Even in the normally docile world of classical-music recording there occasionally arises a duty to report. Oehms Classics, a recognized European label opera junkies would be poorer without, has issued a live recording of Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini's opera "Edward II" that the usual classical-music print outlets are, curiously, treating like a trans-uranium element. These are not, it bears adding, journals in which gay contributors are underrepresented.
To be sure, reviews of the performances by the commissioning Deutsche Oper Berlin in February and March last year were mixed, but then it's always tonic to remember that Bizet died credibly believing "Carmen" was a flop. Word's out that she's coming to a theater near you.
While the uniformly praised executants of this "Edward II" still know the difficult music, would a revival in San Francisco be out of the question? As the European press duly noted, "underpants" (their word, not mine) featured prominently in the costumes of male characters, vulgar words for sexual deeds were spoken, and many such deeds portrayed in ways that might bring in the SOM, if not the Silicon Valley, crowd. Anyway, DOB is Donald Runnicles' company, so he would probably pitch in, perhaps even conduct.
Jibes and jabs aside, "Edward II" is a powerful piece of musical theater whose uninterrupted 90 minutes I'd eagerly travel for. I found every minute of it dramatically cogent and convincing, and cringed only when the subject matter left no other response. That's saying a lot these days.
Working with his regular collaborators, librettist Thomas Jonigk and director Christoph Loy, the Swiss composer has transposed Christopher Marlowe's potent drama of the ill-fated English king and other 14th- and 16th-century sources into a deliberately present-day frame. The opera's motivating themes are societal intolerance of homosexuals and Jews. It moves with the stealth and power of "Salome" or "Wozzeck," though I'm not otherwise equating it with them.
As a musical score, it doesn't stint on the darkness, ferocity or brutality. But as a point of reference, it's no more assaultive, aurally, than Aribert Reimann's "Lear," which had two important runs at the War Memorial in the 80s. It's a gay opera without the leavening touch of Rufus Wainwright, whose own third opera, "Hadrian," gets its premiere at the Canadian Opera Company in October.
I find nothing gratuitously ugly in "Edward II," but considerable music of singular delicacy of feeling evoking dreams, ghosts, portents of private madness and, terrestrially, tender (if fraught) love between men. It's a bother that the set lacks an English translation of the libretto, but the German text (some of it of a profanity even Berlin audiences reportedly found startling in the opera house) could not come through more clearly. Scartazzini writes music built to convey not only words but also their force.
A full orchestra is augmented by electronic, sampled and otherwise manipulated sounds blended as well as I've heard in a contemporary score. While you'll neither miss nor soon forget the frequent "walls of sound," the aural sense is more that provided by an expert chamber orchestra, superbly conducted by Thomas Sondergard.
Similarly, the vocal music includes Sprechstimme and ordinary (and apparently not-so-ordinary) speech, again so superbly integrated you hardly notice the transitions. More than any other opera composer today except George Benjamin, Scartazzini writes for the voice. Even the stratospheric lines of Edward's murderously villainous wife Isabella never sound extra-human or pointlessly acrobatic. Swedish soprano Agneta Eigenholz's vocal ease with the harrowing role plays an inestimable part in the character's venomous eloquence.
A better or more committed cast is unimaginable. Baritone Michael Nagy gives notice of a Wozzeck-in-waiting with his magisterial yet infinitely variegated dispatch of the title role. As his lover Piers de Gaveston, Ladislav Elgr sings difficult music such that you can clearly understand what Edward loves in him. That's him in the tank top and "underpants" on the CD cover. Burkhard Ulrich, a fine, versatile German tenor and DOB stalwart I've had my eye on for a decade, makes an indelible impression as Walter Langton, the vile, homophobic, anti-Semitic Bishop of Coventry.
The integrity of this opera and the Berlin performance raise a question about the rarity of operas with central gay characters that are not based on historical precedents. Even the compelling, truly important "Fellow Travelers" by Gregory Spears, which is winning new productions and performances, has its narrative roots in the D.C. paranoia of the Hoover FBI. What am I missing?
The booklet essay includes a telling quote from the composer. "[Edward II] narrates a drama of intrigue concerning a homosexual couple in a society without tolerance. In general, according to Scartazzini, theatre and opera are 'about questions of being human, living together, of the realization of the individual in society. This well-known subject, surprisingly never before set as an opera, interests me for its social questioning and current relevance.'" As the great Leonie Rysanek loved saying, "That's what I said."