Brutalit and Bathos in Sante Fe

By Michael Walsh

Hans Werner Henze's opera We Come to the River is stunning

It is an astonishing theatrical tour de force, sprawling across three stages and accompanied by three orchestras. The essentially atonal score nevertheless embraces a variety of styles, including a show-stopping military march. The libretto is one of the harshest antiwar tracts in all of opera, a soldier's tale of unrelieved brutality that opens in a battlefield slaughterhouse and ends with violent death in a madhouse.

Technically dazzling, emotionally searing, although ideologically bathetic, Hans Werner Henze's We Come to the River has just been given its American premiere by the Santa Fe Opera, eight years after its first performance in London. It was a welcome event: the prolific German-born Marxist composer, 58, has created one of the postwar period's most accomplished operas.

We Come to the River is set to an original text by British Playwright Edward Bond. The principal themes--the evils of fascism and the brotherhood of the masses--are ones that Henze has previously explored in such vocal works as the Essay on Pigs (1968) and El Cimarron (1969-70), written in Cuba. "New museums, opera houses and premieres are not necessary," Henze declared in 1967. "What is necessary is. . . the greatest work of art of mankind: the world revolution."

Brave words, if not wise ones. But Henze, a sybaritic socialist with a well-developed taste for capitalist pleasures, has never let politics stand in the way of artistic success. He excoriates the Nazis, the treatment of blacks in the South and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima, while overlooking such evils as Stalin's Gulag. Yet the opera's blinkered world view is secondary to its musical and dramatic substance--for the audience and, perhaps, for the composer as well.

The setting is an imaginary empire. An abortive revolution has been quelled by the General (Baritone Victor Braun). A deserter is executed; later, his wife and her mother, who have been looting corpses in order to survive, are also shot. Sickened by the carnage, the General turncoats and is imprisoned in an insane asylum. There the inhabitants obsessively recite litanies of violence as they tear their hair and rend their clothes. When the General once again refuses an order to take the field on behalf of king and country, his eyes are put out. Images of his victims appear before the blinded General; frightened, the asylum's inmates kill him, while ghosts of the liberated dead sing a hymn to the revolution: "We stand by the river./ If the water is deep we will swim./ If it is too fast we will build boats./ We will stand on the other side./ We have learned to march so well/ That we cannot drown."

What could have easily been a dreary political harangue, however, emerges instead as an object lesson in how to organize a vast musical canvas. With his split-level stages, Henze takes maximum advantage of opera's unique capacity to present several ongoing comprehensible tableaux simultaneously, and he characterizes each of the principals with distinctive motives and timbres. Thus the agonized atonality of the General's music contrasts sharply with the perfumed, quasi-Orientalism of the Emperor's, which is tinged with bells and gongs; an arioso for the sensitive Soldier 2 (Tenor James Atherton), who assassinates the Governor out of desperation, is sung to a delicate guitar obbligato.

We Come to the River is an opera that owes much, both musically and dramatically, to such 20th century masterworks as Alban Berg's Wozzeck and Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten. Henze's acknowledgment of his sources is evidenced not only by the military theme but by the multistage concept, which is inspired by Die Soldaten. The figure of a doctor who spouts dubious medical theories is derived from the sadistic quack who torments Wozzeck, and near the end of Part I, Henze quotes the Berg opera's drowning motive as the deserter's mother-in-law, mortally wounded, sinks in the river.

The Santa Fe production, directed economically and forcefully by Alfred Kirchner, is a triumph, with strong performances by an enormous cast (111 roles in all) that sings well and, crucially, projects the English words clearly. The three orchestras, encompassing more than 120 instruments, are conducted with authority by Dennis Russell Davies. Formerly of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Davies, 40, has won an impressive reputation in Europe as a modern-music conductor, largely through his adventurous programming at the Stuttgart Opera.

Henze's grim fable is not the only fillip for jaded operatic appetites in the New Mexican highlands this summer. A double bill of Alexander von Zemlinsky's Eine Florentinische Tragoedie (1917) and Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Violanta (1916) presents a pair of pseudo-Straussian potboilers, the former by Arnold Schoenberg's brother-in-law and the latter by a Viennese-bred Wunderkind who later became a Hollywood composer best known for his brassy scores for such films as Anthony Adverse and The Adventures of Robin Hood. Each work concerns a fatal love triangle in Renaissance Italy--in Florence, the interloping lover is killed, while in the Venice of Violanta it is the wife--and each partakes generously of the lustful, late Romantic idiom perfected by Strauss in Salome.

Although the Korngold offers his typically brilliant orchestration and a meaty tenor aria, neither piece is likely to enter the permanent repertory. Nor, for that matter, is Henze's opera, given the odds against new works. But institutions have a duty to expose listeners to the unfamiliar. The Santa Fe Opera, long in the forefront of such experimentation, is doing just that. --By Michael Walsh