Opera as History

Alex Ross, “Opera As History”

The New Yorker, Jan. 6, 2003.

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/05/reichs_three_ta.html

Opera houses are supposed to be fantasy places, where outlandish lovers meet and villains spiral to their inevitable fates. To present an opera about the Holocaust—as the composer Nicholas Maw has done, with "Sophie's Choice," which recently had its première in London—shuts down the usual rituals of escape. I was surely not the only one at the Royal Opera House who felt a kind of aesthetic panic when, toward the end of the evening, the tenor Jorma Silvasti came onstage as Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, singing about crematorium construction. Are there limits to what music can express? Should such evilness be sung, made to sound half beautiful? At the edge of the tolerable, the opera has given us a glimpse of what Hannah Arendt called the "word-and-thought-defying" mystery of the Nazi mind.

"Sophie's Choice" is based on the grand, harrowing novel by William Styron, which follows a spiritually wounded Polish Catholic woman back in time, from a boarding house in Flatbush into the inferno of Auschwitz. The opera also takes sidelong glances at Alan J. Pakula's film version, which starred Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. It is an astonishingly ambitious conception, but Maw—a sixty-seven-year-old, cherub-faced Englishman, who is currently on the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory—has always had a world-conquering strain: in 1987, he completed a ninety-minute-long orchestral piece called "Odyssey," which sounds like all of Richard Strauss's tone poems played simultaneously. Some may wonder, listening to "Sophie's Choice," whether Maw's neo-Romantic, pan-Germanic style achieves sufficient philosophical distance from its subject; after all, Wagner, Bruckner, and Strauss were featured on the soundtrack of Nazism. Yet this composer has unswerving faith in the nobility of his inherited language, and the score gives the impression of music brooding...