Nicholas Maw's Sophie's Choice opened at the Royal Opera House a week ago. It was the first new work to be performed at Covent Garden since the theatre's refurbishment. And it was a failure. Though it was hugely hyped before its premiere, and though tickets for the whole run sold out before the opening night, reviews were poor. After all the brouhaha, a sense of deep anticlimax descended.
No one expected a mess. The opera was, after all, based on a hugely admired novel, which in turn had been made into an important film. It boasted Simon Rattle as conductor, Trevor Nunn as director and a top cast that included Austrian mezzo Angelika Kirchschlager and American baritone Rodney Gilfry.
Maw, meanwhile, is a composer whose music, broadly tonal and melodically driven, would present no problems with accessibility, even over the opera's four-hour duration. The Royal Opera, it was assumed, was about to unveil a masterpiece that could enter the repertory.
As expectation mounted, a huge publicity machine swung into action. Most papers carried one or more features on the work. Much was made of its sell-out status and of the less than epoch-making fact that Chelsea Clinton was to attend the premiere. At the climax of the hype, Elaine Padmore, director of opera at Covent Garden, made an extraordinary statement. "Simon Rattle," she said, "thinks it is the most significant British opera of the last 50 years. When he thinks that, heavens, you just have to say 'Wow!' "
Whatever the circumstances behind Rattle's remarks to Padmore, the statement calls into question the credibility of both. Rattle is now on record as deeming Sophie's Choice more significant than Britten's The Turn of the Screw, Tippett's
The Midsummer Marriage or any of the operas of Birtwistle. Padmore's "Wow!" meanwhile, was shared by few. Though some Sunday papers prematurely reported a triumph, the premiere was politely received, no more. Some people left before the end. The reviews varied from the lacklustre to the damning.
It would now seem that a number of warning signs were misread or ignored. The fact that Maw expanded the score to facilitate 17 scene changes was glossed over, when it should have raised questions about the work's theatrical viability. Few commented that Maw's reputation is founded on orchestral and vocal music rather than his two previous operas. No one noted that Rattle, great musician though he is, has previously revealed an imperfect operatic judgment by conducting a number of productions to which public and critical reaction has not equalled his own enthusiasm for the staging.
Sophie's Choice ultimately, however, founders on gaping disparities between subject, score and production. It raises issues that take us into territory where music and theatre struggle to cope. William Styron's novel deals, on one level, with the passage to adulthood of Stingo, a writer, in the years following the second world war. On another level, however, the novel confronts the legacy of the 20th century's greatest catastrophe. Sophie, who brings about Stingo's erotic initiation, is a Pole who survived Auschwitz at the most appalling price, and is subsequently involved in a fatal relationship with Nathan, a dazzling but schizophrenic Jewish intellectual. Styron's major themes are the nature of survival, the guilt of the survivor and the impingement of past on present.
Maw fashioned the libretto himself, drawing on the novel's dialogue, and claiming that what he presents us with is "basically Styron's text". In fact, what he has produced is a series of verbose scenes that lose sight of the novel's emotional trajectory. By jettisoning all of Styron's details about Stingo's youthful lustfulness, he crucially fails to establish the fact that Stingo fancies Sophie until the third of the opera's four acts, which blurs both the work's narrative and its dramatic resolution.
The score, meanwhile, exposes Maw's failure to find a corresponding musical language. The subject allows him to peer back over the postwar serialists he distrusts and to allude to late Romanticism, interwar expressionism and the American tonalists. Stingo's music resembles Samuel Barber's Knoxville. There are whiffs of Berg and Schoenberg, composers the Nazis suppressed. And to attempt to convey the impact of the Holocaust, Maw drags a barrage of post-Romantic effects into play. He builds up to the terrible choice Sophie must make to survive Auschwitz with a meandering cor anglais over tremolo strings that echoes the Day of Judgment sequences from Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. The choice once made, there is a massive peroration that slowly calms itself like the recognition scene from Strauss's Elektra.
Unfortunately, such effects form the kernel of the opera's musical language throughout. Several reviewers have commented that there is no musical differentiation between Sophie's experiences in Auschwitz and New York. There is also little sense of the musical encapsulation of the characters' psychological development.
Nunn's contribution, meanwhile, is similarly suspect. He is strong when it comes to conveying the pressure of past on present. As Nathan and Stingo chat about literature, the set rears upwards to reveal a library beneath, where Sophie and her anti-semitic father are discussing "the Jewish question". Later, the room in Auschwitz, where the Commandant assaults Sophie, lurches round to reveal the New York bar where Nathan denounces her as a whore.
Aesthetic re-creations of the Holocaust, however, can be deeply problematic. This is certainly the case here. As cattle trucks trundle across the stage we are being asked to admire a stunt, as well as to contemplate horror.
The implications of the work's failure are inevitably awkward. As its stands, the opera is unworthy of revival. More importantly, it raises questions about the future of new mainstream opera in Britain. The Royal Opera sank a small fortune of its own and sponsors' money into the project, which cost around £100,000 for each of its five performances plus one schools' matinee - that's twice the cost of an average new production at Covent Garden. Though the Royal Opera has plans for works by Adès and Birtwistle, one is left wondering whether sponsorship money will be forthcoming for future premieres on such a colossal scale. Who, after all, would want to invest in a flop? Can creating this level of expectation really further the cause of new opera?
