John Corigliano’s New Opera Reimagines Dionysus as Dracula

The first recorded vampire opera—Silvestro Palma’s “I Vampiri,” from 1812—played the undead for laughs. In a spoof of the vampire hysteria that swept over Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Palma’s characters hallucinate bloodsuckers running amok in the Italian countryside. Seven years later, John William Polidori published his sensational story “The Vampyre,” prompting a series of earnest operatic adaptations. Heinrich Marschner’s “Der Vampyr,” from 1828, outdid competing efforts by Peter Josef von Lindpaintner and Martin-Joseph Mengal. Marschner’s work, in turn, helped inspire Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” in which the title figure has the air of someone who sleeps in a coffin, even if he doesn’t bite anyone in the neck. When, at the end of the nineteenth century, Bram Stoker wrote “Dracula,” he had this operatic history in mind. Early notes for the novel suggest that the ill-fated real-estate lawyer Jonathan Harker attends a performance of “The Flying Dutchman” in Munich before setting off to visit a new client in Transylvania.

Curiously few vampire operas followed that early burst of activity. The high-modernist period should have yielded a Dracula shocker, but film, opera’s upstart rival, took possession of the genre. Indeed, much latter-day vampire music has consisted of newly fashioned scores for classic films. In 1999, Philip Glass wrote a suave string-quartet accompaniment for Tod Browning’s “Dracula.” Dozens of composers, rock bands, and electronic artists have written or improvised music for F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” which carries the irresistible subtitle “A Symphony of Horror.” When Werner Herzog remade “Nosferatu,” in 1979, he brought the genre full circle by drenching the soundtrack in blood-red rivers of Wagner.

John Corigliano’s Dracula-infused opera, “The Lord of Cries,” which had its première last month at the Santa Fe Opera, thus has the field mostly to itself. The libretto is by Mark Adamo, Corigliano’s husband, who is himself an opera composer of considerable accomplishment. Adamo had been mulling over Stoker’s tale for years, seeking to fuse Dracula with the figure of Dionysus in Euripides’ “The Bacchae,” and in his rendition the vampire turns out to be a guise assumed by the pagan god as he seeks to unleash on Victorian England the same vengeful chaos that he once dealt out to Thebes. In the early scenes, Harker has returned from Transylvania, his mind in tatters. Dionysus arrives in England and recruits modern bacchantes from the inmates of an asylum; the doctor in charge, John Seward, becomes convinced that he can defeat the fiend only by becoming fiendish himself. Like Agave in “The Bacchae,” he ends up cutting off the wrong head. The core message of Adamo’s libretto, delivered in the final chorus, is that repression breeds madness and violence: “You may assuage the priest without, but not the beast within.”

Adamo’s double-layered conceit is a good match for Corigliano’s aesthetic, which thrives on the collision of disparate spheres. Now eighty-three, Corigliano first won wide notice in the nineteen-seventies, when many younger American composers were discarding neoclassicism and twelve-tone modernism in favor of neo-Romantic and minimalist strains. Corigliano’s convulsive First Symphony (1988), memorializing friends who died of AIDS, and his operatic phantasmagoria “The Ghosts of Versailles” (1991), extrapolated from Beaumarchais’s Figaro plays, feature generous dollops of melody, although a modernist apparatus is often used as a framing device. Transitions between the two modes are not always seamless, but at his best Corigliano brings motivic rigor and formal control to an eclectic vision.

“The Lord of Cries” is an uneven creation, but it contains some of Corigliano’s grandest, wildest, most exuberantly inventive music. The first spooky spatter of notes—E, A, B-natural, C, C, A, and B-flat—gives an indication of the work’s sophisticated trickery. In the German system of spelling out notes, these become E, A, H, C, C, A, B—“Bacchae” backward. The “Bacchae” cipher sounds throughout the opera, either as an agitated sequential motif or as a menacing columnar chord. The fact that it also encloses Bach’s musical signature—B, A, C, H—adds another tier to the intricacy of the conception.

Corigliano does not stint on the sonic terror: winds lash about in an aleatoric frenzy, strings emit insectoid clouds of harmonics, trombones revel in satanic glissandos. The ear-flattening climaxes recall the composer’s Third Symphony (2004), or “Circus Maximus,” a sonic riot for wind band. Traditional tonality, meanwhile, is turned on its head. One of the most effective moments in “The Lord of Cries” comes toward the end of the first act, when Dionysus, having escaped from prison, calls upon his minions to “shudder the foundations of the world.” The trumpets herald him with a halogen-bright E-major chord, which is then taken up by glockenspiel, crotales, xylophone, and sustained high strings. The result is a sound world reminiscent of Messiaen at his most celestial, except that it represents forces that Messiaen would have equated with evil.

Balancing the Grand Guignol set pieces are stretches of brooding gorgeousness, which honor the nocturnal-Romantic core of the vampire tale. The arias for Dionysus, a countertenor role, are eerie tours de force. In the Stranger’s Aria of Act I—the god also goes by this name—the melodic line has the tight grace of a Bernstein song, but the orchestration gives it a sinister mien, with winds executing serpentine solos in vacant space. Toward the end of the aria, Dionysus sings monotone F-sharps over chords of D major, D-sharp minor, and C major in the strings and winds, the last undermined by an abyssal F-sharp in the tuba. The aria is addressed to Seward, and it is unmistakably an act of seduction, though the hidebound doctor can sublimate his desire only through violence.

Where the opera sometimes falters is in its pacing. The first act is extended to a taxing eighty-seven minutes, with needless repetition and an excess of hurried exposition. In addition, Corigliano’s rhythms tend to be a little foursquare. Perhaps there’s an intentional element of over-the-top kitsch in the galumphing orgiastic dance that ends Act I, but, if so, James Darrah, who directed the première production, didn’t capitalize on the opportunity. The staging, with sets by Adam Rigg, has a tame, tacky look, with rows of street lamps wanly evoking a Victorian setting. Only Chrisi Karvonides-Dushenko’s pleasingly lurid costumes rise to the occasion.

The Santa Fe Opera is always a prime spot to see gifted younger singers, and the company has fielded a superb cast for “The Lord of Cries,” which runs through August 17th. I saw the second performance, at which distant thunderstorms added atmosphere. Anthony Roth Costanzo, as Dionysus, applied the same steely sensuousness that he brought to Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at L.A. Opera and the Met. The fast-ascendant baritone Jarrett Ott, as Seward, mastered a demanding tessitura and vividly conveyed the character’s arrogance and agony. The tenor David Portillo was a transfixing Harker, alternating between cultivated lyricism and shrieks of madness. The soprano Kathryn Henry, as Lucy, gave a rich-voiced, affecting account of a role that is conspicuously less well developed than the male leads. Kevin Burdette, in a speaking narrator part, adopted an amusingly bombastic newsreel-announcer manner. Matt Boehler lent his distinctive bass to Van Helsing; Leah Brzyski, Rachel Blaustein, and Megan Moore cast a spell as Dionysus’ attendants. Johannes Debus, in the pit, delivered a startlingly fine, sharp account of a far-from-simple score.

The fate of a new opera is hard to guess. “The Ghosts of Versailles” received few revivals after its triumphant début at the Met, in 1991, though in recent years it has experienced a comeback. Corigliano threatened afterward that he would never write another opera; it’s to our benefit that he relented. What’s notable about “The Lord of Cries” is its gleeful lack of caution—a commendable late-period turn for an artist who has at times been too calculated in his effects. Not, perhaps, since Verdi wrote “Falstaff” has an operatic composer made so much mischief past the age of seventy-five. ♦