On April 30, The Dallas Opera presents the world premiere of Moby-Dick by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer, based on Herman Melville's iconic American novel of 1851. Tenor Ben Heppner stars as Captain Ahab. Jake Heggie has said that Melville's book is not only operatic in scope: music virtually rises from its pages. "There is so much music with the sea and the wind and that sort of universe that Melville created, the ship floating on the ocean just as the planet floats on the universe. There were bells on the whaling ships, the whales themselves made very percussive noises." As he and Scheer worked to distill a huge, classic book into a two-act, three-hour operatic story, the composer felt "the musical world reveal itself" with grand orchestration and a 40-voice men's chorus.
Sounds very promising. La mer agité becomes la mère agité and gives birth hopefully to a new Venus firing our imagination. I agree, the orchestra is a good equivalent of the sea, and one can hear behind its waves the whale circling around Ahab.
ReplyDeleteMoby Dick in Dallas? Why not in Friedrichstadtpalast (Berlin) with that strange aquarium?
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