It’s a creation of the Paris Opera and it’s also a discovery for us: the last opera by Leonard Bernstein, who however wrote three, not very often staged, the best known being Candid. A quiet place, oPera unfinished by the admission of its author but very interesting all the same, served by a beautiful staging by Krzysztof Warlikowski and the sharp, searched direction of Kent Nagano.
A successful production
We were waiting for it with curiosity, this creation by Leonard Bernstein, one of the last works of the immense conductor whose production as a composer is a little too unknown in France. Does this mean, however, that A quiet place fully satisfied us? Let’s answer yes concerning the production itself: intelligent staging by Warlikowski, quality distribution by performers experienced in this genre of music, direction by veteran Kent Nagano, great defender of the work, which he recorded, mastering the Bernsteinian language (he is not the only one), a mixture of syncopated, swinging rhythms, and influences conveyed by European music of that time (abstraction, polytonality) to the other side of the Atlantic.
The funeral C) Bernd Uhlig, Opéra national de Paris
A (hysterical) conversation in music
Of course, we cannot help thinking at regular intervals about West Side Story, the masterpiece andemblematic of Bernstein: these suspended musical cells, this work on brass and percussion, notes that explode in sonic explosions, beginnings of melodies in ensembles where (and this is very American) the voices, as in a musical conversation, overlap, respond to each other or do not respond to each other, trying to take the place, shouting louder, seeking to impose their own discourse. And suddenly, in a more melodious way, long interventions by certain characters, like immense recitatives: Sam, the widowed husband who suddenly violently says everything in his heart at the end of his spouse; or, at the end of the work, the very beautiful confession of the son, Junior, by way of possible reconciliation with his father (still Sam) who rejected him, a major element of not only American social hypocrisy and reason can -being of the death of the mother.
Junior (Gordon Bintner) kneeling with mom Dinah (Johanna Wokalek) in front of a funeral worker C) Bernd Uhlig, OnP
An unfinished opera?
But the few boos that we heard (immediately drowned out by applause that went to the musicians and the staging) were no doubt due to the work itself, of which, it seems, Bernstein was not not yet satisfied. A Quiet Place (1986) was designed as an extension of Trouble in Tahiti, opera from 1951 (by an already famous 33-year-old Bernstein) where Sam and Dinah, a young couple, already see dawn during their honeymoon, through the blows of the knife of one and the depression of the other, the extent of the gap that will widen between them in the deceptively happy America of the fifties. Here (and perhaps it would have been necessary, as was sometimes the case, to insert pieces of this first opera into A quiet place) Dinah is dead. Beautiful reconstruction in video, in the style of SinCity (where the black and white was broken only by the red of the sang versed), the car accident, the falling rain, the wet road, the dazzling headlights, the fatal spin. Accident or suicide?
On the left Sam (Russell Braun) wants to shoot Junior (Gordon Bintner); on the right Dede (Claudia Boyle) and, from the back, François (Frédéric Antoun) C) Bernd Uhlig, OnP
The Neuroses of Deep America
Curiously the question will not be asked by the survivors. Sam, the father, mad with grief and who sees his wife reincarnated, a wandering ghost of blond hair if Cate Blanchett, if Tippi Hedren, if Gena Rowlands – the neurosis of those perfect American women wives accustomed to saying nothing and smiling until ‘when their collapse reveals their despair. Around Sam, who came from Canada for the funeral (7 hours. Such a long road. Distant Canada), the two children, Dede, the daughter, Junior, the son, outrageously gay. And François, Dede’s husband who was Junior’s lover. Coming from Canada where life is freer to this -Kentucky? Tennessee?- in any case very deep America…
Is a quiet place too quiet?
American tragedy? Not even. We could make a play out of this story of the fragile reconciliation of a family around the corpse of the mother. Except that we have seen (in the theater especially) deeper stories, stronger scenes, a more devastating dive into the family taboos of a nation, of a society (the United States not being in this, and in those times, only a mirror of ourselves, and not the most retrograde), and we expect drama or twists that never come. A fake gun, the pink pajamas of a little boy (who is looking, nice idea, at one of Bernstein’s famous lessons from the Young People’s Concert for television, consecrated by that notorious bisexual Bernstein to a homosexual composer, Tchaikovsky), the presence of a husband (of Dede) and lover (of Junior) too smiling to be honest, a girl who no longer seems to memory of her brother’s incestuous feelings: everything smooth, everything slips, like a thrown stone that never breaks the oily surface of an extinct lake. And that’s what we regret: not enough drama, violence. Power. Of greatness. Of ambition. The time having failed Bernstein to remedy it.
At the funeral the quartet of “mourners” (Marianne Croux, Ramya Roy, Niall Anderson, Kiup Lee) Behind, the funeral director (Colin Judson) C) Bernd Uhlig, Opéra national de Paris
A burlesque and tragic funeral
Nevertheless: the show is successful because Krzysztof Warlikowski, a talented troublemaker in the staging, understood that, for a work unknown to an audience, it had to be as readable as possible, to highlight the issues of the work with the talent to make it well understood, which does not prevent you from imprinting your mark on it. And the leg is in the superb and long initial act, for example, burlesque and tragic burial of Dinah, the stage of Garnier transformed into a sort of Protestant temple where those who knew the dead man comment hysterically or more humanely (She was a nice lady though, sometimes with biblical quotations (The path of truth is straight and sure). At this game the most remarkable, big bourgeois like the America of the big cities produces it in spades, are Helen Schneiderman (Susie) and Emanuela Pascu (Mrs Doc), like the funeral director, the tenor Colin Judson, who tries to calm everyone down. The pitiless eye of Warlikowski masterfully orchestrates this cackling, under the watchful eye of the funeral personnel, all black, guided by the authority of the very beautiful Danielle Gabou (a dancer by profession) who permanently wears the photo of the dead.
In front of the portrait of the deceased, the deceased (Johanna Wokalek), seated C) Bernd Uhlig, Opéra national de Paris
A too sweet reconciliation
This is where the father (Russell Braun, not the most beautiful voice in the world but remarkable presence and angry pain) comes in and Junior (the Canadian Gordon Bintner, a discovery too), caricature of gay -Warlikowski, homosexual himself, funnily charges his presence as a cowboy in pink and mauve in the code, a little, of the Village People, to answer a sentence heard earlier on Dinah, the deceased: The one whose son is a cracked sissy who leaked (in Canada) conscription.
Act 2 follows in parallel a Junior sleeping with a sculptural Black in a shabby motel while Dede (the Irish Claudia Boyle, very fair and very beautiful presence in a role with often difficult gaps and who, in yellow and pink with boots white, also symbolizes the eternal American optimism, this refusal to see the dark reality) begins the reconciliation with the father which will materialize in the 3rd act. With the help of François (Frédéric Antoun, a little pale at first but imposing his presence little by little, even if sometimes in vocal difficulty in the delicate bass of his tenor range) who we understand still belongs as much to Dede than to Junior, symbol of this fragile reconciliation that Warlikowski installs without fanfare in an unbalanced gentleness but which is far from having the strength of the 1st act…
The family: from left to right Dede (Claudia Boyle), François (Frédéric Antoun), Dinah seated (Johanna Wokalek), Sam seated (Russell Braun), Junior (Gordon Bintner) C) Bernd Uhlig, OnP
Warlikowski’s very fine idea is therefore obviously (it’s not in the libretto) to have, from the burial, brought forth the ghost of Dinah, whose identity we do not immediately grasp, and Johannah Wokalek imposes on it , as we have said, her so American blond presence. The remarkable work of Nagano, on these difficult rhythms which also belong to musical comedies, often sung interventions at the wrong time of the orchestral writing, still contributes (orchestra of the Opéra de Paris in an excellent evening) to the success of A quiet place, creation in France perhaps minor and that some will receive even if it is all the same a Bernstein; and, anyway creation in the best possible conditions.
A quiet place by Leonard Bernstein, direction by Krzysztof Warlikowski, musical direction by Kent Nagano. Opera-Garnier, Paris, until March 30.