In the composer John Adams’s new opera, “Antony and Cleopatra,” the orchestra seethes beneath the singers, delivering brief, explosive outbursts.
Perhaps the riskiest venture that an English-speaking composer can undertake is to make an opera out of Shakespeare. Although the repertory contains various Shakespeare adaptations, only one version by a native speaker has found a secure place on international stages: Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” from 1960. The hazards of Bardic opera are obvious. The plays generate their own indelible music in the reader’s mind, and recitations by celebrated actors linger in the memory.
At the same time, Adams possesses a melodic signature that is independent of his literary sources. The pivotal moment in “Harmonielehre,” his breakthrough piece of 1985, is the emergence, midway through the first movement, of a sprawling, upward- and downward-lunging theme in the strings and horns, more or less in the key of E-flat minor. It is intensely theatrical, gestural music, a monologue without words.
Nevertheless, the love affair of Antony and Cleopatra is no oasis of illicit sensuality, on the order of the various incarnations of “Romeo and Juliet,” or of its delirious Wagnerian cousin, “Tristan und Isolde.” The rat-a-tat, scherzando energy of the opening bars is sustained throughout the first act, which takes us up to Antony’s defeat at the Battle of Actium.
Pulitzer’s sleek, stylized production—with sets by Mimi Lien, costumes by Constance Hoffman, and lighting by David Finn—locates the action in the nineteen-thirties, mixing the seedy splendor of pre-Code Hollywood with the monumental bombast of Fascist Italy. The linkage makes good sense, given how cinematic values influenced Fascist iconography: silent movies helped popularize the so-called “Roman salute,” which does not seem to have existed in ancient times.
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