Being noble may not be 'Sophie's' best choice

James Chatham and Angelika Kirchschlager star in "Sophie's Choice" at the Washington National Opera. (Washington National Opera Photo)

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON | Newsday Staff Writer

September 25, 2006

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Maybe I missed the memo - the policy directive stating that the most effective strategy to achieve new English-language opera is to base it on a classic play or novel, preferably one that has already acquired a definitive film version. Composers received the message, though, and the American Lit school of opera has developed a syllabus of its own: Tobias Picker's "American Tragedy," John Harbison's "The Great Gatsby," Andre Previn's "A Streetcar Named Desire," William Bolcom's "A View From the Bridge," Mark Adamo's "Little Women," Ned Rorem's "Our Town."

The latest addition to this list is a finely crafted "Sophie's Choice," by Nicholas Maw, which had its spirited U.S. premiere at Washington National Opera on Thursday.

Maw is British, but he has embraced the stratagems of his American colleagues: a mix of lyricism and expressionistic tension and tonal harmonies acidified by conversational rhythms, so that the characters discuss a trip to Coney Island in a kind of Yankee recitative.

The orchestra provides the CliffsNotes, commenting on recurring themes and highlighting currents of unstated anxiety. The trumpets keep interjecting nervous little outbursts, as if worried that the audience might miss a significant moment (or that the passages are dangerously quick and high).

William Styron's novel, about the Holocaust's aftershocks shuddering through postwar Brooklyn, is full of seductions for an opera composer: jealous furies, shameful secrets, depraved villains, moral confusion - themes that would make any latter-day Verdi start sharpening pencils. Nathan even has a mad scene of the sort usually reserved for long-tressed ladies in nightgowns.

Maw resisted the temptation to pass this intricate novel through the food mill of opera and reduce it to a handful of genre scenes. Perhaps it would have been better if he had. Instead, "Sophie's Choice" is so shellacked in seriousness and stiffened by noble intentions that it hardly moves. In Maw's hands, Sophie - the Meryl Streep role, sung by the excellent Angelika Kirschlager - has no core. I do not mean that her confrontations with evil have left her only partly human, as she says. Rather, the character is no more than the sum of her soliloquies. We need to understand that Sophie loves crazy Nathan because she, too, has a damaged soul. Instead, we see her stagger and clutch her breast like any Donizetti diva, and the score blasts her inner architecture of guilt, evasiveness, delight and gloom into a generic pile of pain.

Rod Gilfry sang Nathan Landau, and it is hard to know whether a more natural comedian would have done justice to the character, or whether Maw simply didn't provide him with the tools. In Styron's book - and in Kevin Kline's movie incarnation - Nathan is the life and doom of the party, the irresistible personality throwing off sparks of hilarity and fear. Onstage, he became much less, an unpredictable bully with a beautiful baritone.

Maw's technique as a composer takes this piece a long way toward success; his earnestness and reverence for the Styron novel hold it back. The opera, like the book, is framed by a first-person narration, affectingly sung by Dale Duesing. Novelists have more need and leisure for such things, though. In opera, the climactic spasms of violence or love should be followed by a curtain, not by lessons or reflections. The music takes care of the narration, if its voice is strong enough.

SOPHIE'S CHOICE. By Nicholas Maw. Attended Thursday night, Washington National Opera. Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. Directed by Markus Bothe. Conducted by Marin Alsop. Repeated Sept. 27, 30, Oct. 5 and 9. 202-295-2400; dc-opera.org.

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