When Leonard Foglia was invited to direct an opera primarily based on Herman Melville’s masterpiece a couple of white whale, his first response was: “Moby-Dick. That’s nice!”
“Then I ran to a used bookstore and acquired the e book,” he recalled, “and I believed: Oh my God, what am I in for right here? It’s so daunting. I didn’t panic, however I believed, How can we do that?”
How he and his collaborators did it is going to be on show on the Metropolitan Opera starting March 3. The opera consists by Jake Heggie to a libretto crafted by Gene Scheer.
To start with, Scheer needed to whittle a novel of more than 600 pages right down to a 64-page libretto. He stored as a lot of Melville’s language as doable, and estimates that 40% to 50% of his libretto will be discovered within the unique textual content, although he usually tweaked the phrasing to make it extra singable.
Heggie and his preliminary companion, Terrence McNally (who withdrew for well being causes), had already determined to lop off the opening chapters, which happen on land. They set all the opera aboard the whale-hunting ship Pequod.
One other essential change was renaming the narrator, calling him Greenhorn to mirror his standing as a novice aboard the ship. Now the e book’s well-known opening line, “Name me Ishmael,” is transposed to the very finish of the opera when the character has matured.
“Within the novel, Ishmael is telling a narrative that occurred a few years in the past,” Scheer mentioned. “However within the theater, you need to see it occur in actual time. . . . We’re watching him soak up all of the experiences in order that when he says ‘Name me Ishmael,’ he’s prepared to put in writing the e book. In essence, this opera is the schooling of Ishmael.”
Tenor Stephen Costello, who’s performing the position for the fifth time and is the lone forged holdover from the Dallas premiere in 2010, sees his character as “the one one who actually has an arc.”
“He goes on the Pequod as a result of there was nothing for him on land,” Costello mentioned. “So he’s both going to die at sea or determine who he’s.”
Along with Costello, the Met forged consists of tenor Brandon Jovanovich because the vengeance-obsessed Captain Ahab. Pip, his cabin boy, is written as a “trousers position” (a male character portrayed by a girl) and will likely be sung by soprano Janai Brugger. Starbuck, the primary mate, will likely be baritone Peter Mattei, and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Inexperienced will sing the a part of Queequeg. Karen Kamensek conducts the eight performances by way of March 29.
The opera, commissioned to have a good time the opening of a brand new opera home in Dallas, has been successful from the start, drawing reward from audiences and critics—and even students.
Bob Wallace, a professor at Northern Kentucky College and previous president of the Melville Society, admired the opera a lot that he wrote a e book about its creation.
“Scheer and Heggie did an excellent job of shrinking the novel to make it match the stage and but protect a lot of the essence of it,” he mentioned in an interview.
As a lot as critics admired Scheer’s adaptation and Heggie’s tuneful, atmospheric, and at instances gripping rating, they lavished particular reward on the bodily manufacturing, with units by Robert Brill and projections by Elaine J. McCarthy.
The motion, Steve Smith wrote in The New York Times, “performed out in opposition to a multimedia-enriched staging that ranged from placing to near-miraculous.”
Maybe probably the most gorgeous impact is the best way animated projections superimposed on a climbing wall that’s curved a bit like a skateboard ramp create the phantasm of the crew leaving the Pequod to board three whaling boats.
“A variety of the joy and thrill of watching that is as a result of work of the manufacturing workforce,” Scheer mentioned. “Lenny stored saying to me, ’You think about it the best way you need it, and let me determine easy methods to do it.’”
That always concerned imposing uncommon bodily calls for on the singers. As an example, when Pip will get misplaced at sea, his character sings the equal of an operatic mad scene dangling excessive above the stage, with projections making it seem he’s treading water.
“I mentioned to Janai after we first rehearsed it,” Foglia recalled, “‘Okay, you’ll be able to simply get mad at me now, as a result of it’s a must to sing your hardest aria hanging from not even a full harness, only a single wire.’”
As well as, Queequeg and Greenhorn climb up and down ladders to sing on the high of the mastheads. Ahab, who has misplaced a leg in a previous encounter with Moby-Dick, has to hobble on a wood prosthesis. And Greenhorn—lastly named Ishmael—ends the opera grabbing onto a whale hook from a passing ship that lifts him to security.
“I joke with them that every thing opera singers depend on in life—having each toes planted on the bottom—I’ve taken away from them,” Foglia mentioned.
—By Mike Silverman, Related Press
This story was first printed February 26, 2025. It was up to date on February 28, 2025, to appropriate the identify of Northern Kentucky College.
