The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (83 page)

The demented yet magnificent Sweeney Todd returns to London from long imprisonment, determined to wreak revenge on the Judge who falsely convicted him, raped his wife and now has designs on his daughter Johanna.
Todd sets up his barber’s shop above a Fleet Street pie-shop owned by the revolting Mrs Lovett, and they set up a gruesome partnership – as Todd uses his razor to slit the throats of all customers, so she cannibalizes the corpses for pie filling.
For a while, they are hugely successful – but their nemesis is unimaginably horrible.

What to listen for

In contrast to the black parody of the ‘Dies irae’ from the Catholic mass and several passages of outright Grand Guignol, Sondheim plays merrily with the styles of Victorian music-hall and Gilbert and Sullivan (notably in Mrs Lovett’s ‘The Worst Pies in London’ and ‘By the Sea’).
Among the more lyrical numbers, ‘Not while I’m around’, a duet between Tobias and Mrs Lovett in which the affectionate sentiments are gruesomely undercut by the horror of the situation, stands out.
But perhaps the best number in the score is the ironically jolly waltz at the end of Act I in which Todd and Mrs Lovett fantasize over their cannibalistic meat pies.

In performance

In 1984,
Sweeney
Todd
was performed at New York City Opera.
Since then, it has received several other highly successful opera house productions, one of the most notable being David McVicar’s for Opera North.
McVicar took Todd seriously, presenting him as a tragic hero consumed with righteous anger at the complacence and self-interest of the Victorian establishment.

Recording

CD: Len Cariou (Sweeney Todd); Angela Lansbury (Mrs Lovett); Paul Gemignani (cond.).
RCA 3 379 2

John Adams

(1947– )

Nixon
in
China

Three acts. First performed Houston, 1987.

Libretto by Alice Goodman

Conceived in collaboration with the opera’s first director, Peter Sellars, this has proved one of the most durable and complex of operas emanating from the ‘minimalist’ tendency of modern music, reaching large audiences throughout the world.

Plot

American President Richard Nixon and his wife Pat arrive in Beijing on their historic diplomatic mission to Communist China in 1972.
At the airport, they are greeted by the father of modern China, President Chou En-Lai.
Later, Nixon and his unsympathetic foreign policy expert, Henry Kissinger, meet Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and discuss the problems of governing the contemporary world.

Pat Nixon is deeply touched by her tour of the sights of modern China.
At a great state banquet, a revolutionary ballet is presented as entertainment.
At its climax, the villainous Madame Mao exults in Communism’s brutal triumph over counter-revolutionary elements.

On their last night in Beijing, the Nixons, the Maos and Chou En-Lai reflect in their separate bedrooms on the course of history and the paths that their lives have taken through it.

What to listen for

John Adams once wrote that he ‘wanted to create a music that had the energy, drive and ecstasy of minimalism, but which had much more expressive potential’ – this he achieves in
Nixon
in
China,
a work that is both exciting and moving.
Using the basic minimalist device of repeated arpeggios
which modulate harmonically, Adams builds a musical drama which, in the style of baroque opera, focuses as much on the characters’ inner meditations (some of them highly complex in their political implications) as on external plot.
Highlights include the spectacular opening of the opera, building up to Nixon’s arrival, and the magnificent crescendo which accompanies the landing of the aeroplane, followed by Nixon’s strikingly syncopated aria, ‘News news news’; the comic banquet which concludes Act I; Pat Nixon’s visionary reflections on what she sees of China, ‘This is prophetic’, in Act II, followed by the superb scene in which a performance of the revolutionary ballet
The
Red
Detachment
of
Women
is interrupted by a terrified Pat who mistakes theatrical violence for reality.
Act II ends with a venomously assertive Queen-of-the-Night style coloratura aria for Madame Mao.
Act III is much quieter in tone – like Debussy’s
Pelléas
et
Mélisande,
the opera seems to end with all its questions still wide open.

In performance

Although it has received several other successful stagings,
Nixon
in
China
must always be deeply bound up with Peter Sellars’s original production, which captures, through Adrianne Lobel’s designs, the naïve charm and vibrant colours of Chinese poster art.
The villains of the piece are Kissinger and Madame Mao, but the libretto adamantly refuses to take sides between capitalist Americans and Communist Chinese, allowing both sides to state their ideological cases with dignity.

The great critic Andrew Porter once pointed out that this must be the only opera in history in which most of the principal characters – the Nixons, Kissinger and Madame Mao – could theoretically have been present at the first performance!

Recording

CD: James Maddalena (Nixon); Edo de Waart (cond.).
Nonesuch 7559 79177 2

The
Death
of
Klinghoffer

Prologue and two acts. First performed Brussels, 1991.

Libretto by Alice Goodman

Based on events which occurred in 1985, and completed during the US war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Plot

Exiled Palestinians sing in counterpoint to a chorus of exiled Jews.
The cruise liner
Achille
Lauro
is hijacked by Palestinians a few miles outside Alexandria and hostages are rounded up.
Leon Klinghoffer, an innocent Jewish tourist in a wheelchair, is shot dead following an argument between the hijackers.
The captain and the hijackers negotiate, and the ship returns to Alexandria.
Klinghoffer’s body is thrown overboard and the captain tells Mrs Klinghoffer of her husband’s death.