David Lang – opera’s rebel without a cause
A new work by American composer, David Lang, is always an important event. He self describes as a passionate, prolific and complicated composer. This is true. He is big potatoes. I grabbed one of the few remaining seats at the premiere last Thursday of Prisoner of the State, his latest opera, at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, New York, home of The New York Philharmonic.
Beep! Beep! Alert! Please, sir, but that’s not an opera house, it’s a concert hall. Well spotted, Grimshaw minor at the back. Lang has created a tableau, using the orchestra as observers and surrounding them with the action. Or, perhaps, the sponsors wouldn’t cough up for a full size hall?
Perish the thought. It’s the former, as Lang specialises in creating works that spring surprises. A couple of years ago another of his tableau works, The Little Match Girl Passion, was staged by the innovative IlluminArts group in Miami, Florida, in the Pérez Art Museum.
The familiar Hans Christian Andersen tale, adapted touchingly by Lang, was performed in the museum concourse, almost as a flash mob event, engulfing an audience of gallery patrons, sixty per cent of whom obviously had no idea it was about to happen. The other forty per cent had no idea where exactly. I had assumed this was a recipe for disaster.
Au contraire – that’s a stylish, less painful way of admitting I was wrong. An amazingly high percentage settled in for the whole work. A few scuttled by, absorbed by their smartphones. For them Armageddon would come a poor second to Candy Crush Saga.
Set the scene for Prisoner of the State. The walls of the orchestra stage had been bared, austere grey, with naked scaffolding, some razor wire, lit by perimeter floodlights, At the rear was an elevated platform populated by prisoners set against a clever, trompe l’oeil back wall projection of themselves, captured on “security” cameras.
The projection had a sepia quality and gave the setting surprising depth. The orchestra was split left and right. The walkway from the rear to front stage was used as performing space and a cell with trapdoor caging The Prisoner was located front.
Jaap van Zweden, recently appointed Dutch music director of the Phil, marked his inaugural season with a lot of piffle about pioneering “orchestra as theatre”, seemingly unaware of the fact that oratorios and semi-staged oratorios have been strutting concert hall stages for centuries.
But, I concede Prisoner of the State takes the concept to a different, more engaging level. The drama was absorbing. The dark clad orchestra seemed part of the action; anonymous observers of the civil rights transgressions unfolding before them.
Well, that’s what it was all about wasn’t it? Transgressions to be condemned. The ones you read about in the papers, go tut, tut, then move on to the Sports section. The piece is based on Beethoven’s Fidelio story, of the wronged prisoner rescued by his valiant wife, heroism leading to the iconic chorus of convicts reaching for the light at the triumphant conclusion.
Lang has trimmed back the Beethoven tale, cutting out the funny bits. Believe me, there IS some comic relief in Fidelio. He says he does not seek to blunt Fidelio’s moral tale. Nor does he pretend he is rewriting it. He is distilling the Fidelio story into a complacency-piercing missile, honed to seventy five minutes, aimed squarely at his supposedly comfortable audience. Wake up call.
Oops! No! Misfire! When the moral missile hits it goes “pop” not “bang”. Because Lang delivers a diluted, ambiguous message that spreads agreeably across the audience. Who cannot agree with his concluding proposition that:
The difference here,
Between prison and outside –
In here
In here
You see the chains
You see the chains
Self-evident. What’s going on? Are we enraged at self-evident injustice? Or, are we simply ignoring the poor guys? If we paid attention to them would that make it ok? Are they guilty? Does that matter? As David Cameron might well have said, “We’re all in chains together”.
There’s a hopelessly contradictory attempt to answer that central question earlier in the work – a litany from the prisoners on what they’re banged up for:
They say I had a knife
(But I didn’t)
They say I had a gun
(I did have a gun)
They say I hit a man
(I never hit that man)
They say I killed a man
(I did kill that man)
Where does this take us? Some are guilty, some are not? Gosh! Then the evil Governor steps out of the action in an aria introducing the astonishingly novel nostrum:
Better to be feared than to be loved
It is better to be feared than to be loved
Really? I’ve never heard that before. That’s why Boris Karloff got so many parts, being scary. Glad I came.
The truth is, Lang writes excellent music, but can’t write librettos for toffee – and insists on writing his own. Big mistake. Any collaborative librettist worth his salt would have delivered a sharper message, aimed at a specific target. Jolt the audience, for goodness sake.
In the context of the Fidelio story it’s a target rich battlefield. Wrongful imprisonment; the Marshall project, active since 2014, sums it up well in one of its pawky podcasts, “Oops, We took twenty years of your life by mistake. Have a nice day”; political detention – China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Burundi, Guantanamo Bay ……. endless.
I have watched every clip of Lang I could, describing why he conceived Prisoner of the State. “Angry”; “think of politics all the time”; “call to action”, he intones. But when it comes down to it he prefers to craft a message with which few in the audience could disagree. I would have preferred provocation by a powerful political polemic, with which I may have disagreed, but reached beyond banality.
David Lang’s music has been described as “luminous, gorgeous” and that about sums it up. It’s in the fashionable idiom of being delivered in repeated phrases – almost incantations – provoking a hypnotic effect. He is skilled at creating moods and describing changing states. The final chorus of Prisoner of the State sounded not Beethoven’s triumph of the light, but a cautionary note. The libretto was wasted on it.
Prisoner of the State was the billed as the zenith of a series, Music of Conscience, a three week exploration of composers’ responses to social conflict, including Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, stripped by the composer of its original dedication to Napoleon; Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, dedicated to bombed out Dresden; and John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls, in memory of the victims of 9/11.
All are reminders of a poignant event, shine a light on a specific injustice or highlight a character flaw. So, the concluding work of the season was an anticlimax. In Prisoner of the State Lang reveals himself as the 21st century’s first “Rebel Without a Cause”. Cue James Dean.