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April 14, 1999, 07:51 p.m.
Cover story: Tolstoy transformed
By CHARLES WARD
Copyright 1999 Houston Chronicle
RUSSIAN writer Leo Tolstoy was deeply skeptical
of the moral impact of music. In his novella The Kreutzer
Sonata, he blamed a marriage breakup and a murder on a Beethoven
violin sonata. In the great novel War and Peace, Natasha
Rostova's moral downfall occurs against the background of an
opera performance.
No wonder the New Grove Dictionary of Opera characterizes
Tolstoy as a "distinguished hater of opera."
Ironically, for its next world premiere, Houston Grand Opera
turns to the "hater" for inspiration. Resurrection,
based on Tolstoy's last novel, opens Friday at the Wortham Theater
Center.
Composed by American Tod Machover, the opera tells the story
of Prince Dmitry Nekhlyudov, a Russian military officer called
to serve on a jury. He soon finds himself sitting in judgment
of Katerina Maslova, once his aunts' servant, whom he seduced
and impregnated in a distant moment of lust.
When she is convicted and sentenced to prison in Siberia,
his reawakened guilt propels him to save her. He uses all his
resources, political and material, to free her, in the process
freeing himself from the spiritual burdens of wealth, position
and society.
The notion that Tolstoy furnished such a simple story line
may seem improbable to those who know his two greatest works,
War and Peace (1865-69) and Anna Karenina (1875-77).
With their sprawling tapestries of Russian society and huge
casts of characters, the two are forbidding to read. Reductions
of War and Peace for other media have remained extraordinarily
bulky. Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev produced an operatic
treatment lasting more than four hours, to be heard over two
evenings.
Yet Resurrection, at its core, is "simply about
two people," said director Braham Murray, co-artistic director
of the Royal Exchange Theater Company in Manchester, England.
Their story is the spine of the opera, while surrounding incidents
have been compressed or adapted and the ending has been altered
to eliminate Tolstoy's bromide on chastity.
Through flashbacks, Resurrection juxtaposes the trial
and Prince Nekhlyudov's encounter with Maslova. After the trial,
he asks her forgiveness, pledges to free her and declares his
wish to marry her.
In Act 2, he finds her during a march to Siberia in the middle
of winter; he has a petition she must sign. When he next sees
Maslova, now in Siberia, he has an imperial order freeing her.
She rejects him for another prisoner but urges the Prince
to give to others the charity he has shown her. With that act,
he realizes, Maslova frees him as well.
GO general director David Gockley started talking to Machover,
45, about writing an opera more than a decade ago. Even then,
Machover had composed works for a range of major musical ensembles,
from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to the Kronos Quartet to Pierre
Boulez's Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris.
It took almost that long for the composer to find an apt text
sketching the theme of spiritual renewal.
"The depth of the questions posed, the riveting, intimate,
unusual love story of Prince Nekhlyudov and Maslova, and the
indelibly horrifying descriptions of cruelty and stupidity provide
the backdrop for an unbelievable flowering of human vitality,
warmth and love," Machover said.
In Resurrection, he has written a traditional opera,
a consonant score for orchestra and unamplified voices. "My
musical language is basically lyrical, dramatic and expressive,"
he said. (One project that particularly impressed Gockley was
the CD Angels, in which Machover arranged medieval chants
and American folk hymns and added some original music.)
Machover, a native of upstate New York, also is known for
his inventive adaptation of electronics to acoustical classical
music. He composed Resurrection while on leave from his
posts as professor of music and of media at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where he is a leading member of the
school's famous Media Laboratory. Founded in 1985, the lab is
devoted to research on information technologies, including digital
television, holographic imaging, computer music, electronic publishing
and artificial intelligence.
Two of Machover's electronic projects are particularly provocative.
The Brain Opera, unveiled at the 1997 Lincoln Center Festival,
is a multimedia piece in which each performance is based on sounds
created by the audience using toys and electronic gizmos in the
lobby or contributed by people using the Internet. A permanent
version of The Brain Opera is being installed in the new
House of Music in Vienna.
The second involves his hyperinstruments, developed as team
projects with students and Media Lab colleagues. These use computer
programs to transform musicians' movements during live performance
into sounds that supplement the live music.
For Resurrection, Machover will embellish sound in
two subtle electronic ways, though the work can be played without
them. One will consist of pre-programmed sounds, activated by
a Yamaha keyboard, that might enhance a bass line, sharpen the
attack of a particular note or provide additional instrumental
color.
The second will be controlled by a touch-pad called the Multi-Modal-Mixer,
a variation on a hyperinstrument. At various points in the performance,
a musician will add to the orchestral sound by the way he "plays"
the touch-pad with his fingers.
But electronic sounds will not dominate, Machover emphasized.
Speakers will be placed in the orchestra pit, not on the sides
of the stage, so that live sound and electronic enhancements
can blend as completely as possible.
"Everything has been done to serve the music and the
work in a way that assures that the overall sound is acoustic,"
Machover said.
HE collective goal of the Resurrection creative team
is a piece that will fit Gockley's preference for new works that
have popular appeal and can easily be repeated. Mark Adamo's
Little Women (1998) and Daniel Catán's Florencia
en el Amazonas (1996) were the first in that genre.
HGO music director Patrick Summers worked closely with Machover
on the overall dramatic shape of Resurrection. The resulting
form is -- accidentally, both say -- very much like some of the
best American musical comedies. A long first act sets out the
premises and complications of the story; a shorter second act
contains the resolution. In the time-honored tradition of opera,
Machover uses arias to reinforce emotional peaks.
Murray said his work on the libretto has tightened the narrative
and increased the plausibility of the ending. The staging --
this is the director's first professional opera -- will rely
heavily on lighting and freeze frames.
Resurrection may be a turning point in Machover's career.
For much of his adult life, he has faced conflicting impulses:
taking music into the world and designing advanced technology
to apply to it. His past two decades have been devoted heavily
to the latter, but the new opera may change that.
"I think of Resurrection as a synthesis,"
he said. During the next few years, his challenge will be "finding
a better balance between the social form of music and technological
design.
"It's very powerful to remember that music contains in
itself everything needed to move people."
The all-American cast will include Houston Opera Studio baritone
Scott Hendricks as Prince Nekhlyudov, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato
as Maslova, mezzo-soprano Katherine Ciesinski as Sofia Ivanova
(one of the Prince's aunts) and, in multiple roles, mezzo-soprano
Judith Christin, bass Dale Travis and tenor Raymond Very.
Summers will conduct the HGO Orchestra. Sets and costumes
are by Scott Higlett.
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