In Santa Fe, a Worthy Failure

Rochberg's Confidence Man challengingly evokes an older idiom

For more than a decade, Composer George Rochberg, 64, has been a point man in one of the bitterest musical skirmishes of the postwar era. With the appearance in 1972 of his Third String Quartet, a work at times frankly reminiscent of Beethoven and Mahler, Rochberg broke irrevocably from the dominant twelve-tone school of composition to write music that was more tuneful, more accessible and, in his opinion, more expressive. His apostasy puzzled and angered many of his colleagues, who felt that the tonal system used by the great classical and romantic composers was exhausted. "Why is George writing beautiful music?" Rochberg's wife Gene was asked. "We've done that already."

Rochberg has since refined his neo-tonal style in such works as the String Quartets Nos. 4, 5 and 6, known collectively as the "Concord" Quartets after the ensemble for which they were written, and the Violin Concerto, premiered by Isaac Stern. But his most ambitious rapprochement with the past has come not in instrumental music but in opera. The Confidence Man, with a libretto by Gene Rochberg based on Herman Melville's bleak, cynical novel, is currently on display at the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico.

Alas, the choice of Melville's ninth novel was unwise. Written in 1856, when Melville's health and spirits were at a low ebb, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade is a series of vignettes illustrating the venality of human nature. Woven throughout is the ever changing persona of the Confidence Man, who assumes various guises on board a ship of fools called, with typical Melvillean irony, the Fidele, as it journeys down the Mississippi one April Fools' Day. It is a rich, difficult and underrated work, but not one well disposed to operatic adaptation.

Recognizing this, the Rochbergs extracted the China Aster episode as the centerpiece of their opera. China's story, related by one of the novel's characters as a cautionary tale, is onedimensional: pressed by a friend to take a $1,000 loan, China, a candlemaker, invests it unwisely, goes broke and dies. This essentially is the plot of the opera, and it is not strong enough to support an evening of musical theater. It is merely the old pay-the-rent melodrama, not real drama.

Rochberg has done his best to flesh out the unpromising material. The opera, his first, is filled with striking set pieces: a lyrical duet for China (Tenor Neil Rosenshein) and his wife Annabella (Soprano Sunny Joy Langton); an ominous interview between China and his moneyed friend Orchis (Tenor Michael Fiacco), whose threatening nature is underlined by a snap-pizzicato line in the low strings; a good-natured, bibulous ensemble lauding the joys of wine. In his handling of the choruses, Rochberg is especially skillful; indeed the final chorus, extolling the virtue of confidence, recalls the Falstaffian spirit of Verdi. For the interpolated minstrel show--the liveliest and dramatically most effective scene, although almost entirely unrelated to the rest of the work--Rochberg has composed memorably effervescent mock folk music.

The composer has also indulged in one inside joke. As China is debating whether to accept Orchis' loan, the Angel of Bright Future appears to him in a dream, encouraging him to take the money in a siren song of harsh modernity that reaches back stylistically to Rochberg's use of atonality in the '50s. Bright Future (musical "modernism") holds out the promise of artistic redemption. But it proves to be an empty, cruel promise, best rejected.

Ultimately, though, these isolated moments are not enough to make The Confidence Man into a coherent operatic whole. By focusing on China Aster, composer and librettist have made the character of the Confidence Man (Baritone Brent Ellis) into a supporting player. Whenever they include other episodes from the novel--principally a scene in which the Confidence Man bilks a barber out of a shave by appealing to his trust--they needlessly distract attention from the main drama. The story of China Aster is not enough; the full story of the Confidence Man would be too much.

The best observation on the opera's difficulties comes from none other than Melville. The heading of Chapter 40 of The Confidence-Man reads, "In which the story of China Aster is at second-hand told by one who, while not disapproving the moral, disclaims the spirit of the style." The grimly humorous spirit of Melville is missing from the opera, with nothing substantive to replace it.

Yet the failure of The Confidence Man does not necessarily mean a corresponding failure of musical idiom. The quality of Rochberg's lyric invention is high, and the fast-moving sequences, such as the minstrel show, are handled with dashing technical assurance. Even the two scenes with the angel, ironic though they are, display a strong command of modern musical materials. Rochberg has issued a challenge in The Confidence Man, to both himself and other composers, a challenge to make modern music speak again in the language it inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries. Whether it can be done persuasively and unselfconsciously is still to be determined. But for a musical culture that has lost its moorings, the attempt is a worthy one.

--By Michael Walsh --

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