SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Philip Glass, Appomattox: San Francisco Opera, Dennis Russell Davies, conductor; War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. 14.10.2007 (HS)

Cast:

Robert E. Lee: Dwayne Croft /
Brian Leerhuber (10/24)
Ulysses S. Grant: Andrew Shore*
Julia Dent Grant: Rhoslyn Jones
Mary Custis Lee: Elza van den Heever
Mary Todd Lincoln: Heidi Melton
Elizabeth Keckley: Kendall Gladen
T. Morris Chester: Noah Stewart
Abraham Lincoln: Jeremy Galyon
Brig. Gen. Edward Alexander: Chad Shelton*
Julia Agnes Lee: Ji Young Yang
Edgar Ray Killen: Philip Skinner

Director - Robert Woodruff
Set designer - Riccardo Hernandez
Costumes Paul Tazewell

Robert E. Lee - Dwayne Croft
 

There is a moment in Appomattox, the new opera by Philip Glass centered on the end of America's Civil war, when the stage bursts with life. A regiment of African-American soldiers fills the stage, and they sing a march, the original music by Glass and a pastiche of period tunes such as "Battle Hymn of the Republic," to a rousing text from the times. It is the climax of a sequence depicting the taking of Richmond, the Confederate capitol, by Union troops in 1865.

In set pieces such as these, the opera soars. Moments earlier, a black journalist seats himself in the speaker's chair from the ruins of the Confederate legislature and narrates a dispatch for his newspaper on the Northern triumph. After the South's surrender, a quartet of black citizens sings "The Ballad of Jimmy Lee," the tale of the murder of three civil rights workers in the 1960s, one of several digressions meant to explore the fallout from the end of a war about slavery. Later, the murderer takes the empty stage and, in a riveting soliloquy, tries to justify his crime. These pieces are set to Glass' familiar chugging, shifting arpeggios, colorfully orchestrated. Glass' vocal lines arch satisfyingly.

If only the entire opera were made of such taut, compelling material. The main focus of the piece is the meeting of the Union general Ulysses S. Grant and the Confederate general Robert E. Lee to agree on the terms of surrender in the town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Their exchanges, at first by messages sent by courier and later face to face at Appomattox, are wary but civil. They give each other the benefit of the doubt. There is no real contention.

Every American school child learns about Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Grant and president Abraham Lincoln offered generous terms, which included allowing the South's soldiers to return to their farms with their horses. Lee, who fails to break through the enemy lines in a last-ditch attempt to hold out in the mountains, realizes that his war is lost and surrender will save thousands of lives.

Although the music flows along pleasantly, these scenes have a drab quality. To get any drama at all into the opera, Glass and his librettist, Christopher Hampton, interpose scenes from later in history, like that murder of civil rights workers.

Ulysses S. Grant: Andrew Shore and Robert E. Lee: Dwayne Croft
 

Act I tells the story of the taking of Richmond, first by focusing on the two generals, then by scenes of citizens fleeing as bombs explode around them, and the arrival of the soldiers. The scenes from later in history come in Act II, set in the home where the surrender was signed. Some allude to Lincoln's assassination, others to Grant's presidency, the 1873 murder of 100 black men in Alabama at the hands of the military, and the murder of Jimmy Lee and two white civil rights workers in the 1960s. Despite the best intentions of Grant and Lee at Appomattox for civility and grace, human nature mostly argues otherwise.

Framing the two acts, a brief prologue for five sopranos introduces Grant's wife, Lee's wife and daughter, Lincoln's wife and her seamstress, a former slave. They give voice to the irrationality and tragedies of war. They and their music return in a bookend epilogue.

Sung by soprano Rhoslyn Jones, Grant's wife Julia leads the proceedings. She is one of seven Adler Fellows from San Francisco Opera's vocal training program in the cast, all of whom acquit themselves proudly. They include soprano Elza van den Heever (who sang Donna Anna well in last June's Don Giovanni) as a rock-ribbed Mary Custis Lee, Ji Young Yang as Agnes Lee, Heidi Melton as Mary Todd Lincoln, Kendall Gladen as Elizabeth Keckly, her seamstress. Noah Stewart commanded the stage and sang plangently as T. Morris Chester, the black journalist.

In the principal roles, baritone Dwayne Croft carried himself with graceful bearing and sang Lee's lines with tremendous depth and color, while baritone Andrew Shore gave Grant a gruff presence but tremendous grit and power. They led a cast of some two dozen singers. The standout, bass Philip Skinner as the convicted 1960s murderer and Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen, delivered his soliloquy with unnerving directness, conveying the impression that this guy really believed the venom he spewed.

In the pit, longtime Glass conductor Dennis Russell Davies led the orchestra in wave after wave of Glass' trademark surges. In recent years, Glass has moved away from the strict minimalism with which he first made his fame. Having written movie scores and other works, he no longer relies upon repetition upon repetition (which served him so well in the opera Satyagraha). Early Glass music could deliver a thunderbolt by introducing a subtle change in the pattern. His music today needs to deliver its charge by finding a sound, a harmony, a melody, or an orchestra color, that conveys the idea he is trying to express. In this opera, paradoxically, he does it best when he leaves his minimalist roots and writes real tunes, as in the regiment's march. Much of the rest swims by amiably but without making the kind of impact he achieves in the big scenes.

The prologue opens on a series of doors in a metallic wall, from which emerge the women one or two at a time. To refer to the carnage of war, a military orderly pushes a hamper full of severed legs, which he dumps as he crosses the stage. The wall rises to reveal a stage of criss-crossed metal gratings over what seems like a moat of red blood. A frame drops into place, suggesting Grant's headquarters. Later the frame rises to reveal the stylized ruins of Richmond. Some upside down horse carcasses are suspended midair, again suggesting the carnage of war. A long gangway crosses the stage at the back, a misstep because it suggests a ship when none is there.

In Act II, three walls of the home in Appomattox drop into place for the surrender meeting. The light on the principals goes dark and focuses on those various interruptions from the future as they arrive and depart the stage. After the generals leave, bystanders steal the contents of the house, leaving its poor owner clutching his last painting, which another looter grabs—another indication that, despite man's best intentions, humanity's worst side often wins in the end.


Harvey Steiman
 

Photos © Terrence McCarthy

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