Well that’s the effect of living backwards, it makes everyone a little giddy at first. But there is one great advantage, the memory works both ways.
The White Queen in Through the Looking Glass
This piece has been on my watch list for a long time. I’ve watched snippets of the Munich State Opera premiere performance in the past, and so I was very excited to finally sit down with this piece.
My understanding of the piece, prior to seeing the full thing, was that it was a pretty wild ride, with a really fantastic production. Unfortunately, my expectations of a wild acid trip weren’t met.
Out of the two hour playing time, I certainly found some moments musically really fascinating but on the whole I felt that a lot of the material was either too long, too dull or too smart. I only laughed, and really it was a chuckle, once. I thought I would be giggling a lot more.
In doing some research of the piece I read this concise musical analysis, which brought to light some interesting musical techniques Unsuk used, such as palindromes, quotations, crab cannons and other musical riddles dotted through the score. Unfortunately, sometimes what looks cool on the page and which takes significant composition time to execute doesn’t transpose to something charming and witty aurally.
I also took issue with some of the text setting and the way it was sung. Opening this can of worms can provoke an unending debate between operatic and musical theatre traditions, but I feel many contemporary opera composers focus so much on the musical ideas and less on the text and the way the text is heard. Text is often an impetuous to composition, which I think is all well and good for concert work, but the moment we’re in the theatre there needs to be clear delivery of the text (away from the usual supertitles now common in opera, regardless of language) to the audience. The singing can sometimes inhibit this. The singers do an amazing job to execute what has been written, and can at times communicate the language to the audience very well. However, I don’t think this is achieved in a majority of sung moments in this work.
Being given such a big canvas as an opera, I feel that many composers want to pack in too many tricks and too many musical ideas. In this piece there seems to be some long or high singing that really blocks my understanding of the text. I actually thought that the spoken sections with orchestra accompaniment were some of the best sections of the piece. I guess it’s a question around why should this piece be sung in the first place, and what do we get out of the drama by a character singing. The Queen of Hearts, for instance, is given excellent over the top melodramatic music sung by a high Wagnerian soprano, though I didn’t understand a word she sang. But, this sort of worked for the character. But when Alice or the Cheshire Cat sang long, legato lines I felt a strong disconnect between the text, character and musical intention.
I also felt at times there was s disconnect from the music to my understanding of the characters and the setting. Alice’s long and legato aria toward the end lamenting what she’s seen and where reality and wonderland meet is stunningly beautiful and moving, but it just didn’t seem right to me and my reading of the book .
Second to this issue around directness of singing is acting. A work that I feel should be whimsical, dreamy and fun struck me as very hard and cold. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of joy on stage and I would be curious to see another production to see if that’s the cast, direction or anxiety from the difficult music.
Another thought, in Unsuk’s defence, is first operas are bloody hard to do, especially if you aren’t a singer. No matter how much vocal writing you do, trying to marry good quality vocal writing, with clear text setting and dramatic pacing is exceptionally difficult. I know that Alice has gone onto having a life as a concert piece, which maybe suits its musical objectives a bit more. But for me the dramatic pacing doesn’t work. I was also left guessing if this was a work for adults or children. I don’t think it had an interval, so 2 hours is a long sit for a child, especially when the music is so dense and the action on the stage so cold and slow.
Ultimately, it’s hard for me to be objective about Alice in Wonderland. There are few books I’ve read twice. Picture of Dorian Grey and Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking-glass would have to be the works I’ve reread the most. I grew up on some amazing adaptations of this book, including of course the iconic Disney version, a really psychedelic UK version from 1972 with Peter Sellars, Dudley Moore and even Robert Helpman as the Mad-hatter, with a excellent John Barry (James Bond) score, the dreadful Tim Burton version, a Hello Kitty version and probably my personal favourite, a 1985 two part tele-movie adaptation with songs by Steve Allan. My personal highlight being Carol Channing as the White Queen singing about Jam.
Comparing these more commercial adaptations with an operatic version isn’t really fair. But ultimately for me this should be a psychedelic, fantastical trip intended for children and this version strikes me at times hyperactive, dull and nightmarish, unsure as to its purpose.
Alice and the characters and moments of the book often pop into all my work. My first symphony carries the subtitle In my garden with Alice and suggests a wild Wonderland-esq journey. At my Alice themed 21st birthday party my poor parents had to deal with each room of the house being turned into a different section of the book. She is an iconic symbol of fun and innocence, but all I got from this piece was clinical coldness and fear.
My backyard set up for my 21st Alice in Wonderland birthday party