With issues of same-sex marriage making headline news worldwide, the time was ripe for an opera on the most widely-known lesbian couple of the first half of the 20th century, author Gertrude Stein and the woman she called her wife, Alice B. Toklas. Enter composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Royce Vavrek with the June 14, 2014 Opera Theatre of Saint Louis world premiere of 27, a five-act operatic fantasy on Stein and Toklas' years in Paris at 27 Rue de Fleurus.
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis has since issued a live recording of the 90-minute work on Albany Records. A video, no doubt, would have given us a more complete understanding of the production's impact than the two-CD set does. But at a time when few opera recordings are made, and even fewer turn a profit, one must be grateful for favors large and small.
For those unaware of the women's history, Stein (1874-1946) was a Pennsylvania-born, well-off writer and arts lover of German-Jewish descent. Stein, who attended Radcliffe, first became aware of her lesbian nature while attending Johns Hopkins Medical School. After discovering herself in a depressing love triangle, she and brother Leo moved first to London, and then, in 1903, to Paris. There, at 27 Rue de Fleurus, they began to collect the works of Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse, and others.
In 1909, Toklas, an equally prosperous Jewish lesbian from San Francisco, met Stein in Paris. During this period, Stein's salon became the destination point for painters, writers, intellectuals, and their admirers from France, America and beyond.
In 1912 (some sources say 1914) Leo, who held his sister's writing and lesbianism in contempt, moved from the apartment, leaving Stein and Toklas to hold forth as an independent lesbian couple. With the art collection divided, Stein's own writing (including the libretto for gay composer/music critic Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts) and alliances with writers who included Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald gained greater importance in her life.
The couple's final years together were spent in Paris during the Nazi occupation. When Stein died in 1946, one report claims that she first asked Toklas, "What is the answer?" When Toklas remained silent, her final words were, "What is the question?" While Toklas, who was born in 1898, lived until 1967, the opera ends with Stein's death.
There is no better way to establish context and reason for Gordon and Vavrek's 27 than to read the New York Times obituary of March 8, 1967. Several years before we in New York's Gay Liberation Front picketed the Times because of their refusal to use the word gay or recognize same-sex partners in obituaries, the Times referred to Toklas as "the longtime friend of Gertrude Stein, who helped the late writer preside over a celebrated literary salon." While the unsigned obit finally invokes the word "couple," it seems to do so only because, given Stein and Toklas' notoriety, anything else would have been seen as sheer idiocy on the paper's part.
The libretto
What is most wonderful about Vavrek's libretto is the way it unabashedly honors the love between Stein and Toklas, and paints a portrait of their intimacy. Some of their interchanges are simply adorable, if not hilarious. Gordon's music has a ball with these.
Nonetheless, the libretto attempts to compress over four decades of history into a single opera. It begins while Stein's Paris salon was in full flower and she sat for Picasso's famous portrait of her, and ends with her death in 1946. In attempting to encompass so much history, it not only oversimplifies complex events, but also compresses dialogue into the same intentionally short, pithy Steinisms epitomized by two of her most famous quotes, "Rose is a rose is a rose" and "There is no there there." While such droll dialogue makes for good entertainment, it is highly doubtful that Stein and Toklas actually addressed each other and their extraordinary coterie of artists, writers, and intellectuals as though they were second-graders speaking in Morse code.
Especially simplified are Stein's conservative politics and alleged collaboration with the Nazis during WWII. The opera's fourth act, entitled "Gertrude Stein is Safe, Safe," opens with empty frames of some of the paintings Gertrude collected singing "Twice denying a war/is no war is no war is no war." Picasso's portrait of Stein summarily accuses her of "betrayal, narcissism, blindness, collaboration, and self-hatred" because she translated Vichy speeches for highly political, art-loving friends.
Stein, in turn, defends herself. Claiming she did it all for her art, she reminds the portrait (and us) that she drove supplies to French hospitals during WWI, all while nurturing a generation of genius painters, writers and soldiers.
Far more thought-provoking is the opinion of Corinne E. Blackmer, a Stein scholar and author of a major entry on Stein at GLBTQ.com who is Professor of English and Judaic Studies at Southern CT State University. In private correspondence, Blackmer wrote, "Stein and Toklas were friends with a man (gay) named Bernard Fay, who was influential in the Vichy government and who saw to the protection, not only of Stein and Toklas, but also of their incredible collection of modernist works of art. Stein translated some of Gen. Petain's [head of Vichy government] anti-Semitic rants �" apparently she admired him that much, according to some, but I do not believe this recounting of events.
"My interpretation of the evidence is that Stein and Toklas, fearing capture by the Nazis as lesbians and, in particular, as Jews, sought the protection they could find. I don't believe she really admired Petain, and I think 'collaboration' is too strong a term for what happened under these very extreme and dire circumstances.
"There are many different opinions on this issue, some having to do with a certain compulsion to 'take Stein down' for being a near-untouchable Modernist genius, and others in a passion for historical accuracy, but I differ from the same. A translation and a begging for protection are not collaborations in my view, particularly given the realities then. What would anyone in their position do? Get themselves killed and their art works destroyed? Saving of life is the highest ethical principle in the Jewish tradition."
Although this is a CD review rather than a historic treatise, it is essential, when evaluating an opera about women whose story plays such a vital part in our history, to ask if their legacy is best served by the libretto's oversimplifications. IMHO, Stein and Toklas would have been far better served had Vavrek and Gordon limited their opera to a shorter period in the women's lives. Had he focused exclusively on the break between Gertrude and Leo, we might have learned far much more about her life, love, and accomplishments.
The music
Partly in response to Vavrek's libretto, and partially because it's his style, Gordon's music proceeds in rapid, sing-songy, show-biz fashion. There are some touching moments, most notably in the love duet that centers on the phrase "Ring, ring, ring, ring," and in the final scene. But too much of the writing devolves into clipped-phrase, Copland-lite, quasi-Broadway patter that fails to linger in the memory. The music comes across as simple and clever, but as emotionally and spiritually bereft as the libretto. At opera's end, we know far too little about Stein and Toklas' character other than the fact that they bandied about the terms "wife" and "genius" a lot of the time.
The cast, on paper, is top-notch. Beloved mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe not only shares Stein's large frame, but also has a low range whose sexually ambiguous tonality works marvelously for a lesbian portrayal. In truth, she sounds a bit too thick and forced at the top of her range, but that is a small price to pay for such otherwise splendid singing.
As Alice, soprano Elizabeth Futral may share Alice's more slender frame, but her voice sounds far less youthful than Blythe's. She is now past her prime, with a wobble and vocal uncertainty that sadden my heart. The young trio of three members of Opera Theater of St. Louis' Young Artists Program �" tenor Theo Lebow (Picasso, Fitzgerald, et al. ), baritone Tobias Greenhalgh (Leo Stein, Man Ray, et al.), and bass-baritone Daniel Brevik (Matisse, Hemingway, et al.) do a fine job, and Michael Christie conducts the company orchestra with vigor.
Perhaps Tom Cipullo's After Life , a recent Music of Remembrance commission in which the ghosts of Stein and Picasso confront each other and argue about life and art, has more to offer. Stein and Toklas' legacy needs to be treated in a deeper manner than 27 provides.