Houdini: The Riddle Remains

By Christopher Porterfield

Old tricks upstage a new opera in Aspen

Opera: An exotic and irrational entertainment --Samuel Johnson

If only Dr. Johnson could have been in the Colorado Rockies last week. The Aspen Music Festival put on an exotic and deliberately irrational entertainment in which clowns, jugglers and acrobats capered across the stage. Flames shot up from nowhere. Flowers sprouted suddenly in a spittoon. A chorus stalked the aisles chanting a pitch for patent medicine. The hero was played by no less than three performers--a singer, a dancer and a magician. Before a note was even heard, the magician was hanging by his feet high over the stage, wriggling free of a straitjacket.

The occasion was the U.S. premiere of Houdini a "circus opera" by Dutch Composer Peter Schat and British Writer Adrian Mitchell. A note in Mitchell's libretto says that the work--originally produced in Amsterdam in 1977--"isn't a documentary but a celebration." What it celebrates is the spirit of human freedom symbolized by Houdini's ingenious escapes from every form of shackle and confinement.

Key events in the magician's life, freely rearranged, are played out in stylized, pageantlike scenes. His birth is presented as his first "great escape." But he remains passionately tied to his mother. Her death at the peak of his career leads him to court, then to denounce, the spiritualists who are unable to put him in touch with her. After his own death, his wife Bess holds seances for ten years in an attempt to reach him.

(At the first of two performances last week, an electrical failure plunged the music tent into blackness at the finale, prompting a brief, wild surmise that Bess had succeeded.) Death, she sings to his departed spirit, is the "door from which you will never escape."

Librettist Mitchell, 46, is known as an anti-elitist who believes art should be "useful" to a broad public. Schat, 44, a political radical, was one of the collaborators on the 1969 Dutch opera Reconstruction, a political fantasia on Don Giovanni in which the Don represented imperialism and the Commendatore turned out to be Che Guevara. Thus it comes as no surprise that Houdini is suffused with a romantic--and at times sentimental--populism. In the final scene, Houdini appears from beyond the grave with the message that "there is no heaven but the people/ Let the people of the world/ shake off their chains/ and sing." To move from a vaudeville artiste slipping out of handcuffs to this kind of cosmic hymn is a long leap--too long. Except for some passing swipes at the police, war and poverty, Mitchell and Schat never specify the nature of the people's chains. Nor do they pause to consider that absolute freedom can itself be a kind of bondage.

Schat's score calls for a sizable chorus and a huge orchestra, heavy on brass and percussion (including steel drums). Stylistically he is what might be called a postserialist. Having explored the twelve-tone system in earlier compositions, he now works in a freely eclectic vein, yielding at times to the "tonal nostalgia" that Robert Craft pointed out in Alban Berg's music, at other times borrowing the jazzy strains of theater music. At Aspen, his pounding rhythms generated a powerful momentum and his thickly massed sonoraties built to sharp climaxes, especially in the big choral scenes. His solo vocal passages and more lyrical moments, however, seemed to lack a distinctive melodic contour.

As Houdini, Tenor Jerold Norman was re-creating his role in the Amsterdam production, and the experience showed in his secure, if rather monochromatic, performance. Other major roles were ably filled by Rita Shane as Houdini's mother, John Brandstetter as his manager and Viviane Thomas as Bess. Conductor Richard Dufallo, who heads Aspen's annual Conference on Contemporary Music (at which Schat is one of this year's composers-in-residence), had the work firmly in hand. His youthful chorus and orchestra managed most of the score's difficulties, though without making them sound any less difficult.

In the end, both the music and text were upstaged by the magic. Several of Houdini's feats, including his water-can escape, were authentically and grippingly duplicated by Mark Mazzarella, a 19-year-old college sophomore. But the cost of going for such theatrical pizazz was a loss of psychological depth. Houdini offered almost no plot, almost no human interplay. Throughout the evening, a large portrait of the magician stared out at the performers from the ear of the stage, as if challenging them to account for his mysterious driven nature. The tricks, the career, the public appropriation of him as a hero were all here. But the man himself? Once again, he escaped. -- Christopher Porterfield

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.