Music chronicle

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2003 by Clark, Robert S

SUPPOSE YOU WERE AN AMERICAN COMPOSER schooled in the arts of harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, and writing for the human voice. And suppose you wanted to compose a work for the lyric stage, one that clearly and idiomatically had its roots in American soil. Along with all the other vexations of writing on a large scale, you would be faced with a hurdle familiar to generations of American composers: how to impart an unmistakably American flavor to a classical form that was spawned and matured in Italy and other European nations.

The dilemma that confronted William Bolcom, the composer of the opera A View from the Bridge, written for the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1990 and presented for the first time by the Metropolitan Opera late in 2002, was even more complex, because the opera's setting is among the Italian immigrants of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook in the 1950s. Bolcom was thus presented with three distinct stylistic forces tugging at him: his own basic composing voice, with diatonic underpinnings spiked by chromaticism and dissonances; the pull of the Italian operatic tradition (in a "Composer's Note" in the Metropolitan program, he confessed that he "couldn't avoid the feeling of Verdi, Puccini and Boito"); and the need to suggest the story's American locale.

To this task Bolcom brings perhaps unique qualifications. Throughout his career he has immersed himself in American popular forms. With the lyricist Arnold Weinstein he has himself written some one hundred cabaret songs, mainly for performance accompanying his wife, the mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, at the piano. The two have made about twenty albums of American popular and theater music together (sample title: After the Ball: A Treasury of Turn-of-the-Century Popular Songs). Weinstein served as librettist for A View from the Bridge, adapting the text from two original sources by Arthur Miller, the play's initial one-act version (1955) and a full-length View First directed two years later by Peter Brook in London. The collaboration was strengthened by Miller's own participation, suggesting changes to Weinstein and in a few instances creating entirely new text, such as a jailed Sicilian illegal immigrant's second-act arietta "I sailed away to America on a ship called Hunger." Yet, as Bolcom says in his "Note," "We found that the first version could in many cases be set musically just as it was."

Bolcom summarizes his approach to this material in his note: "I wanted the major characters to have tunes with the same accessibility that a good old Broadway tune has." He comes closest, perhaps, in the first-act song for one of the principal characters, another Sicilian immigrant named Rodolpho who is one of the young leads. His paean to "New York lights" is strong enough to take on life outside the opera as a popular standard, much as Gershwin's "Summertime" has done. But Bolcom did not want simply to ape either the Broadway style or the Italian operatic style. So, he says, he went about "absorbing" them. "One of the things that the people of Red Hook themselves as Italian immigrants would have absorbed [was] popular music of the time in America."

Thus at important junctures in the action Bolcom introduces Johnny Black's classic "Paper Doll," written in 1915 but still current at the time of the libretto's action. It is sung first by Rodolpho in a quasi-Neapolitan manner, and later appears in what Bolcom calls a "real fifties, 12-to-the-bar, early rock-and-roll version," to a recording of which Rodolpho and the story's female ingenue dance. Elsewhere, when a South American coffee ship approaches the Red Hook docks, Bolcom writes a tango. Such devices are not new to American opera-most recently John Harbison's Great Gatsby did much the same thing. But Bolcom's all but seamless fusion of them with the characters' vocal lines, parlando, and spoken passages, and with the steady motif-and-variations technique of the orchestra's accompaniment and commentary, seems to this observer to have set the bar higher.

The two-act opera's story, as recounted to the chorus-cum-neighborhood-people by the lawyer Alfieri (John del Carlo), would not be out of place in a setting by Mascagni or Leoncavallo. The longshoreman Eddie Carbone (Kim Josephson) lives in Red Hook with his wife Beatrice (Catherine Malfitano) and his niece Catherine (Isabel Bayrakdarian), whom the Carbones have raised from infancy. Beatrice's cousins Marco (Richard Bernstein) and the younger Rodolpho (Gregory Turay) arrive from Sicily to stay with the Carbones and find work on the docks. Eddie impresses upon the women that they must be discreet about the presence of the two illegal immigrants, and the chorus recalls the fate the community exacted on an informer. Eddie harbors a suppressed desire for Catherine, who is seventeen years old and beautiful, and he has neglected Beatrice for some time. She complains to him in the aria "When am I gonna be a wife again?" Eddie soon notices the mutual attraction of Catherine and Rodolpho and tells the girl that Rodolpho wants to marry her only to get legal immigration papers. At Christmas Eddie comes home from the docks drunk and discovers the young couple coming out of the bedroom. He orders Rodolpho out of the house, but Catherine persists in her determination to marry the young Sicilian. Eddie turns to Alfieri for advice on how to rid himself of Rodolpho, but the lawyer says it cannot be done short of turning the brothers in to Immigration. Eddie does so. Rodolpho and Marco are jailed and Marco vows revenge on Eddie. When the brothers are released for Catherine and Rodolpho's wedding, Marco confronts Eddie, and the two men struggle. Eddie pulls a knife, but Marco is the stronger. Eddie accidentally stabs himself, and dies in Beatrice's arms.