Last Voyage

By William Bender

"I would much rather have written the best song of a nation than its noblest epic." So said Edgar Allan Poe, the 19th century American poet, teller of horror tales and inventor of the detective story. A vulnerable sort, tormented by melancholy and eventually by drink, he was infatuated with the mystery and dramatic power of music. Years after his death in 1849, composers--Sousa, Rachmaninoff, Debussy--found themselves equally fascinated by the music of his words.

In his new opera, The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, Minneapolis-based Composer Dominick Argento, 48, has chosen to treat not the author's creations but his life. Introduced brilliantly last week by the innovative Minnesota Opera Company in St. Paul, the opera takes Poe's death as its starting point.

He was found lying on a street in Baltimore, near delirium, dying. In his last contact with friends, in Richmond, he had said he planned to take a boat to Baltimore. No record of the sailing was ever found. Argento and Librettist Charles M. Nolte have used that mysterious boat ride to construct a metaphoric voyage of selfdiscovery: Poe, the crazed poet, relives his loves, sins and miseries.

Grim Waters. In essence, Argento and Nolte have written an opera for the music lover who also enjoys the dreamscapes of Fellini and early Bergman. Moods billow like the Dry Ice currents that lap across the stage, suggesting waters as grim as the Styx. Characters are rarely who they seem to be. Even Poe is not always sure who or where he is. His antagonist is a shadowy character named Griswold -- based on Poe's vindictive literary executor, Rufus W. Griswold -- who seems to be lago here, Mephistopheles there, even turns into Poe himself.

The music is a mix of serialism and tonality that saturates the evening with multiple layers of consciousness. Argento's orchestral score, in a masterly interpretation by Philip Brunelle, can be as gruff as Strauss at one moment, as ethereal as Debussy the next, sometimes underlining the drama at hand while simultaneously anticipating events to come. Most important, Argento can write for the voice. The land beyond, a second-act aria for Poe's wife Virginia, is almost Mozartean in its poignant simplicity. Virginia died of consumption at 24. In the opera she is resurrected, but after singing her aria, she dies again. It is an enviable role that allows the soprano to die more than once, and the limpid-voiced Karen Hunt makes the most of it. But it is the men who dominate Poe, as they do in operas like Otello and Don Carlos by Argento's idol, Verdi. Tenor George Livings (Poe) and Baritone John Brandstetter (Griswold) go at each other with sonorous hatred.

Poe is Argento's eighth opera, and as fine as any ever written by an American. Its success is an appropriate sequel to the Pulitzer Prize he won last year for his song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf. He is a rarity among composers in that he knew nothing about music until age 14 (when he read a book about Gershwin), and did not begin piano lessons until 16. Three years later he was a piano major at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory of Music. The first summer he read the letters of Mozart. Recalls Argento: "I don't know exactly why, but I do know that when I came back to school that fall after read ing those letters, I was a composer." No doubt about it.

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