When “Moby Dick” opens on the Metropolitan Opera this week, audiences will expertise a deeply American story of unchecked ambition, fomented grievances and a self-destructive want for revenge.
Based mostly on Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, the opera delivers a cost-effective and resolute retelling of the fateful story of the Pequod, a ship in pursuit of a vengeful white whale. The libretto, by Gene Scheer, hits the e book’s fundamental conflicts with out dropping monitor of the motion. The rating, by Jake Heggie, is sleek and propulsive. The opera’s ending is for certain and clear.
It’s in all probability honest to say that extra individuals know the story of the white whale from parodies or synopses than from studying “Moby Dick.” However an adaptation isn’t just a abstract of the e book’s main occasions. A society obsessive about efficiencies could be overly targeted on directness.
Skillful although it’s, the opera, which had its premiere in Houston in 2010, has a form of scrubbed and airless storytelling that leaves the singularity of the novel behind. That is the kind of adaptation that audiences have lengthy responded to — a simplification of the e book’s billowy construction to emphasise its plot. However can a tidy adaptation actually symbolize this unruly e book, with its dramas born of limitless uncertainties? Or is the aim of adaptation one thing completely different?
A composer decides what facets of the narrative could be instructed by way of music, whereas a librettist shapes the story by way of phrases that may be thrown out into the air by the use of music. An aria reveals a personality’s singularity and ambition. Characters sing them to announce what they need and what lengths they need to pursue to get it. Every artistic flip provides distance from the e book.
Definitely, there are benefits to adapting a piece as nicely referred to as “Moby Dick.” There’s a starting, center and finish which have met the approval of readers, and that may function the ballast for any variety of artistic reinterpretations. There’s much less threat for a manufacturing, too. Whereas Melville’s unique writer, Harper and Brothers, thought of the e book a business failure when it got here out, few works examine in affect and longevity.
There are additionally distinct disadvantages to adapting “Moby Dick.” Melville’s language could be troublesome. The e book has tons of of pages of exposition. And far of the story’s foreshadowing comes by way of delicate cues, metaphors and allegories.
The novel, at its coronary heart, is an ethical story about how individuals cope with what they most concern, how they confront what they despise, and the way they make sense of defeat. These are summary agonies performed out by way of a forged of characters who don’t actually evolve. As a substitute, they press on changing into archetypes of unrealized ambitions. Although Ishmael (referred to as Greenhorn in Scheer and Heggie’s opera) narrates the e book, Captain Ahab (the tenor Brandon Jovanovich on the Met) is the star of the opera, an apt, dramatic selection: He’s the novel’s most complicated and developed character.
Within the novel, Ahab is most tender, although inconsistently, in his interactions with Pip, a 14-year-old cabin boy. Within the opera, Pip’s story serves because the turning level that reveals Ahab’s heartlessness. Pip is an harmless, and his naïveté stands in distinction to the sailors’ confidence. His survival is within the fingers of the crew, and his presence raises the stakes of the voyage. After a mishap, Pip (sung by the soprano Janai Brugger) suffers immensely; his ensuing concern is a harbinger of troubles to come back. Pip’s transformational second happens earlier in Scheer’s telling than within the e book, a dramaturgical selection that speeds the narrative alongside, whereas holding all of the novel’s important notes.
Setting Melville’s thorough and moody prose to music appears a pure. Its lyrical high quality invitations music that reaches for harmonies: The textual content is stuffed with open vowel sounds, made when the tongue doesn’t hinder the circulation of air. That may be helpful to singers once they harmonize, particularly in choral performances.
Melville’s diction may also be oratorical, organized with the driving vitality of a sermon. In “The Lee Shore,” a funerary chapter provided as testimony for a sailor who might be misplaced to the ocean, the narrator weighs the frustration of a life unfulfilled in opposition to the finality of loss of life, “Higher is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even when that have been security!”
There’s a pure lyricism in Melville’s sentences, even because the narration drifts between pessimism and optimism. Usually, he makes an attempt to call emotions that reside someplace deep and unseen. He does this by embracing rhythmic patterns utilized in poetry. Think about the narrator’s must reckon with “a moist, drizzly November in my soul.” This steadily cited passage within the e book’s opening paragraph carries a sample of stress and intonation.
However Melville’s sentences are sometimes prolonged as they wind by way of a number of concepts. This makes them troublesome to sing. Scheer’s libretto is forthright in its characterizations. Its strains, many lifted proper from the e book, are deceptively easy, written with nice management. Some are as quick as one or two phrases. Via the muscular interpretation of the refrain, these monosyllabic utterances — “Aye!,” “Ding!” — change into temporary, euphonious hollers.
Not all diversifications of “Moby Dick” are trustworthy to the disposition of the novel. The British composer Robert Longden and the librettist Hereward Kaye created a bawdy musical concerning the staging of “Moby Dick” by the ladies of St. Godley’s Academy for Younger Women. (It opened on the West Finish in 1992, was extensively panned, and closed after only a few months.) The efficiency artist Laurie Anderson created an avant-garde model of “Moby Dick” in 1999, referred to as “Songs and Tales From Moby Dick.” The e book is actually about “huge heads,” she says within the present — particularly Melville’s, which was “filled with theories and secrets and techniques and tales,” and the whale’s, which was monstrously giant.
Some extra typical diversifications may very well be interpreted as acts of devotion to Melville’s messiness. Dave Malloy’s 2019 model, carried out at A.R.T. in Cambridge, Mass., reckoned with the eclectic type of every chapter. It additionally explores the methods gender and race create their very own subplots within the narrative. One other current adaptation, created by the English actor Sebastian Armesto and simple8, a manufacturing firm that focuses on minimalist productions, instructed lots of the story’s essential moments by way of sea shanties.
However maybe it’s a foul thought to imagine {that a} retelling of “Moby Dick” ought to do something apart from honor the adapting artists’ dedication to it. At greatest, their imaginative and prescient will simply as discernible as Melville’s is. At worst, one might all the time choose up the e book.
One factor that distinguishes Heggie and Scheer’s adaptation is the frequency with which it has been carried out (a distinction that can also be uncommon for a recent opera). Earlier than coming to the Met, it was carried out by opera firms in Salt Lake Metropolis, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco and extra. You may argue that it has change into canonical, regardless of being solely 15 years previous.
Are there too many diversifications of Moby Dick? In all probability not. Onerous occasions breed bitter males like Captain Ahab, and there may be all the time one other one crammed to his hat’s brim with grievances; all the time one other who feels greater than justified in his anger; all the time one other who is able to drown these round him in his distress.
Wendy S. Walters is a professor of nonfiction within the writing program on the Faculty of the Arts at Columbia College.
