When the Style Is No Style

By Michael Walsh

Throughout musical history, a single compositional style has generally dominated its era. In the fractious late 20th century, however, composers freely draw on myriad influences to create highly personalized idioms. Eclecticism, once a term of opprobrium, has become a virtue, perhaps even a style in itself, as the boundaries of serious music steadily expand.

At the Santa Fe Opera last week, two important premieres demonstrated just how potent eclecticism can be. John Eaton's The Tempest, with a libretto after Shakespeare by Music Critic Andrew Porter of The New Yorker, is a rich blend of Renaissance music, jazz and electronics that is surrounded by an uncompromisingly modernist microtonal framework. Another happily eclectic work, Hans Werner Henze's The English Cat, takes an anthropomorphic tale by English Playwright Edward Bond, based on Balzac, and sets it to music that freely ranges from kitschy consonance to acerbic dissonance. Both operas have the kind of unquestioned stylistic integrity that bespeaks major works.

The Tempest, being performed for the first time, makes fierce demands on listeners but rewards them with an opera of stark beauty. It may be presumptuous for any composer not named Verdi to set Shakespeare, but Eaton's music passes the test, honoring its source while illuminating and transforming it.

Eaton's notion of mixing harpsichords, synthesizers, saxophones and electric guitars with a conventional orchestra may at first seem eccentric. Further, his method of microtonal tuning, which he has long advocated, requires singers and instrumentalists to produce quarter-tone intervals, so that an octave is divided into 24 pitches instead of the conventional twelve. Yet each of the disparate elements in the opera has a dramatic function, giving characters or groups of characters distinct musical personalities.

Electronic sounds are prominent whenever Prospero (Baritone Timothy Noble) works his magic, and the necromancer's spiritual struggle is mirrored in his agonized, atonal music. Alonso's disoriented entourage is aptly symbolized by a raucous chorus of trumpets and trombones, searching for its pitches through a sliding microtonal minefield. A small Renaissance ensemble often accompanies the shadowy, faceless Ariel (Mezzo Susan Quittmeyer) on his spritely missions, and his unaccompanied Where the bee sucks becomes a mock-Elizabethan song. A trio of alto sax, electric guitar and electric bass represents the bestial Caliban (Mezzo Ann Howard), and his drunken revels with Trinculo and Stephano are celebrated with some exquisitely low-down jazzrock that closes the first act in a brilliant theatrical burst. (Eaton, 50, a professor of composition at Indiana University, was a successful jazz pianist in his younger days.)

Indeed, the only serious miscalculation is the awkward, discordant and ungainly love music for Ferdinand and Miranda. Its grating quality is exacerbated by the strangulated tenor of Colenton Freeman, although Soprano Sally Wolf manages to negotiate Eaton's leaps with taste and dignity. A nod in the direction of convention here would not only provide some needed aural respite but characterize the lovers more effectively.

Eaton's meticulous planning extends even to the opera's rhythmic structure, with each character assigned his or her own basic tempo. Act II, for example, closes with a stirring, cacophonous ensemble of clashing rhythms and timbres as all the major characters sing simultaneously and Prospero exults, "My high charms work!/ and these, mine enemies, are all knit up/ in their distractions. They are in my power." What Eaton has done is not merely to set Porter's concise, three-act libretto, but to retell it in musical terms, creating a cognate of Shakespeare's play. It is a formidable intellectual as well as musical accomplishment.

The Santa Fe company gives The Tempest a vivid production. The cast is generally excellent, as are the sets and lighting, and Bliss Hebert's direction is tight and focused. Conductor Richard Bradshaw tackles the score with panache, bringing Eaton's music ringing to life.

Henze's The English Cat was first performed in Germany in 1983 and is now presented in America in English. Henze, one of the leading contemporary opera composers, has suppressed his penchant for blatant politicization to produce a subtle, cautionary fable. Bond's libretto tells the story of a pacifist band of petit bourgeois cats who have formed the Royal Society for the Protection of Rats and have been rearing a young orphan mouse. The plot concerns the ill-starred triangle of Tom (Baritone Scott Reeve), Minette (Soprano Inga Nielsen) and her husband Lord Puff (Tenor Michael Myers). Seeing the fatal outcome of the affair, the mouse Louise wisely decides not to rely on the professed good intentions of natural enemies.

Henze's score displays the composer's familiar mastery of a variety of musical idioms, from a seductive rooftop serenade to a dry Stravinskian neoclassicism that accompanies the cat's pompous posturings. The delightful storybook production by Charles Ludlam, founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, turns the opera into a tragicomedy in the vein of a 19th century melodrama, but one with a pointed moral. In a season that also includes Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld and Strauss's neglected Die Liebe der Danae, Santa Fe has proved once again that it is the most adventurous, if not to say eclectic, opera company around. --By Michael Walsh