Until this year, few knew the story of the ship Amistad: that in 1839 a group of captured Africans had risen up against Spanish slave traders and subsequently won their freedom in American court. Now, hoever, the drama has been adapted for two high-profile projects: Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Amistad” and Steven Spielberg’s film of the same name. Here, Tribune movie columnist Gene Siskel and Tribune classical music critic John von Rhein, who have seen both productions, discuss and compare the two.
Siskel: John, you saw and reviewed the “Amistad”opera before seeing the movie. How would you have reviewed the opera differently if you had seen the film first?
Von Rhein: I don’t think I would have reacted much differently. “Amistad”the opera and “Amistad”the film are different works of art with different means and different agendas. A critic must try to judge them on their own terms. That’s hard to do in the present instance, because a great many people here in Chicago who will have experienced both versions of the Amistad story are going to make comparisons. It’s almost unavoidable that they are going to use the film as a cudgel to beat the opera. It’s an unfair fight, because the emotional power of Spielberg’s picture makes it so compelling. But even if we didn’t have “Amistad”the film to compare it with, the opera would remain inherently weak.
Siskel: How hard is it to compose an ominous anthem for the ocean journey that opens the story? When the Lyric’s “Amistad”failed that test, I knew I was in for a long night.
And not only is none of the music memorable, but just two bits of stagecraft work: the facial caricatures on signboards that the slaves and the Americans hold up to represent the frightened way they view each other, and the seating of the Supreme Court justices on a platform atop a huge doorframe that leads to the courtroom. The former could have been a clever leitmotif throughout the opera; the latter is both economical in terms of space and whimsical in symbolizing the court’s omnipotence.
Von Rhein: At the very least, the Lyric “Amistad”needed big, expansive moments of memorable music that would support the drama of the slaves’ rebellion and trial. I’m thinking particularly of John Quincy Adams’ aria in which he reflects on the democratic ideals of the young republic. The words are stirring but the music makes it fall flat.
In its own way, composer John Williams’ score for the Spielberg film succeeds much better because it functions at the level of popular entertainment, not high art. The soundtrack helps Spielberg tell a powerful narrative on a gut level, which is the only way to put the Amistad story across meaningfully if you are pitching it to a mass audience or even to a more specialized crowd that goes to the opera.
There is no music in the opera as effective as the soft humming of an African woman in the indelible opening sequence of the film.
Siskel: John, did you have any trouble during the opera following the complicated court case? I can’t imagine that you didn’t, unless you studied before attending, which I recommend audiences do, even for the movie.
Von Rhein: No, I didn’t have a problem with that. The opera’s creators, composer Anthony Davis and librettist Thulani Davis, tried to do us a favor here by combining the film’s (and history’s) three courtroom trials into one, thereby simplifying the case. Too much so, I feel. What the film did so much more insightfully was to show us that the legal mumbo jumbo of the prosecution’s arguments about property rights was only a smoke screen to obscure the shameful reality that, in many parts of the world as of the 1830s, men and women still were being dehumanized and degraded by being forced into slavery.
Siskel: Here’s where I believe an opera is at a generic disadvantage to a film of this story. It’s a whole lot tougher to sing a legal argument than to state one. Just imagine Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden singing their closing argument in the Simpson trial. (I know, it couldn’t have hurt.)
Von Rhein: I think the disadvantage of the opera alongside the film is even more basic than that. The Lyric’s “Amistad” had singers telling us things the film could show us far more effectively, in a fraction of the time it took them to sing the arias and choruses. And the film wasn’t burdened with dramatically irrelevant things like the Goddess of the Waters’ scene that came literally out of the blue. The film had a dramatic rhythm; the opera didn’t.
Siskel: The first act of the Amistad opera was particularly weak; on opening night, I saw half the row next to you leave. I know that contemporary music is traditionally met with resistance, but this subject matter has such inherent drama. If I were reviewing the opera I would have begun this way: The new “Amistad” opera does the inconceivable and artistically unpardonable — it makes slavery boring. How else can you explain the walkouts?
Von Rhein: The fact that the “Amistad” music is contemporary isn’t the issue. Actually, it’s quite conservative in idiom. The Lyric has presented new operas whose music is a great deal more stylistically advanced than “Amistad.” Last season’s “Un Re in Ascolto” was an excellent example. Many people remained in their seats to the end of that work because Luciano Berio’s music and drama held their attention.
I agree with you, Gene: It’s strange that an opera that features murder, revolt, human rights issues and a sensational courtroom trial should inspire so little passion in the audience.
Siskel: Did you feel any pressure to tread lightly on the opera because of its racial subject matter and because it was a locally produced world premiere?
Von Rhein: Not at all. A music critic can only deal with the musical work itself and how it is realized, no matter how good and noble the intentions are. This was an international premiere and, as such, had to take its kudos, or lumps, just like any other.
Siskel: I was surprised that in the opera the slaves were fully clothed, possibly a first for a slavery story. Partial nudity may not be an opera tradition, but doesn’t this story demand that? Are opera singers unwilling to bare part of the bodies? Or did the creators wimp out?
Von Rhein: Nudity? In the Ardis Krainik Theatre? Get real, Gene. Seriously, the fact that all the singers in the opera were fully clothed wasn’t at all a problem for me. The way the Amistad story was told in Spielberg’s film demanded nudity, yes. There were other ways the opera’s director, George C. Wolfe, could have shown the degrading treatment of the captives without taking off their clothes. I’m sorry he didn’t push the envelope further there. There has been nudity previously on the Lyric stage: Think of Maria Ewing shedding her seven veils as Salome here, or the Venusberg floozies in director Peter Sellars’ “Tannhauser.” But those were special cases. Most opera singers refuse to doff their duds on stage even in those rare situations where stage directors ask for it. Let’s face it: Most of them don’t have great bodies, and they know it, even if they won’t admit it.
Siskel: John, I said partial nudity; I’m not suggesting turning “Amistad” into “Boogie Nights.” Surely there must be some buffed big voices extant in an operatic chorus. If not, maybe I should endow the Siskel Weight Room to the Lyric? Next year: the Ebert Treadmill.
Von Rhein: Very funny, Gene. The Lyric is awaiting your bequest.
But your comment about the slaves got me thinking about how the film and the opera deal with slavery. Although Spielberg clearly wants to remind us of the evils of America’s “original sin,” the operatic “Amistad” isn’t really about slavery at all. It’s partly about who owns American history, partly about an actual court case as viewed from at least four points of view — the captives themselves, the U.S. government represented by President Martin Van Buren, the abolitionists who saw their struggle as both religious and humanitarian, the slavers who regarded their human cargo as property. There’s nothing anywhere near as harrowing in the opera as the Middle Passage sequence midway in the movie showing the Africans being herded together, whipped, manacled, shot and drowned.
Do you think that we get a better understanding of the institution of slavery from either version of “Amistad”?
Siskel: Steven Spielberg’s film added to my knowledge of slavery by indelibly communicating the commercial appeal of slavery — that there was a profit to be made at every stage of the dehumanizing process by Africans, Europeans and Americans alike. But the opera didn’t even work as a lament. Unlike opera, film has the closeup as an instrument of punctuation and power. But the opera didn’t even attempt to communicate suffering.
Von Rhein: What I also admired about the film was it gave me a vivid sense of the Mende as a people and a culture brutalized by slavery. We see Cinque kidnapped by members of a rival tribe and sold into slavery. We see the captives insisting on being allowed to bury one of their dead while awaiting trial in New Haven. We see, humorously, the fumbling attempts of their American lawyer to overcome the language barrier separating them. By contrast, the opera’s Cinque is a heroic cipher and the captives are a faceless chorus of the oppressed.
What could the opera’s creators, composer Anthony Davis and librettist Thulani Davis, have learned from Spielberg and his scriptwriters?
Siskel: If you have a narrator, he’d better be compelling. In writing the opera, the Davises came up with a fictional character called the Trickster God (Thomas Young), who serves as a narrator, guide and muse. I think I properly understand his function as an African storyteller, but for me, as written, he stopped the action cold. Maybe he would have worked better singing his commentaries to a child at the side of the stage, passing down an oral history? They could open and close the opera.
Von Rhein: Gene, you may have missed your true calling as an opera librettist. Still, I’m not sure bringing in a child would not have added a touch of sentimentality to the opera that would have blunted its edge even further. I understand the opera’s use of the Trickster as a theatrical device establishing a link between the captives and their African roots. He frames and narrates the action, but he also enters the action and acts as a kind of Greek chorus. It’s an interesting idea that plays better on the page than the stage and, again, needs more interesting music to work.
