Arts & Events

If John Adams had been content to offer a faithful operatic rendering of Shakespeare’s epic drama of Antony and Cleopatra, Adams would have created by far his finest opera in a career marred by several monumental failures amidst much, in my opinion, unwarranted public and critical acclaim. But, no, in creating this operatic Antony and Cleopatra, Adams couldn’t resist the hubris of trying to outdo Shakespeare by adding extraneous material to Shakespeare’s immortal text. Most egregious was Adams’ inclusion of a long, harsh speech in which Caesar Augustus boasts of Rome’s Empire borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid. To make matters worse, the staging of this speech by director Elkhanah Pulitzer includes multiple superimposed close-up images of tenor Paul Appleby’s stridently distorted face as his Caesar forcefully hammers home his almost facist insistence on the greatness of Imperial Rome. Pulitzer even closes this borrowed speech from the Aeneid, (it is NOT in Shakespeare at all), with a close-up image of a mailed fist thrust directly at both the onstage Roman audience and at the audience in the War Memorial Opera House. Even the music Adams provided for this speech was bombastic and tedious to the maximum. This was indeed the low point in an opera that constantly veered back and forth between admirable moments and grievously marred musical moments of monumental hubris. 

In this Antony and Cleopatra, soprano Amina Edris’s Cleopatra was sensational. Vocally and dramatically, Amina Edris created a totally believable character of this Egyptian queen whose “infinite variety” according to Shakespeare was praised by all who knew her. With her paramour Antony, sensitively portrayed by bass-baritone Gerard Finley, Amina Edris’s employed all her womanly wiles — tenderness, voluptuousness, occasional feigned indifference, and even some anger — to ensnare Antony all the more and essentially wrap this formerly great warrior around her little finger. As a middle-aged Antony, Gerard Finley perfectly delineated the gradual but inevitable decline of an Antony who once bestrode the oceans but now drowns in his own sensual and sexual indulgence with Cleopatra. However, I regret that director Elkhanha Pulitzer arbitrarily failed to acknowledge Antony’s gradual decline but instead opened the opera with Antony passed out on a couch in a drunken hangover from the previous night’s drinking and lovemaking. 

Yet another regrettable move by director Elkhanha Pulitzer was her decision to split this opera’s settings between the Egypt and Rome of 30 BC and a Hollywood version of the 1930s. This resulted in a jarring disjunction in which we abruptly moved from live onstage action set in ancient Egypt and Rome to newsreel footage of crowd scenes ostensibly showing political rallies (of Mussolini’s Rome?) in the 1930s. The newsreel footage was assembled by projection designer Bill Morrison. He also provided footage that accompanied Enobarbus’s descriptive account of the first meeting of Antony and Cleopatra in Cydnus in Turkey when Cleopatra arrived in a fabulous gilded barge. However, Bill Morrison’s footage accompanying this account shows nothing of the sort but instead shows simple Egyptian feluccas on the Nile, creating yet another disjunctive effect between Shakespeare’s text and this Elkhanah Pulitzer staging of John Adams’ opera. 

The third major character in Antony and Cleopatra is of course the youthful Octavious who bills himself as Caesar Augustus. In this role tenor Paul Appleby portrayed a petulant Caesar whose coldly calculated political acumen constantly outmaneuvers Mark Antony’s far more spontaneous but often unwise actions. Appleby’s tenor, though weak at times, became stridently forceful in his delivery of Caesar’s speech interpolated from the Aeneid. The fourth major character is Enobarbus, Antony’s lieutenant. In this much reduced version of the role of Enobarbus, bass-baritone Alfred Walker sang well when the music suited the high tessitura of his voice though at other times the music written for Enobarbus by John Adams seemed too low to suit Walker’s voice. Mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Deshong was a fine, dignified Octavia, Caesar’s half-sister, who accepts a marriage to Antony as a political alliance between Caesar and Antony. Though Antony’s own acceptance of this marriage at a moment when he is totally enraptured by Cleopatra remains something of a mystery. In any case, Antony quickly deserts the marriage with Octavia and returns to Cleopatra in Alexandria. 

In an opera that lasts nearly three and a half hours, there were nonetheless many of Shakespeare’s scenes that were left out of John Adams’ opera. The character of Pompey and his rebellion against Caesar are totally missing from this Antony and Cleopatra. Likewise, two military battles are here telescoped into one battle only, the crushing naval defeat of Antony at Actium, a battle scene accompanied by some of John Adams’ most bombastic music. Finally, the assault by Caesar and his army on Alexandria, including a preliminary victory by Antony’s Egyptian forces and then quickly followed by his abject defeat, are totally absent from this opera. 

In supporting roles, mezzo-sopranos Taylor Raven as Charmian and Gabrielle Betag as Iris gallantly portrayed Cleoptara’s female attendants, while tenor Brenton Ryan as Eros and baritone Timothy Murray as Scarus sang well as Antony’s followers. Meanwhile, baritone Hadleigh Adams was a fine Agrippa, a follower of Caesar, and bass-baritones Philip Skinner as Lepidus and Patrick Blackwell as Maecenas, another follower of Caesar, were excellent in their roles. 

San Francisco Opera’s Music Director Eun Sun Kim was here conducting her first John Adams opera, and she did a fine job of infusing this music with verve and, in some cases, an excess of vitality in moments of bombast. The orchestra was huge, 72 pieces in all, and included 2 harps, a celesta, and a cimbalom. Mimi Lien was the set designer, Constance Hoffman was costume designer, David Finn was lighting designer, the aforementioned Bill Morrison was projection designer, and Mark Grey was sound designer and mixing engineer. Lucia Scheckner was dramaturg and libretto consultant. 

Finally, a word of praise is due for this opera’s final scene which portrays the death of Cleopatra, once Antony himself has died of a self-inflicted wound. Walling herself up in a tower, which incongruously seemed to contain a giant lighted Christmas tree!, Cleopatra allows herself to be bitten by poisonous asps. As she dies, Amina Edris’s Cleopatra beautifully sang of her love for Antony and even sang poignantly of hearing Antony’s voice calling her to join him in death. This quiet, sensitive music was probably the very best music in this overlong John Adams score.