![]() We hear troubadour and madrigal strains, Baroque arias, modernistic sound labyrinths, punk-rock squalls, and torch songs fit for a Lynchian lounge. Soper mobilizes the entire thousand-year history of music to energize the discussion. ![]() And Shame ends up a voice of melancholy realism: “I am learning not to suffer / not to suffer mindlessly / and not to want to.” Lady Reason, having got nowhere with a rational critique of irrational passion, becomes increasingly hysterical. The God of Love abandons courtly sentiments in favor of belligerent rants. The three go to war over the Lover, but their identities prove unstable. Each character is given bespoke vocal processing: reverb for the God of Love, a vocoder for Lady Reason, microtonal distortion for Shame. Shame spews corrosive despair (“The anguished lover finds no peace in the creeping night”). Lady Reason strives for scientific detachment (“Begin secretion of acetylcholine”). The God of Love offers phrases from the original poem (“One can dream dreams that are not lies”). Soper’s verbal dexterity is evident when, in the prologue, the Dreamer enacts lulling the audience to sleep. The principal tensions arise from the irreconcilability of the allegorical observers. Passages from Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti, and Tennyson are also interpolated, though most of the words are Soper’s own. Soper adds a male character named the Dreamer, who introduces the scenario, extracts the Lover from the audience (the role becomes female), and soon falls prey to emotional complexities. The original text is a sprawling dream narrative in which a figure known as the Lover, having become enamored of a rose, converses with dozens of allegorical figures, including the God of Love, Lady Reason, and Shame. In “The Romance of the Rose,” her biggest work to date, Soper turns to the thirteenth-century Old French poem of that title, which was written jointly by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Still, she belongs to a Wagnerian lineage, however circuitous the genealogy. In some ways, she harks back to the medieval troubadour tradition, in which poet, composer, and singer were one. Romantic grandiosity and mythic gloom are foreign to Soper’s world. Agile, playful, quizzically erudite, she has made her name with such philosophically inclined music-theatre projects as “Here Be Sirens” and “Ipsa Dixit”-both of them self-referential meditations on the meaning of music and art. Kate Soper, whose opera “The Romance of the Rose” had its première on February 18th, at Long Beach Opera, is also an unlikely candidate for the post of a latter-day Wagner. Stephen Sondheim is the most conspicuous modern example, though he almost certainly would have hated the comparison. Many composers after Wagner wrote their own librettos few could match his furious double focus. The value of his literary output remains a matter of debate nonetheless, his dramatic texts, which include the librettos of all thirteen of his operas, have a style indisputably their own, combining extravagant rhetoric with fail-safe narrative structures. Perhaps the most plausible reason has to do with the cascading power triggered by his command of music and words alike. ![]() ![]() No one has ever been able to explain exactly why Richard Wagner had such a shuddering impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, to the point where he became the subject of a somewhat unhinged international cult. ![]()
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