mind when he began work two years ago. She agreed to do the role, but withdrew last fall. To what degree the challenge of writing for Sills may have deflected Argento's usually stable dramatic sense cannot be known, but he has produced a harsh onslaught of ornamental coloratura writing without sufficient melody or legato line to sustain it.

And what of Dickens? It is fine to be "after Dickens," but in this case the distance is embarrassing. Great Expectations would seem to offer rich and practical material for an opera. Pip's progress through the world is eventful, and he does not meet a single dull soul on his road to self-knowledge. Yet the novel is not so diffuse that it could not be contained in a manageable number of scenes.

If surrounded by Pip, the haughty Estella, the lawyer Jaggers, the convict Magwitch, Miss Havisham could be the kind of flamboyant character, drawn with simple, sharp lines, on which operas thrive. Mozart used a similar virago, the Queen of the Night, in The Magic Flute. But Pip, Estella and Jaggers (Magwitch is left out entirely) appear and disappear, little more than shadows crossing Miss Havisham's feverish brain.

Argento, who won a 1975 Pulitzer Prize, has not totally lost his musical sense. There are several ensembles--brief trios and quartets, a long quintet--that have attenuated fascination in this dream world. The orchestration is sparse, but it underscores the decay and the stopped time that Miss Havisham inhabited after she smashed her clocks on what was to be her wedding day.

City Opera has done well by Argento. Set Designer John Conklin's haunted house is properly spooky, and the opera's shifts in time and mood are made decisive by Gilbert Hemsley's lighting. Conductor Julius Rudel kept things going so smoothly one almost forgot that this was a world premiere, the first time for everyone. For Rita Shane there can be only praise. Her acting was fiery, her singing confident, if uneven. It is hard to think of anyone, including Sills, who could have truly commanded the part. Miss Havisham's Fire burns a long time, but finally ends in ashes.

-- M.D.

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