For several years,TOD MACHOVER has pioneered the development of "hyperinstruments" -- the combination of computer and conventional orchestra instruments. His experiments in this field reached new heights when his Brain Opera -- an interactive work in which the audience actually walked through a three-dimensional space as the music was being created, bit by bit -- became the talk of the 1996 Lincoln Center Festival. But even before Brain Opera had its premiere, Machover was planning a more conventional opera, and the result, Resurrection, based on Tolstoy's final novel, will be unveiled at Houston Grand Opera next month. Houston's enterprising general director, DAVID GOCKLEY, started discussions with Machover ten years ago about a work that would live comfortably in an opera house.
"When David and I began talking about this project,"
says Machover, "I thought of it primarily as a piece about
where we as a culture find ourselves right now. I wanted to do
something with the idea that we're living in the best of times
and the worst of times. There's a kind of progress offered to
us, in the fact that the world is getting smaller, and communications
are improved, and there is so much promise that people should
be able to understand and embrace each other more than ever before.
But you don't have to look very far to see that where we are
is much tougher and more confused than that. The Internet is
a perfect little metaphor for this problem -- it's the
ideal means for anyone to communicate, but at the same time it's
a confused mess. When I thought of different stories for this
opera and different ways of telling the story of how one can
have hope in the middle of a complex period, I came back to my
favorite novelist, Tolstoy, and his last novel, Resurrection."
Tolstoy's novel tells the story of the spiritual reawakening of Prince Dimitry Nekhlyudov, who in his youth seduced a young serving girl, Katyusha Maslova. She becomes a prostitute and later, when she is on trial for poisoning her lover, Dimitry is on the jury. He decides he is responsible for the turn her life has taken and becomes obsessed with trying to make amends, going so far as to follow her to Siberia, where she is sent after her conviction.
"Tolstoy wrote Resurrection exactly 100 years ago, in 1899, as an old man," says Machover. "He was already sensing the Revolution and the incredible changes about to happen to Russia. What he's saying in the novel is that society is getting more and more complex and fragmented, and it's getting harder for people to listen to their own conscience. Tolstoy tells us that there's a conscience inside every person that tells us how to live and deal with other people. The question is how to find that again."
Resurrection is written for a chamber orchestra of thirty-five players. "There will be a kind of what I call enhanced orchestration," says Machover. "My goal is to keep it unamplified. Whenever I use enhancement, I try to have it blend with the rest of the orchestra so it doesn't draw attention to itself. Over the past few years, I've gotten incredibly tired of loudspeakers and amplification. One thing I'm trying to experiment with in Resurrection is bringing technology to the level of good acoustic sound."
When bass-baritone GREER GRIMSLEY goes to a restaurant with friends, he's often chided for overtipping. That's because he used to be a bartender at Antoine's, the famous restaurant in his native New Orleans. In fact, Grimsley was many things before becoming a full-time singer -- a welder's assistant in the New Orleans shipyards, a plumber and manager of a dinner theater in Naples, Florida, where he watched over productions of Wait Until Dark and Dial M for Murder. The last one may have been the most humbling experience of all. "A lot of older folk go to dinner theater, and Florida is a retirement community," he said recently, during a telephone interview from his home in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, mezzo LURETTA BYBEE, and their six-year-old daughter Emma. "Many of these older folks would come in, and they were in the early stages of dementia and would end up lost in this room. It was heartrending. Someone would come in who had to be on oxygen, and you would hear the respirator going for the whole performance -- but still, they loved coming to the theater."
All that seems very far away now. There hasn't been any need
for Grimsley to hold a day job for some time. Last summer, he
got a major career boost when he sang Kurwenal in the much-publicized
Tristan und Isolde at Seattle Opera. Wagner-lovers from
around the world flocked to the Northwest to hear what BEN
HEPPNER and JANE EAGLEN would make of the titl
e roles, but Grimsley got his share of fine
notices, too. "From the beginning," he remembers, "there
was the sense of great possibilities with the whole thing. There
was a feeling that we were all coming together to do something
historic. Most of the time you get either a great Tristan or
a great Isolde, but it's been a while since you had two people
who could squarely sing -- pardon the Southernism --
the peewatty out of both those roles.
"In doing the research, I found out that in all the legends, Kurwenal is such a steadfast and true friend to Tristan. When Tristan is wounded, the first time, Kurwenal is one of two people who will even come near him, because of the stench of the wound -- and not out of a sense of duty, but out of a sense of caring and love. In a couple of productions I saw, you didn't quite get the sense that there was that deep a relationship between the two men, and that was something I was eager to show. I didn't feel intimidated by singing the role. I tried to approach it as lyrically as possible. Wagner wrote some very beautiful lines for all concerned -- even with Telramund, in Lohengrin (which Grimsley performs at San Diego Opera in 2000), there's some wonderful singing. And just to give in to barking is not doing justice to the composer."
photos: courtesy Houston Grand Opera (Machover); © Gary Smith 1999, courtesy Seattle Opera (Grimsley)
OPERA NEWS, March 1999 Copyright © 1999 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.
TRISTAN TEAM HEPPNER, GRIMSLEY