“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
--Edgar Allen Poe
"The Raven" is one of Poe’s most famous and recognized works. It has been turned into parody poems, comic books, cartoons, several films (including a 2012 thriller depicting Poe as a pursuer of serial killers), and now an opera by Toshio Hosokawa, presented by Gotham Chamber Opera.
Hosokawa has created a “monodrama” from Poe’s classic. His music is more intense and frightening than any horror film score I’ve ever heard. Powerfully communicating a nauseating dread that evolves into full-blown terror, the score is magnificent. And it was played beautifully, each color and mood reaching out from the orchestra to unsettle the audience seated at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater. The flute alone was mesmerizing.
The stage was almost bare save the musicians and performers; an asymmetrically raked platform sat onstage, slightly off center. Mezzo-soprano Fredrika Brillembourg ascended the platform and began to speak/sing the well-known introduction, “Once upon a midnight dreary…” as prima ballerina assoluta Allesandra Ferri began to interact with her, touching her, repositioning her and giving visual expression to the words. Several times the two of them came together for a tableau that resembled a raven.
Brillembourg was in top form, her voice sounding at times very much like the nightmarish orchestra that played alongside her. Her diction was so perfect it made the supertitles unnecessary. Her voice, once it left the singspeak and blossomed into song, conveyed woe and desperation without distraction, like the clear voice that is always heard inside the head of one who is mad.
It is unfortunate that Hosokawa did not explore the music within Poe’s words. Poe was one of the most rhythmic poets of all time, his “voice” is unmistakable because of it. Sadly this voice was not heard during this particular opera. Brillembourg was obliged to drag each verse out so slowly that Poe’s famous rhythms were essentially lost. And gone too was one of the most effective things about this story within a poem, the lack of terror in the narrator at the poem’s beginning. He is not found swirling in a cloud of dread, he is merely falling asleep while reading. The knock comes, he is perplexed, and his perplexity grows into fear and then into a terror that boarders on madness as the Raven taunts him. In this score the terror and madness are on display pretty much from the very onset, there is nowhere to go.
Still, it is a fascinating piece, and at its conclusion some audience members were on their feet. Prior to the opera we were treated to a fine performance of Andre Caplet’s "Masque of the Red Death", a piece for string quartet and harp inspired by another Poe masterpiece. It set the stage nicely for an evening of musical dread.
