Opera Company's "Cyrano' (1st review)

If only this librettist could find a composer

JIM RUTTER

Sometimes you get what you pay for. And then there are the times when you pay for what you get.

For the East Coast premiere of Cyrano, the Opera Company of Philadelphia certainly spent more for big-budget sets and costumes than it shelled out for the singers. But with David DiChiera’s mood-music score, who needed them?

Cyrano, based on Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, portrays the familiar story of the swashbuckling big-nosed wit (Marian Pop) who’s too fearful of rejection to confess his love to the “horrendously beautiful” Roxane (Evelyn Pollock). Instead, he finds the perfect “interpreter for his soul” in the handsome though dull Christian (Stephen Costello), and sends love letters that confess his desires in a form whose beauty she’s bound to like. As all three discover (too late to do anything about it), beauty is more than skin-deep, and Roxane, initially overwhelmed by the handsomeness of youth, falls head over heels in love with the depth of passion in Cyrano’s soul.

If I attended Rostand’s play, or even a staged performance of Bernard Uzan’s libretto— which manages to retain the humor in the best tradition of French comedy— I’m sure I would have enjoyed it immensely. But the Opera Company’s production wasn’t a play with music, and it wasn’t an opera; it’s dialogue recited independent of the music that played in the background. Imagine going to see your favorite musical and hearing the lyrics of one show while the music of another played in the background and you’ll have some idea what occurred.

Though the strident horns and lush verdancy of the violins make for a neo-Romanticist’s dream, with only three short choral numbers (for a cast of more than 100, no less), and just four arias (only two of them mirroring a melody line in the score), this three-hour-plus work interests musically but is very boring as an opera.

Not that there’s anything wrong with musically interesting, though boring operas; the genre is full of them (like Gounod’s Romeo et Juliet). Usually, the problem’s the libretto, reflecting either dull or poorly written subject matter, or a librettist whose script couldn’t live up to the music.

The great disconnect

But DiChiera’s work seems to suffer from the opposite problem. Uzan provided him with a fantastic text, full of humor and well-drawn characters fleshed out with devastating lines, like Roxane’s moment of realization that she “loved the same being but lost him twice.” Though he spent seven years writing the music, DiChiera’s contribution sounds more like a film score, supporting the action but not integrating it, and thereby creating too great a disconnect between the singing and the music.

The battlefield during the Act III siege of Arras illustrates this problem. In song, Cyrano discusses tactics with Christian. Suddenly, drums begin to play in the background, independent of whatever he’s singing. And here we have a film score, and not an opera, with DiChiera’s contribution representing the cinematic ideal that music should accompany a script rather than integrate it into the totality of a work. The score is full of sudden crescendos without any corresponding sung emotion. It’s like hearing an evening full of clumsy people stubbing their toes—yelping loudly to express a moment of anguish that quickly fades, conveying little emotional texture or meaning.

How Verdi would have handled it

It’s not as if Uzan or Rostand’s original text didn’t offer DiChiera a number of opportunities. In Act I, Cyrano replies to taunts about the size of his nose by rattling off a number of very funny replies. But it’s all singing to non-matching music in the background, and I immediately wondered why DiChiera skipped over this opportunity, while someone like Verdi so quickly capitalized in song on a similarly ironic theme in Rigoletto’s "Cortigiani, vil razza dannata?"

Later, Uzan’s libretto offers DiChiera the perfect point-counterpoint structure when Roxane slowly reveals that she loves Christian. For every half-true line she utters, he replies with an appropriate response of “Ah,” and as she parries, he feints, and it feels like a verbal swordfight. But again, the score completely lacks a melody line for the lyrics that could have dramatically intensified the emotions of this moment in the script.

To be sure, DiChiera’s background music helps the dialogue, which appears more natural when not sung. But who goes to the opera for a naturalist recreation of reality, especially for a story set nearly 400 years ago in a foreign country and its forgotten culture? Also, to be sure, DiChiera does include a poignant and musically beautiful quintet at the end of Act II that made me nearly melt in my chair. But after Wagner, Puccini and Verdi, the rest of DiChiera’s writing simply seems too academic, and theatrically nearly intolerable.

Great voices with nothing to sing

Which is a real shame for these singers, whose voices can’t attain their full expressive power without a corresponding lyricism in the music for them to sing. From Pop’s supple baritone to Costello’s ranging tenor, it’s easy to recognize the potential of these voices, far harder to know what they’d sound like singing thematic music with structured progressions.

I remember thinking the same about the Center City Opera Theatre’s 2007 production of Lowell Lieberman’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, taken from the work of perhaps the English language’s wittiest playwright. Lieberman similarly failed to integrate Oscar Wilde’s text and action into the score. Wilde’s famous lines like “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it” became part of Lieberman’s recitative, where a song could have clearly incorporated all of Lord Henry’s corrupting advice.

DaPonte transformed the work of Beaumarchais into grand entertainment for The Marriage of Figaro, while Francesco Piave transposed that exceptionally dense author Victor Hugo’s Le Jeu de la Roi into the glorious characterizations of Rigoletto. More important, Mozart and Verdi managed to fully integrate what they offered into a musically thematic score. Hell, even Cole Porter knew how to incorporate witty or dense lyrics into a song.

If Lieberman and, now, DiChiera represent the evolution of opera, the OCP would be well advised to stick to the past.



To read another review by Lewis Whittington, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To reads another review by Tom Purdom, click here.