Barber's "Antony and Cleopatra' by Curtis

Samuel Barber led a charmed life for most of his career. His talent was recognized early and emphatically. Arturo Toscanini introduced his Adagio for Strings to his radio audience, and Vladimir Horowitz played the premiere of Barber's Piano Sonata (although not before insisting that Barber write a new finale).

Barber's first opera, Vanessa, won a Pulitzer Prize, and his Piano Concerto inaugurated Lincoln Center. Little that he touched did not turn to gold— although, as an almost despairing critic of his own work, Barber threw away almost as much of it as he published, as well as one symphony that was already published.

Barber finally came a cropper on his Antony and Cleopatra, commissioned to open the new Metropolitan Opera house at Lincoln Center in 1966. The audience didn't like the production, and the critics pronounced the entire enterprise a debacle. What was supposed to have been the crowning moment of the composer's career turned into a pratfall.

Barber became deeply depressed, drank heavily and died 15 years later, producing little in the interim and never again attempting an opera. A revised version of Antony and Cleopatra was mounted in 1974, but failed to salvage the work. On the operatic stage, it was considered an Edsel: a worthy effort on paper, but a dud on the boards.

Barber's other work continued to appeal, and his Adagio attained the status of a national icon, performed at state funerals. Antony and Cleopatra was gradually forgotten, except of course by the composer.

Barber's big problem

Now his centennial has arrived, and Barber is more popular than ever. For that very reason, the time has come to reckon again with his most ambitious score, and the Curtis Institute (of which Barber was an early graduate) has accordingly staged a new production of Antony and Cleopatra in the intimate space of the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater.

Taking the work down from grand spectacle to almost chamber opera has clarified the dilemma it represents. Barber elected to set the Shakespearean text, as Benjamin Britten did with A Midsummer Night's Dream; but in Barber's case, he confronted one of the most verbally sumptuous dramas in world literature as well as history's most famous love story.

This is raising high stakes indeed. Vanessa had been a Jamesian tale of sexual repression, which lay comfortably within Barber's own dramatic range. In Antony and Cleopatra he confronted a backdrop of imperial spectacle and battle, and two lovers whose relationship was as much political as sexual, their very intimacy a series of high posturings in which ultimate betrayal was implicit.

It is one of Shakespeare's most difficult plays to perform, as the debacle of the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra in the early 1960s had unhelpfully underscored. In other words, it was a perfect setup for camp: as was the whole pretension of the Lincoln Center Met itself, the centerpiece of an arts plaza that, with its Mussolinian facades, gave off what Tennessee Williams's Big Daddy would call a powerful odor of mendacity.

For Barber, with the essential reticence of his gifts, this was a challenge fated for disaster. He registered imperial pomp with film score platitudes, and forced his intimate lyricism toward Verdiesque grandeur. Musically and dramatically, the result was bound to fail against a backdrop of inflated cultural expectations. Verdi himself might have had a tough time of it.

Forgoing splendor

The Curtis production, which is very spare and relies for its effects mostly on ingenious lighting, goes the other way, leaving splendor to the imagination (except for an ornate bed that gets pushed around the stage), and letting Barber's score plead its own case. The early scenes are somewhat halting (with a chunk of the rejected Second Symphony thrown in), but the music is, in the end, almost persuasive as the composer gins up his intensity to suggest the tragic narcissism of the protagonists.

What's lacking is the sense of irony that a Berg or a Strauss might have brought to the scene. Barber is too beautiful for these lovers, whose profoundest grief is for themselves and who are more concerned with the figure they'll cut as suicides than anything else once their game is lost.

In Shakespeare, of course, there is a good deal more pathos, but his text is so brutally truncated by the requirements of operatic action that there is virtually no room for character development or even plot sequencing. Thus the lament of Enobarbus, one of the high points of the score, is incomprehensible to the casual listener because his prior scheming is left out.

Musical chairs

The opera begins with a thumping chorus designed to give exposition— a not ineffective strategy that, however, leaves a large number of male and female extras, clad in contemporary business attire, with little to do but play a literal game of musical chairs with the metal seats they briskly circulate around the stage. This staging is, one supposes, meant to suggest Roman discipline and drill, with an imperial frosting of metallic laurel leaves that look from a distance (presumably by design) like telephone headsets.

Cleopatra (Allison Sanders) and her retinue are, in contrast, dressed for musical comedy decadence, with gaudy colors and see-through fishnets. Mark Antony (Brian Cedel) can't seem to settle on a style or an identity, torn between the fleshpots of the East and the imperatives of soldierly discipline and imperial rule.

In Shakespeare these tensions, which symbolize the overreach of an imperial state itself, are given scope for expression; but in the opera, the lovers are foregrounded, and the chemistry between them is consequently critical to the credibility of the proceedings. Cedel and Sanders treat each other with a Handelian stiffness, however, leaving their oft-moved bed to do much of the acting for them.

When Cleopatra first celebrates and then laments Antony as "My man of men," she seems to be invoking an abstraction rather than a flesh-and-blood mortal (and there's a copious amount of blood on the dying Antony). Similarly, Antony's "I am dying, Egypt"— the cry that expresses with such marvelous concision all that he is losing— falls flat in this staging.

Interrogating the messenger

Despite its shortcomings, however, this Curtis production does offer the music, feelingly projected by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra under George Manahan, and there are exceptional moments— Cleopatra's interrogation of the messenger who brings her news of Antony's political marriage; the defeated remnants of Antony's army, huddled in their rags after the climactic battle.

The music is too good to waste, even if the opera itself remains flawed. It won't ever be what Barber and the Met perhaps hoped it would— a work that put American opera on the world stage— but it's worth reviving now and then, and this chamber version played more to its strengths than a grand opera production does.

There's one other good reason for the present revival. I don't know to what extent Barber may have considered the original production a commentary on the Vietnam War at its premiere in 1966, but it's an even more cautionary tale for the times now, bogged down as we once again are with our own "East." The historical struggle between Octavian and Antony for mastery of Rome and its empire was the tipping point that brought down the Roman Republic. The imperial presidency that has held sway over us since 9/11 may portend a similar moment for ourselves.