Angels in America
Barbican
Angels in America is the latest in the series of contemporary operas which are being mounted at the Barbican by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The others have been semi-staged, this was three-quarter staged, with props, moved around by the performers, and an Angel crashing into the action at the close of Act I. It is the latest opera by the Transylvanian composer Peter Eötvös, whose previous opera Love and Other Demons was premiered at the 2008 Glyndebourne Festival, to no great acclaim. Angels in America, by contrast, has been given very warm welcomes in the various cities in which it has been produced, beginning with Paris in 2004. If anything, I preferred Love and Other Demons, but I can’t see merit in either of them, and, worse, Angels strikes me as positively bad.
It is adapted from the play by Tony Kushner, recipient of every known award, almost seven hours long, and described generously by Christopher Cook in his helpful programme notes for the Barbican as ‘gloriously baggy’. I must find out more about that ‘gloriously’. It had seemed to me a shapeless sprawl, by no means justified or excused by being subtitled ‘A Gay Fantasia on National Themes’. Written when the Aids epidemic in the United States was at its peak, it was guaranteed respectful attention, especially since it combined an epic scale with plenty of camp humour and a mistily articulated message of Hope from Beyond. It has been a recurrent American vice, thinking that the disciplines of art somehow demean great and terrible issues. That hardly needs disproving but, if the claim is that ‘the blindness of Republican America to what was happening under its nose’ is answered by a messy representation, then that was refuted, contemporaneously with Angels, by David Feinberg’s magnificent and under-rated novels Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion, which tackle the same issues with insouciance, devastating wit, agonised insight and unostentatious decency.
Eötvös has shopped around in the course of a career which has involved much contact with the one-time avant-garde of Stockhausen and Boulez, the directorship of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and many prestigious conducting positions. It’s no use asking the question how someone who regularly conducts great music manages to produce and tolerate his own inferior products, because so many great conductors have done that. Yet the question with Angels is more complicated, since in the first place the composer must have found the play powerful, while also susceptible of musical enhancement. Its seven hours have of course been very drastically pruned by Eötvös’s wife, Mari Mezei, but what remains is so skeletal as to be nearly senseless.
Take, for instance, the most repulsive character, Roy Cohn, former colleague of Joe McCarthy and responsible for the judicial death of Ethel Rosenberg, who appears here as a tormenting ghost. Cohn, still in the 1990s a right-wing bigot, is in denial about having Aids, being wholly homophobic, and insists that he has liver cancer. He swears prodigiously, his lines probably containing more profanities than the whole previous history of opera; he bullies and snarls, but there is nothing at all that makes him human. His music fails to characterise him, so we have nothing but a crass cut-out. Kelly Anderson, thanklessly taking the role, has an impressive voice but is given no chance to use it, and seemed as ill-at-ease performing as I was watching.
Cohn is peripheral, however: there are two couples, one gay and the other straight, who constitute the centre of the drama. Prior Walter, one of the gays, is at a fairly advanced stage of Aids, but refuses to die (not an option, then). Prior is standard camp, hardly an advance on The Boys in the Band, for those senior enough to remember that bad play. Once more, too, the role was performed unconvincingly, as was that of Prior’s healthy partner Louis, who takes to cruising Central Park, where he picks up Joe, a Mormon, married and in the closet.
The scenes are all short, the music hardly bearing any relationship to the action. Many of the words are spoken, there is very little melody-plus-accompaniment. Disastrously, and probably unnecessarily, the singers all had face-microphones, and the amplification made every muttered word a deafening pronouncement. The orchestra includes numerous percussion instruments, celesta, Hammond organ, and acoustic and electric guitars, to create a sleazy ‘city’ atmosphere. Apocalyptic intrusions for the Angel are accompanied as one would imagine.
The piece received a favourable reception, and will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Wednesday, 7 April; anyone who misses it can listen on the BBC website.
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