Trouble in Houston for Lenny

By Michael Walsh

Bernstein's opera, A Quiet Place, is a disappointment

Sometimes it is possible to be too talented. Take the case of Leonard Bernstein, for example. The protean golden boy of American music, who will turn 65 in August, has justly won renown as a flamboyant conductor, an engaging proselytizer and an omnidirectional composer. Bernstein has conquered in ballet (Fancy Free), the Broadway musical (West Side Story) and the symphony (The Age of Anxiety). But in the past 20 years, it seems, the vast range of his talent has hindered rather than helped him, especially as a writer of serious music. In 1963 there was the embarrassment of the "Kaddish" Symphony, with its outburst of adolescent admonishment of God; 1971 saw a Christianized version of the same material in Mass. The premiere last week of his new opera, A Quiet Place, while an improvement, did little to stem his creative decline.

The work, staged by the Houston Grand Opera as part of a triple commission by the Kennedy Center and La Scala, is a two-hour sequel to Bernstein's 1952 Trouble in Tahiti, a one-act gem stone that gently chided the false contentment of the burgeoning new American suburbs, while poignantly focusing on the failing marriage of an archetypal couple, Sam and Dinah. In its fluid, assured handling of styles, its economy of means and its genuine melodic inspiration, Trouble in Tahiti is a small masterpiece.

Why Bernstein felt the need to add a cumbersome sequel is a mystery. Does anyone care what happens to Mr. and Mrs. Calaf after the curtain goes down on Turandof? But Bernstein and Librettist Stephen Wadsworth, 30, a former editor of Opera News, have gone ahead to construct a convoluted second chapter that picks up 30 years later, just after Dinah's death in a suicidal, drunken car crash. There are now ten characters instead of two: the couple's son Junior (Baritone Timothy Nolen) and daughter Dede (Soprano Sheri Greenawald, in an outstanding performance); Dede's bisexual husband Franc,ois (Tenor Peter Kazaras), who was formerly Junior's lover; Dinah's brother; her best friend Susie; an analyst; the family doctor and his wife; a funeral director; and, of course, Sam (Baritone Chester Ludgin). Balanchine's famous dictum that there are no mothers-in-law in ballet may not quite apply to opera, which is not mute, but the common sense behind it ought to be respected. A Quiet Place is too heavily populated, its relationships obscured by a wordy, awkward book that sinks whatever chance the opera had of being truly satisfying.

Still, there is a problem with the music itself. Like some other composers of his generation, Bernstein no longer fully trusts his basically conservative musical convictions. The eclectic A Quiet Place is fundamentally tonal, but its melodies only infrequently blossom, as if Bernstein were inhibited by 30 years of modernism from writing the kind of straightforward, expressive music that obviously agrees with him. Instead, he has compromised with a bloated, percussive score that, stripped of its bluster and its "commitment," is too often little more than a plaintive bleat. Only in the orchestral interludes, affecting, purely musical ruminations that speak louder and far more honestly than the clamor onstage, do we hear the real voice of Leonard Bernstein, struggling to be heard amid all the earnest chatter. Perhaps it is time for Bernstein to forgo the crutch of a text, which has served him so poorly of late, and listen to what his own voice is telling him.

--By Michael Walsh This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.