The stage of the Civic Theatre is cluttered with a rack of Edgar Allan Poe masks, a velvet-lined coffin and other bizarre props to be used in the Lyric Opera production of ”The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe.” A cast member goes over a few lines of music at the piano with conductor Christopher Keene, then leaves for lunch. Over in a corner, stage director Frank Galati, the other major figure behind the new Lyric staging, is lost in his rehearsal notes.
”The music really conjures up the poetic and loving side of Edgar Allan Poe, this troubled soul who was denied love repeatedly and who watched the people he loved die,” Keene explains to the interviewer.
Although the production evokes images of stark terror even as Poe himself did, the opera doesn`t emphasize the violent side of Poe`s art, says Keene.
”There are no maelstroms, no bodies putrefying before our eyes, no cats vivisected on stage.”
He looks quizzically in Galati`s direction. ”Or are there, Frank?”
For a major opera company to mount a new production of a recent, relatively unknown American work is rare enough. But general director Ardis Krainik clearly believes in the musical and theatrical virtues of ”The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe,” which will have the first of eight sold-out performances Saturday at the Civic Opera House. So many people recommended the Dominick Argento work that she chose it as the opening flourish of Lyric`s ”Towards the 21st Century” initiative, a decade-long retrospective of contemporary operas.
For his part, Argento is clearly delighted that the Lyric ”Poe” is the first large-scale production the opera has received since its premiere in 1976 by the Minnesota Opera Company, which had commissioned it for the U.S. Bicentennial. Although the work has also been given successfully in Baltimore and in Sweden, the Chicago version will be the first to realize Argento`s original vision, complete with large orchestra and a 60-voice chorus in the pit.
”I`m really very flattered by the attention, let me tell you,” says the Minneapolis-based composer. ”It`s no secret that the work has just slumbered for 14 years. One assumes that an opera almost nobody has heard for that length of time is dead or forgotten. But its reputation has kept it circulating. People keep telling me how attractive it is, and I know they have never even seen it.”
Argento`s opera is a vast dreamscape, the voyage of the title purely metaphorical. However, many elements of the basic plot derive from historical fact. In 1849 Poe-one of the most celebrated of 19th Century American writers though a man beset by private demons-told friends he planned to take a steamer from Richmond, Va., to Baltimore. No record of such a trip was ever found. Shortly thereafter, he was discovered unconscious and taken to a Baltimore hospital where he died. The circumstances of his death, at 40, remain unknown. Out of this tantalizing mystery Argento and his librettist, Charles M. Nolte, wove what Galati calls an operatic ”journey into the distorted mirror of art” that explores ”the deep regions of the poet`s imagination.” With his fondness for murky psychological melodrama, the real-life Poe, one suspects, would have adored it.
The opera begins with Poe boarding a ghostly vessel that appears from out of the mists to take him on a voyage of self-discovery. The plot is a whirl of episodes from Poe`s life, presented as if in a grand hallucination such as the writer might have experienced in his final days. Nolte`s libretto incorporates lines from several of Poe`s most famous literary works, inviting us to trace the Freudian connections between the moribund beauties of Poe`s fiction and the women who dominated his brief life.
Three characters assume primary importance in ”Poe”: Poe himself (sung by Donald Kaasch); Virginia Clemm Poe, his cousin and child bride (Ruth Ann Swenson); and Rufus Griswold, his biographer, literary executor, evil genius and alter ego (Richard Stilwell). Six of the eight principal characters will take more than one role. With the chorus relegated to the pit, actor/dancers will perform on stage as passengers on the voyage.
”The subject right away suggested to me the possibility of mixing the very lyric and beautiful with the grotesque and fantastic,” Argento explains. ”I had never done anything like that in my previous operas. Poe was the first subject I had run across that I felt was amenable to such a treatment. While writing it I was constantly mindful that `Poe` had to be a multilayered work; the piano score is written for a six-armed pianist.
”It`s the most complex of my scores, the densest texture I have ever used, pretty much 12-tone all the way through. I`m not supposed to tell people that, because they are surprised that it can be lyrical and 12-tone at the same time.”
Keene, who has been shuttling back and forth between Chicago and Manhattan, where he is conducting Schoenberg`s ”Moses und Aron” at the New York City Opera (of which he is music director), agrees.
”I think what will startle the audience is how beautiful, delicate and powerful the music is,” he says. ”All the modern orchestral effects of which Argento is a real master amplify the hallucinatory quality of Poe`s visions.” Conductor and director say they are delighted to be working together for the first time on a project that draws on their creative synergy to an extraordinary degree.
With Argento`s blessing, they have trimmed and tightened the opera (it will run about 100 minutes, about 40 minutes less than specified in the full score), removing anything that might impede the dramatic flow.
”It`s very exciting to be able to work this way,” says Keene. ”If you are doing `La Boheme` or `La Traviata` you can`t make these kinds of decisions about the shape of a work; you are stuck with it. This is like putting on a Broadway show.”
Galati is no stranger to the operatic Argento, having previously staged the composer`s surreal ”Postcard from Morocco” for the Lyric Center for American Artists. Having won a Tony Award earlier this year for his direction of Broadway`s ”The Grapes of Wrath” (a Steppenwolf Theatre production for which he also wrote the script), he is taking time out from a self-imposed hiatus to stage ”Poe.” Clearly the project cried out for Galati`s special theatrical pizazz.
”With Dominick nearby (in Minnesota),” says Galati, ”we have made a number of decisions about how to reshape the work a little bit, to give it a kind of dramatic character that it perhaps didn`t have before.”
For the Lyric ”Poe,” Galati is using projected titles in a manner suggested to him by director Peter Sellars` controversial 1988 production of
”Tannhauser” at Lyric, with its triple set of captions.
Like the physical production by designer John Conklin, the titles will supply the audience with a multitude of images. At times, Galati says, the captions will incorporate lines from Poe`s stories and poems. At times they will venture beyond the libretto, using textual material from other sources to clarify the facts of Poe`s life.
”We know that Poe`s mother was an actress, that she died of consumption when he was 2, that he married his first cousin when she was not yet 13, that she, too, died of consumption. These details emerge like flashpoints in the libretto, but they are not evident to an audience that isn`t familiar with Poe`s biography.
”Since this is a work about a poet, and since text itself is the subject of the art work, it seems very appropriate to use surtitles in this manner,” Galati says.
Argento formerly was opposed to the use of supertitles with his operas but lately has come around in favor of them. The turning point came in 1985, when Beverly Sills, then director of the New York City Opera, fought to use them in her production of Argento`s ”Casanova`s Homecoming.”
”I was arguing out of ignorance,” Argento recalls. ”I thought it would be an admission that I don`t know how to set the English language clearly enough. But when I heard how many more laughs `Casanova` got when titles were used, I was won over. Titles have never been used with `Poe.` It`s a very intricate story, with lots of ensembles. Titles can`t possibly do anything but illuminate it.”
Do the chief members of the Lyric production team have any advice for audiences coming upon Argento and ”The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe” for the first time?
”I really think they should come to experience the opera for what it is, a dream,” says Keene. ”You don`t need an introduction to a dream. You should just come and take a trip.”
”Yes,” agrees Galati. ”Get on board.”
