Review: Dallas Opera premieres Joby Talbot’s ‘Diving Bell and the Butterfly’

Everest, commissioned and premiered by the Dallas Opera back in 2015, got reactions across the spectrum. But it was deemed enough of a success for the company to commission another collaboration of composer Joby Talbot, librettist Gene Scheer and stage director Leonard Foglia. The result, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, had its vividly realized world premiere Friday night at the Winspear Opera House.

It’s a true and powerful story of lives upended by tragedy. It dramatizes the eponymous autobiography, later turned into a movie, by the French writer and Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby.

In 1995, in the middle of a glamorous career, Bauby suffered a stroke that left him able to move only one eyelid. But learning to use eyeblinks to identify one letter at a time, he painstakingly dictated his memoirs, above all so his young children could know more of the man effectively taken from them.

A paralyzed, speechless man who imagines himself isolated in an underwater diving bell isn’t an obvious subject for an opera. But Bauby’s mind remained keenly active, if frustrated. In episodes of the opera, he comes alive to dramatize the “butterflies” of his impressions, emotions, memories and imagination. Among quotidian challenges Scheer’s libretto makes room for poetic musings.

The first scene, a dialogue between Bauby and a bedraggled figure, is apt to confuse viewers who haven’t read the backstory. But before his stroke, “Jean-Do” (as he’s nicknamed) was planning an updated adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo. Gradually we realize this mysterious character, whose imprisonment parallels Bauby’s, is Bauby’s imagination of the novel’s wise old priest, Abbé Faria.

Ultimately, the opera is about how human beings confront and battle adversity, and how we either adapt to it or don’t. And how adversity changes our self-concepts, as well as ways others see and relate to us. Bauby rages against the dying of the light, but love for his children gives him determination and strength to persevere.

Amid family and medical personnel, Faria becomes a plausible counterpoint. Utterly unconvincing, though, is the late appearance of Mercédès, another character from the novel, who imagines Bauby as the novel’s central character, Edmond. Although the opera lasts only a bit under two hours, with one intermission, it could lose that scene.

English is the language least likely to be sung comprehensibly by its native speakers, but this cast supplies remarkably clear diction. There are also supertitles.

With a lyric baritone at once liquescent and well focused, Lucas Meachem compellingly personifies Bauby’s complexities. Richard Croft’s sturdy presence and noble tenor bring Faria to life. As Bauby’s ex, Sylvie, Sasha Cooke holds things together with personal strength and a bold, clear mezzo.

Deanna Breiwick’s keen tone suits the persistent secretary Claude, to whom Bauby dictates his book letter by letter. Kevin Burdette is aptly mature as Bauby’s father, Papinou. Andrew Bidlack gives the Doctor a lean and potent tenor, and Andriana Chuchman is effectively caring, if awkward, as the speech therapist Sandrine (doubling as Mercédès).

Soprano Jocelyn Hansen is Bauby’s lively Elle assistant, Lea. Ava Jafari and Austin Howarth portray Bauby’s children, Céleste and Théo.

As in some other contemporary operas, singers are sometimes amplified to be heard above bolder scorings for winds, brass and percussion. The electronic enhancement is mostly subtle, but it’s not always clear how much we’re hearing natural voices. And sometimes a character will be singing on one side of the stage while the voice seems to come from the other side.

Talbot’s solo vocal writing is effective enough, but he supplies some surprisingly lush, romantic duets and ensembles. A second act trio for Claude, Sandrine and Sylvie is as soaringly beautiful as anything in Strauss; big cinematic modulations betoken Talbot’s experience as a film composer. For the final scene, a bit sentimentally evoking Bauby’s death, the adult cast joins in a big ensemble singing his words about butterflies and letting go.

Music director Emmanuel Villaume skillfully coordinates singers and orchestra, although I wish Talbot’s orchestral writing didn’t rely so automatically on minimalist pulsings and didlings. Composing at computers makes it entirely too easy to string out repetitions of such effects. But contrast is supplied with angry assaults for Bauby’s stroke and more warmly flowing music elsewhere. The scene in the Elle office sets the orchestra briefly dancing to jazzy rhythms.

Actors performed in the final scene of the dress rehearsal for the Dallas Opera's world... — Actors performed in the final scene of the dress rehearsal for the Dallas Opera's world premiere of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," by composer Joby Talbot and librettist Gene Scheer, at Winspear Opera House on Nov. 1, 2023.(Kyle Flubacker)

Dramatically lit by Russell Champa, the production is visually dazzling. Set and projection designer Elaine J. McCarthy frames the action with giant mirrored panels whose networks of cracks fragment projections otherwise clear on an upstage rake. Minimal props — a hospital bed, a wheelchair, tables, beach furniture — are all that’s needed.

Details

Repeats at 2 p.m. Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 8 and 11 at Winspear Opera House, 2403 Flora St., Dallas. $15 to $411. 214-443-1000, dallasopera.org. The Nov. 11 performance also will be livestreamed at 7:30 p.m. on YouTube, at digital.dallasopera.org, for $9.99.