Читать книгу The Collins Guide To Opera And Operetta - Michael White - Страница 27
ОглавлениеFORM: Opera in one act; in English
COMPOSER: Leonard Bernstein (1918–90)
LIBRETTO: Stephen Wadsworth
FIRST PERFORMANCE: Milan, 17 June 1983
Principal Characters
Sam, the father Baritone
Sam Junior, his son Baritone
Dede, Sam’s daughter Soprano
François, Dede’s husband Tenor
Synopsis of the Plot
Setting: Contemporary America
The funeral of Sam’s wife, Dinah, killed in a car crash, brings together the estranged members of her family: Sam Junior, his sister and her husband, François, who at one time was Sam Junior’s lover. Underlying tensions quickly surface and Junior’s mental instability becomes apparent. In the evening the four recall the history of their relationships with each other and with their dead mother. The next morning, after breakfast and games in the garden (the ‘quiet place’), they find that their hostility has given way to reconciliation.
Music and Background
The operatic equivalent of a Russian doll, A Quiet Place is actually one piece inside another: most of the middle act is the self-contained Trouble in Tahiti written thirty years earlier, and its music sounds markedly different to what comes before and after. The Tahiti sections are in lyrical, near-Broadway style, with sardonic contributions from a 1950s close-harmony trio who hymn the idealised joys of suburban life while the suburban characters, Dinah and Sam, demonstrate the bleak realities. The surrounding sections are musically more complex, less direct and less memorable – although Bernstein’s sense of melody is always there, not far below the surface.
Highlights
Almost all the best writing comes in the middle, Tahiti act, climaxing in a virtuoso comic monologue for Dinah, ‘Island Magic’, that would be pure Broadway but for its rhythmic complications, and finishing on a soaring, seriously dramatic duet, ‘Is there a day or a night?’, which is Bernstein at his soul-searing best.
Did You Know?
Bernstein wrote the libretto for Trouble in Tahiti himself, and the story is based on his own childhood memories, incorporating a peculiarly unflattering portrait of his parents.
Recommended Recording
Chester Ludgin, Beverly Morgan, Wendy White, Edward Crafts, Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Leonard Bernstein. DG 419 761-1/2. The only one, recorded live at the Vienna Staatsoper.
