Austin Lyric Opera
The opera that mistook a case study for a drama
July 13, 2010Poetic license might be anathema to science, but it is essential to art.
Consider, for example, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” originally the title chapter in Oliver Sacks’s fascinating collection of neurological case studies published in 1985. The following year composer Michael Nyman and librettist Christopher Rawlence (with Michael Morris and Sacks) translated that case study into a one-act chamber opera. To judge from a production by Austin Lyric Opera and the Austin Chamber Music Center over the weekend in St. Martin’s Lutheran Church, a great deal more poetic license was needed to transmute a case study into a piece of musical theater capable of engaging the imagination.
The man of the title is a Dr. P, a professional singer and amateur painter who has been making odd mistakes in dealing with objects and people in his environment. Dr. P. and his wife consult from Dr. S, the eminent neurologist, who at first can find nothing wrong with the singer. Dr. S visits the couple in their home and conducts a series of tests. Shown a picture of the Empire State Building, the patient says he sees “a rocket, or is it a syringe? Or a baton, or a tombstone?” Dr. S concludes that Dr. P is suffering from visual agnosia, a brain dysfunction that makes him unable to mentally assemble the welter of shapes he sees into coherent objects. There is nothing to be done about it except for the patient to use music as a way of organizing experience. The end.
That’s not much of a dramatic arc for an hour-long opera, and we don’t learn very much about Dr. P and his wife except that they love each other very much and that she is very protective of his dignity. One feels sympathy for them, of course, but as characters in a drama they’re awfully flimsy.
Nyman’s music, in the minimalist idiom of the period, has some lovely lyrical moments for the singers and ample rhythmic and textural variety from the seven-piece orchestra -- piano, harp and strings. But the orchestral score only intermittently relates organically to the text or the singers’ actions -- not that they have much to do except sing.
The cast did that exceptionally well. Top marks go to the Dr. P of Matthew Treviño, normally a bass but perfectly comfortable in this baritone role. A few weeks earlier he had shown enormous power and a menacing, steely edge as the amoral assassin Sparafucile in San Antonio Opera’s production of “Rigoletto.” The role of Dr. P revealed a voice of luminous beauty. When his character took a break from Nyman’s music to sing Robert Schumann’s “Ich grolle nicht,” from “Dichterliebe,” Treviño showed the earmarks of a gifted Lieder singer -- a natural sense of the text, great rhythmic acuity and excellent German diction.
Cara Johnston’s plump, satiny soprano instrument soared impressively in the role of Mrs. P. Tenor Brian Joyce was an agreeable Dr. S.
It was evident that all three were taking great pains to e-nun-ci-ate every syllable cleanly, but the church’s cathedral-like resonance was an implacable foe. Fewer than half the words were intelligible.
Michelle Schumann served as both pianist and conductor of the spirited orchestra. The spare staging was by director Marc Reynolds and designer David Nancarrow.
Mike
Greenberg
