Theaters are by no means really darkish. In between performances, a easy ground lamp is positioned onstage and switched on. It’s known as a ghost mild, and relying on whom you ask, it’s both a sensible security measure or a solution to beat back spirits. Some say it truly welcomes them.
As viewers members entered the auditorium of the Dutch Nationwide Opera on Friday for the world premiere of “We Are the Fortunate Ones,” they have been greeted by a ghost mild that, true to its historical past, was open to interpretation.
For one, it was a sign of artifice. “We Are the Fortunate Ones” could also be a shifting work of music theater, however it’s, finally, theater: an area for storytelling and reflection. The ghost mild, although, additionally had a touch of the supernatural, summoning eight singers to an uncanny, purgatorial area so they may share their secrets and techniques, regrets and worries for the longer term.
Their tales are, for probably the most half, true. “We Are the Fortunate Ones,” with music by Philip Venables and a libretto by Ted Huffman and Nina Segal, is predicated on interviews with about 80 individuals born between 1940 and 1949, distilled right into a headlong rush by way of time.
What emerges, in an opera as compact and overwhelming as “Wozzeck,” is a portrait of a technology advised with compassion, knowledge and artfulness. You possibly can think about a model of this story as an indictment of the age group that, as one character admits, “made a multitude of issues.” However whereas opera thrives on simplicity, with love blossoming over the jiffy of an aria, “We Are the Fortunate Ones” is something however easy.
Venables and Huffman, who’re rising as one of many nice opera partnerships right this moment, have beforehand created works of layered that means: “Denis & Katya” (2019) raised sophisticated questions concerning the web and storytelling; “The Faggots and Their Associates Between Revolutions” (2023), about historical past and group.
Right here, working with Segal, a playwright, on her first opera, they concentrate on a particular age group, however greater than that they’re within the center class. The interviews have been restricted to nations in Western Europe and Scandinavia, in addition to america. Locations, in different phrases, that loved a golden age of a lot within the aftermath of World Battle II.
The creators, indebted to the literature of Annie Ernaux and Karl Ove Knausgaard, aspire to broad historical past by way of private tales. It’s an unimaginable process within the 100 minutes of their opera, however by homing in on the center class, they join the dots of shared expertise whereas additionally exploring how a technology formed and have become entwined with fashionable capitalism.
Huffman and Segal’s libretto strikes shortly by way of over 60 scenes, some simply seconds lengthy, carried out by a solid of eight singers who inhabit all kinds of characters, no matter gender or race. After they come collectively, it’s most frequently to specific a typical expertise: shopping for a home, happening trip, dying.
Alongside the way in which, the creators of “We Are the Fortunate Ones” push the boundaries of opera, and never as a result of it calls on its performers to talk with actorly ability. With “Whole Eclipse of the Coronary heart” used for the curtain name and exit music, you get the impression that orthodoxy isn’t the purpose. However this work, whereas plotless, is undoubtedly operatic in the way in which it elevates on a regular basis life to the realm of poetry, expressed in a sleek stability of head and coronary heart.
Starting in 1940 and ending within the current, the opera displays on historic occasions like the autumn of the Berlin Wall and Y2K, in addition to the signposts of life itself: Characters are born, grow to be dad and mom, fall in love with another person in midlife or lose a partner, marvel why their knees now not work. Additionally they fear about work and politics, about local weather and the chance that they wasted their lives on nervousness and self-loathing. The libretto is plain-spoken, however, like a Broadway lyric by Sheldon Harnick, sings as a result of of its simplicity.
Talking, singing and dancing for almost the complete working time, the solid will get greater than the standard exercise. (Similar for the orchestra, the Residentie Orkest, grandly characterful beneath the baton of Bassem Akiki.) Nonetheless, “We Are the Fortunate Ones” got here off as effectively rehearsed on Friday, to the purpose that nobody appeared uncomfortable.
The tenor Miles Mykkanen impressively tapped by way of a glib monologue about being 83 and never having to consider the longer term; earlier, the bass Alex Rosen had additionally danced with out effort. Helena Rasker had a wealthy contralto, but in addition a comic book contact in conveying the frustration of a girl whose kids don’t need to inherit her furnishings. The baritone Germán Olvera delivered maybe the bleakest speech, through which his character puzzled whether or not “most individuals, even younger individuals, would select to reside as comfortably as attainable inside a damaged system, quite than attempt to construct one thing new.”
With scene-stealing sounds, the tenor Frederick Ballentine and the soprano Jacquelyn Stucker have been most memorable in vocal solos, whereas the soprano Claron McFadden and the mezzo-soprano Nina van Essen have been simply as fascinating for his or her delicacy.
Huffman additionally directed and designed the manufacturing (along with designing the gala-attire costumes with Sonoko Kamimura), which appears like vaudeville within the bardo. With nearly no set, “We Are the Fortunate Ones” unfolds in entrance of the theater’s hearth curtain and across the orchestra pit. It’s so minimal, it might journey simply not solely to different opera homes, but in addition to live performance halls around the globe.
The performers tape sheets of paper to the wall to construct a display for nostalgic photographs and movies, by Nadja Sofie Eller and Tobias Staab, that resemble residence films however are eerily generated by A.I. It’s one of many many ways in which Huffman’s manufacturing maintains an unsettling ambiance. Bertrand Couderc lights the performers from beneath, lending them a campfire spookiness and the otherworldliness of “2001: A House Odyssey.” Often, singers placed on a spread present quantity with a masks or a prop; additionally they decide up microphones as if in a cabaret act.
A few of that takes its cue from Venables’s patchwork rating, which matches the opera’s timeline with a Hollywood waltz, a dreamy Disney harp or a big-band swing. With so many dance rhythms, all of it begins to tackle the texture of a danse macabre. He strikes freely amongst genres, maintaining the music at a slight distance from the tales onstage, corresponding to a grievance a couple of cleansing woman sung like a tango out of a present by Kurt Weill.
As within the A.I. footage, there may be an uncanniness to his music: “Comfortable Birthday” and “Auld Lang Syne” by way of a carnival whirl. However Venables additionally writes with representational sound. There’s a humorous inhale and exhale gesture in a passage about getting excessive, an Alma Mater-style refrain for describing reunions and the brassily grand chords that Dvorak would use for American marvel.
Like one of the best of opera, “We Are the Fortunate Ones” typically says two issues without delay, between the libretto and the rating. The solid comes collectively, for instance, to sing concerning the happiness of getting older with well being and cash intact over pounding, ever-higher piano chords; the music feels as if it might collapse beneath its personal weight.
In a means, it does by the tip of the opera. The music shrinks, lonely and suspended, mirroring decline and loss of life, the final word shared expertise. Characters talk about the way it occurs and with whom, if anybody. Now we have adopted them for eight a long time, as they modified the world and have been left behind because it continued altering with out them. All that continues to be, after they go, is an account ledger: the worth of a life.
We Are the Fortunate Ones
By way of March 30 on the Dutch Nationwide Opera, Amsterdam; operaballet.nl.
