TY - JOUR
AU - Livingston, Cecilia
AB - A Trip to the Moon (An Opera for All Ages) London, Barbican Hall Composer: Andrew Norman Libretto: Andrew Norman World premiere: June 17, 2017 Production premiere: July 9, 2017 Production direction: Karen Gillingham Musical director/conductor: Sir Simon Rattle London Symphony Orchestra, Guildhall School Musicians, LSO Discovery Choirs, LSO Community Choir (Simon Halsey choral director; Lucy Griffiths LSO Discovery Choir conductor; David Lawrence LSO Discovery Choir and LSO Community Choir conductor) Georges: Robert Murray Queen: Iwona Sobotka Eoa: Sophia Burgos For better or worse, there are certain ways one is supposed to behave at the opera. We’ve all craned our necks for better views around the tall-torsoed and the huge-haired, but standing up is not the accepted solution. Yet when the seven-year-old in front of me leapt to his feet, up on his seat, to see what the Moon-people were doing as the Moon-Monster approached, I couldn’t help grinning. Andrew Norman’s A Trip to the Moon (cheerfully subtitled “An Opera for All Ages”) has both charmed and frustrated its reviewers, but at that moment, charm won—decisively. Norman’s first opera had its London premiere at the Barbican on July 9, 2017, as the first half (roughly one hour) of a double-bill with Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2. A Trip to the Moon is the third in a set of children’s operas (each featuring a monster) commissioned by Sir Simon Rattle, Simon Halsey, and the London Symphony Orchestra. (The previous commissions are Jonathan Dove’s 2015 The Monster in the Maze and the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s 2016 The Hogboon.) The Los Angeles-based Norman (b. 1979)—currently a darling of the contemporary music scene—was jointly commissioned by the LSO and the Los Angeles and Berlin Philharmonics; the LSO’s was the second of three international premieres, in a strikingly different production from that of its Berlin premiere a month earlier. (I will focus on the London Barbican production, referring to the Berlin production for comparison, as the latter is currently available through the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Digital Concert Hall.1) According to the LSO, “A Trip to the Moon was designed to showcase our community and education programmes and for musicians of different musical standards to perform together.”2 The London production involved student players from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the LSO’s Discovery and Community Choirs; the importance of young people and community effort were clear priorities for Norman, in both the opera’s dramatic and musical material. Norman wrote his own libretto, using “as a starting point” Georges Méliès’s 1902 silent short film Le Voyage dans la lune, “at the suggestion of my friend and [children’s] author Brian Selznick.”3 Often touted as “the first science fiction film,”4 Méliès’s Voyage advanced cinematic technique, remains his best-known film, and is among the most famous of early silent shorts; certainly, the image of the moon-capsule landing in the anthropomorphized eye of the moon has become iconic. Méliès and his film have received a number of educational, kid-friendly treatments, from Around the World in 80 Days (1956) to the final episode of HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon (1998), to Selznick’s graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) and its adaptation by Martin Scorsese (Hugo, 2011). Norman has been candid about his own process of adaptation, shaping both music and story to create something that truly involves the community and children’s choirs the commission sought to include in its educational mission.5 Yet the resulting opera raises questions that go beyond what might seem a candy-colored and joyous celebration of inclusivity and tolerance: questions that, in this age of funding emphasis on educational outreach, are crucially important to the creation of new opera “for” children. Press reviews have not been kind to Norman’s first opera. Rebecca Schmid argues that A Trip to the Moon amounts to little more than “a piece of Gebrauchsmusik … in which the moral to be told, and the people involved to relay that message [young musicians] are elevated above a complex artistic statement,” concluding that “the work leaves an aftertaste of cliché.”6 Nick Breckenfield concurs that “the moral is rather glib”7: significant criticism, given that Norman describes his opera as “a simple, pointed parable, an allegory, a morality play, you might even say, about how we treat strangers.”8 Even the most positive reviews, e.g., Tim Ashley’s 4-out-of-5-star review in The Guardian, question whether the work is an opera at all, and draw attention to Norman’s lack of experience in vocal composition.9 Ashley points out that nothing is sung “until 15 minutes into the work … the opening scenes are more a play with incidental music than an opera,” accounting for more than a quarter of the runtime.10 Norman’s astronauts—a significant part of his principal cast—almost always speak their lines, what Anna Picard calls in The Times their “gurning, pun-tastic” dialogue.11 When there is singing, it is almost exclusively in “Moonish,” and Norman’s “vowel-heavy made-up language robs most of the singing of the possibility of more nuanced meaning,”12 much as David Allan observes in the New York Times that “voices, more often than not, are treated as just another instrument.”13 Allan goes further, though, suggesting that Norman’s opera founders on the very cultural concerns Norman hoped it could sensitively navigate. Describing A Trip to the Moon as “troubling” and “problematic,” Allan notes that “while several of Mr. Norman’s earlier, purely orchestral works have had a social, even political point … none have been so obvious, or so simplistic, as this,” which displays “an uncomfortable and surprising naïveté.”14 He summarizes: “The work features a group of explorers, setting out from imperial Europe and dressed in the robes of authority and progress, winning over the natives they encounter with their technological superiority. The Moon People—their music based around elemental fifths, scales and processes of call and response—dance an elaborate pantomime, a choreographed welcome under the gaze of their queen … but quickly turn into a mob when faced with the astronomers.”15 Allan concludes that the creators seem unaware of the work’s perilous “reliance on stale tropes of cross-cultural encounters,” and that, as a whole, Norman’s Trip simply “falls flat.”16 My purpose here is not to quarrel with these reviewers, but rather to give context and complexity to the concerns they raise by reconsidering the challenges Norman faced and how those shaped the decisions he made. Two questions might occur to those who know Méliès’s film, and I will explore both: first, how the opera can handle the elements of the film as film (and silent film in particular) that have made it canonical—that is, Méliès’s playful experiments with film technique; and second, how a very early twentieth-century cinematic satire of the nineteenth-century novels of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells can be approached in an opera for twenty-first-century children. This opens larger questions about what “children’s opera” and “community opera” can be; as community experience, Norman’s opera has value that has been overlooked in earlier reviews. In a recent article that has sparked much discussion among opera creators, critic Anne Midgette expresses her frustration with the trend of adapting film and television to create new opera. She argues that this invites a kind of laziness: The opera field continues an almost desperate search for stories that seem sufficiently operatic—only to shoehorn them into relatively crude melodramatic contours, like the librettist Mark Campbell, distilling Steve Jobs’s life into platitudes about creativity and redemption. Many new operas these days are based on films, novels, or the lives of real people like Jobs: “The Shining,” [also by Campbell], “Cold Mountain,” “The Manchurian Candidate” [Campbell again] and “Bel Canto” are among recent titles. But few of them seem to deliver the punch of the original… .17 Midgette is too shrewd to suggest that these operas are failures merely because they fail to represent their original materials faithfully. Rather, frantic to “tell stories” too, such operas fail to live up to their originals because they are, in her opinion, weak and poorly conceived operas. Whatever dramatic power or charm such stories might have had, strengthened in the way they are told through the contemporary techniques of film and television, is lost between an impoverished libretto and a trite score, banking instead on the story’s currency in popular culture to sell tickets. As adaptations, these operas do not acknowledge that the strength of such stories comes in their cinematic telling, and then do not explore the unique strengths of opera and its dramatic techniques to tell those stories in operatic ways. I would argue that Norman, however, seems to have recognized just this concern, and has sought operatic realization of what is unique to Méliès’s film as film, responding to that medium’s innovations in storytelling. This successful aspect of Norman’s adaptation has been overshadowed by other criticisms in earlier reviews. Norman’s opera opens with the first half of Méliès’s sixteen-minute film projected above the stage; here, Norman’s orchestral writing plays with our Mickey-Mousing expectations of silent film scores (the iconic rocket crash gets a delicious, satisfyingly predictable tam-tam hit) while establishing the timbrally colorful and rhythmically energetic musical language that buoys the rest of the opera. The increasing use of multimedia projection in opera—in new opera and new productions alike—should have made Norman’s decision to include half of Méliès’s Voyage less surprising than it seemed to some of his reviewers, and I would suggest that this eight-minute cinematic overture allowed Norman to approach this commission from his strengths as an orchestral composer.18 Norman is known for his canny ear for orchestral textures and his lively use of extended instrumental techniques to create unusual timbres in large ensembles. There are many ravishing and exciting orchestral colors in the opera—and plenty of novelty: Boomwhackers for the Moon-kids and whirlies for the Moon-adults. (I made a note of the lovely interaction of Boomwhacker-on-floor and pizzicato in the low strings.) Norman’s ability to pace a long crescendo to a climax through variations in orchestral texture is impressive and gives dramatic drive to the opening and rocket-launch sequences of the film. Throughout the opera, Norman’s music adds a layer of joy, bringing to the ear the technical wonder of Méliès’s film-making—its sly surprises, crafty in every sense—as Norman finds musical analogues for the transitional dissolves, substitution splicing, and special effects that Méliès pioneered, even after the film gives way to on-stage action. Indeed, even David Allan, so alarmed by the opera as a whole, admits that this cinematic “prologue, narrating in sound the rocket’s launch, is some of [Norman’s] most alluring writing,” though whether he means “in this opera” or “in Norman’s career” is unclear, and rightly so. At the Barbican, the LSO played at the back of the stage, partially hidden behind the projection-screen; in Berlin, the film was projected above the stage. (In Berlin, the opera was the dream of an exhausted teacher, who takes some students to a screening of Méliès’s film, and then falls asleep. This establishes a particular species of dramatic frame: an oneiric frame, in which the ensuing action is “all a dream.” The teacher participates in the dream-action as “Georges,” alluding to Georges Méliès’s acting role in his own film. After Méliès’s astronomers-turned-astronauts land on the moon, they emerge from their rocket onto Norman’s stage, guided by his sprightly marching music;19 the film stops, and the stage action continues.) In the extraordinarily successful Play (2013), and his percussion concerto Switch (2015), Norman finds musical analogues for film editing techniques and exploits the structuring of film and video game music. Here, the switch from screen to stage—Norman’s clever cinematic-to-operatic substitution-splice—echoes the sudden disappearance of the spaceship in the film and is exactly the sort of engaging musical analogy we have come to expect from the composer of Play. And there is a clear expectation that these arriving astronauts (whose pseudo-Victorian, Disney-esque costumes, regimented silly-walks, and brandished umbrellas suggest that something comic this way comes) are about to burst into song, and that the opera will, at last, begin in earnest. It doesn’t, and they don’t. Instead, the astronauts speak their banter (in German in Berlin; in English in London) over a sort of quasi-recitative accompaniment in the piano. Scored in the actor’s speaking ranges, the piano’s percussive attacks drowned out their consonants, rendering many of the spoken lines inaudible despite the actor’s microphones. In this first, wholly spoken scene, Norman’s Trip begins to diverge from Méliès’s Voyage as the astronauts explore the apparently uninhabited lunar surface. This sequence in the film (following the substitution-splice disappearance of the spaceship) lasts about ten seconds. Instead of Méliès’s economical satire of “Incoherent Astronomy” (I discuss Méliès’s satire below), Norman gives us seven minutes of verbal and physical clowning. When Norman’s astronauts do talk astronomy, they speak simple, educational sense rather than satirical nonsense. Their debate about how they want to be immortalized in film offers a little wink-wink-nudge-nudge for the parents in the audience with lines like “one small step,” but, while humorous, this is far from Méliès’s satirical purpose. At more than a tenth of the opera’s runtime, Norman places significant emphasis on this scene—far more, in proportion, than Méliès does in his film. The question, then, is how this long, spoken scene advances the opera, musically and/or dramatically, while no one is singing. But Norman’s puzzling deferral of the singing voice, first in a silent film score, then in “a play with incidental music,”20 has operatic purpose. These seven minutes of speech establish, in the diegetic world of Norman’s stage, the earthly norm of the spoken word, excluding (and implicitly in opposition to) singing. As they do in Méliès’s Voyage, Norman’s astronauts suddenly fall asleep, although in the film this is preceded by an explosive off-gassing from the lunar surface, which suggests that the astronauts may, in fact, have been at least partially intoxicated or asphyxiated. As Méliès’s astronauts sleep, they are treated to visions of more satirically incoherent astronomy (nonsensical Earth-rise, and so on); in Norman’s opera, our lunar protagonist enters: the Moon-maiden Eoa, to sing at long last.21 The orchestration around the long-expected singing voice creates a shimmering and mysterious halo (plenty of vibraphone and clarinet) that builds a pragmatic pitch scaffolding for the singer. This also creates a sonic intimacy that draws the ear as it tries to parse voice from instrument, free, of course, from the need to parse voice-as-language, since Eoa sings in mellifluous, un-Surtitled Moonish—Norman’s “lunar language,” built almost entirely of vowels.22 Eoa encounters “Georges” and they try to communicate, building trust, sharing language. Georges joins in duet, imitating her song, and Norman’s operatic conceit rings out clear as a bell: this Moon-language is sung, so within Norman’s opera, singing is Moonish.23 While Georges and Eoa do go on to sing a few snippets of things in English (or German in Berlin) as part of their language exchange, the majority of the singing is in Moonish. After Eoa’s introduction of a singing voice, Norman’s opera proceeds as a romance of mutual trust. Despite some initial wariness, successfully negotiated by Eoa and Georges, the Moon-people celebrate their Earth-guests in an elaborate welcoming dance. They then tell the astronauts a story about a monster who steals their children; the Monster shows up to do just that, and the Moon-people turn accusatorily upon the astronomers, who are unable to escape because of damage to their spaceship during landing. In Berlin, the climax-delivering Moon-Monster was an ominous cloud of fog, soon dispelled by the flapping of the astronauts’ umbrellas, recalling the puffs of smoke into which Méliès’s Selenite Moon-people vanished by substitution-splice when struck with umbrellas and boots. At the Barbican, the Monster was an impressive, red-eyed assemblage of wooden sticks and black fabric, which was (in a moment of genuinely inspired charm) apparently afraid of the astronauts’ similarly structured stick umbrellas, and so driven off. Norman’s Monster thus functions as a rather convenient diabolus ex machina: a dramatic contrivance designed to provide the astronauts and Moon-people with a suitably common enemy, much as the damage to the rocket is a convenience for further cooperation. Yet this sort of cliché is recognizable and definable as such precisely on the basis of a long experience of drama—the very thing most children haven’t got. That is to say: this kind of dramatic cliché is something that children’s art can get away with, at the rather modest risk of annoying those more experienced and jaded members of its audience who have seen it all before.24 With the Monster defeated, the Moon-child is retrieved and returned (uninjured, much to the disappointment of the small boy in front of me at the Barbican), and the Moon-people help the Earth-people repair their rocket for the return journey using their sacred stick-Boomwhackers, which they then present to the astronauts. Finally, despite their blossoming romance, Georges and Eoa each declines the invitation to join the other. Georges attempts to, well, tempt Eoa to come with him, by arguing that “the people of Earth need help,” but like Pocahontas, she refuses; crucially, no Moon-person accompanies the astronauts home for earthly display, as one does in Méliès’s film. The spaceship departs for Earth as Eoa sings the pronouns she learned from Georges: “I … You … Us… .”25 As the spaceship departs, Norman seems to return to Méliès’s film: images apparently showing the continuation of the film return to the projection screen, and Méliès’s concluding titles are shown as the music concludes. But I emphasize “appears,” because Norman’s opera leaves out a significant part of Méliès’s film: the return to Earth and the display of the captured Selenite, the absence of which points directly to the concerns about colonial tropes raised by David Allan. Though Méliès’s film is often proclaimed as the first science fiction film (as it is in the marketing of Norman’s Trip), it is actually a satiric parody of more earnestly fanciful nineteenth-century science fiction. The status of Méliès’s Voyage as satire is widely acknowledged,26 including the landing page for the print of the film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which begins by stating bluntly that, “A Trip to the Moon is a satire.”27 Diverging from Méliès’s story, and amplified by adding the Monster, Norman pushes his narrative back to a highly conventional colonial one—the very thing he seemed to be trying to avoid in removing Méliès’s satire of colonial interaction. David Allan has grounds to criticize Norman’s opera for its uncritical repetition of colonialist tropes. I was immediately concerned by the romanticization of “other” that Norman’s reservation of singing for Eoa and the Moon-people implied. That Georges only begins to sing when he encounters the exotic and mysterious maiden only reinforces this trope. We learn no more about the Monster (and if the opera really is a parable about language and learning, why make its dramatic peak the joined forces fighting a monster that no one bothers to understand?). Instead, we have the clichés of hesitant/suspicious gift exchange, the pidgin English (“Monster come. Monster take”), “Native” chanting and song, kidnap of an indigenous child, capture of colonial explorers, the arming of the indigenous with colonial weapons (the umbrella being a particular symbol of official colonial authority28), magic language transference, romance between indigenous maiden and explorer, the National Geographic documentarian Georges, his peering prop-camera at the ready, and so on. Such uncomfortable depictions of colonial tropes and a problematic engagement with indigenous populations have appeared in many works of children’s literature and adaptations thereof. American children’s art has certainly perpetuated this: both Disney’s Pocahontas and Peter Pan come readily to mind. But where Méliès criticized such tropes through satire, Norman accidentally reaffirms them. Méliès’s satire reduces the Incoherent Astronomers to a vicious absurdity by making clear how wantonly these pseudo-scientists abuse and victimize the Selenites. This mistreatment of Méliès’s lunar indigenous is the very aspect of the film that has been all-but-systematically removed from popular American representations of Le Voyage dans la lune, either by redacting the Selenites entirely or by editing their interactions with the astronomers to make the indigenous as barbaric and alien as possible—“funny and strange” antagonists to be defeated and exhibited for amusement. In American cinematic representations of Méliès’s film, the Selenites are either dehumanized or deleted altogether (or, in Norman’s case, deleted and replaced by “Moon-people” and “Moon-Monsters”), shifting the astronomers from targets of anti-colonial satire to earnest explorers confronting strange beasts. Ever since the 1905 appearance of Méliès’s film in New York,29 there seems to have been a particular fixation on the simile of Méliès as a fanciful pioneer in film, as his astronauts are mistaken to be merry explorers of the moon. This account of Méliès as an earnest purveyor of cheerful science fiction is listed by Elizabeth Ezra as having primacy among the common and most easily discredited “myths” about Méliès: that he “primarily made fairy tales and fantasies, characterized by their childlike naïveté.”30 The documented reality of Méliès as a satirist, she points out, is the very antithesis of this view, which might best be called the naïve reading of Méliès’s Voyage. A significant early popular culture depiction of Méliès and his film that omits or marginalizes the lunar indigenous is Disney’s 1955 animated short “Man in Space.” It shows Méliès’s film, conflates it with Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and other lunar narratives, and identifies it as an adaptation of Verne rather than a satire of Verne; the Disney short omits the Selenites completely (and this recasts the Incoherent Astronomers as innocent explorers, with no indigenous to victimize). Disney’s “Man on the Moon” (later in 1955) synopsizes several depictions of lunar society in literature but omits Méliès and his Selenites entirely. A year later, in the introduction to the film Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Edward R. Murrow claims that Verne “wrote a book, called From the Earth to the Moon, and … that authentic genius, Georges Mélée [sic] turned it into a movie … [a] fantasy.”31 Murrow proceeds to state that what will follow is “the actual film, as Mélée [sic] recorded it, at the turn of the century.” Yet what Around the World presents is the twelve-minute Leroy print edited down to a mere three-and-a-half minutes without the ending that confirms its unmistakable satire, according to Matthew Solomon.32 And more recently, HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon (1998) includes the Selenites only as “savage” attackers, and ennobles Méliès’s colonial explorers by comparing them to the Apollo astronauts.33 This myth of Méliès as naïve fantasist, supported by rewriting his depiction of the treatment of the Selenites by the astronauts, is the very one we find repeated by Norman’s friend and inspiration, Brian Selznick, in his 2007 children’s graphic novel The Adventures of Huge Cabret: its jolly attitude toward colonial exploration also makes it fundamentally incompatible with Méliès’s satire of colonialism. In an interview conducted with his publisher, Scholastic, Selznick describes Méliès’s Voyage as “funny and beautiful and strange”;34 similarly, Norman calls the film “whimsical and fun and strange.”35 Selznick and Norman both refer to Méliès’s Voyage as the first science fiction movie, bringing it into line with Verne and Wells rather than recognizing it as a satire of their work: in his website for Hugo Cabret, Selznick repeats the claim that the film is “the world’s first science fiction movie,” describing it as “really magical and strange.”36 On the site, Selznick links to a YouTube copy of the music video for The Smashing Pumpkins’s “Tonight, Tonight” (in large part an homage to Méliès’s film) in which aggressive, Selenite-looking creatures on the moon capture a couple in Victorian dress, who battle the creatures with umbrellas. John Logan’s screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film Hugo, an adaptation of Selznick’s Hugo Cabret, includes a scene in which the characters watch a version of Méliès’s film. In his description of Méliès’s film in the screenplay, Logan represents the indigenous as merely alien beings to be conquered, excising any hint of Méliès’s anti-colonial satire: the murders of Selenites, the court of the Selenites, and the captive Selenite back on Earth are nowhere to be seen—and, as the editing suggests, not there at all. Scorsese did later restore the triumphal parade around the satirical statue of the astronaut Professor Barbenfouillis (played by Méliès in the original) to the version of Méliès’s film the characters watch, but leaves out the captive Selenite. As the characters watch the film, they smile, murmur approval, whisper “beautiful,” and gaze wistfully at the screen and one another. In a tradition of adaptation that sets the stage for Norman’s approach, all is sincere; there is not a hint of satire to be found. Reviewing Norman’s A Trip to the Moon in The Times, Anna Picard wrote that, “if the children of Greenwich and Lewisham are allowed to perform Verdi and Massenet with Blackheath Halls Opera with no dilution, no babying, surely these children can do the same.”37 Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler’s notoriously sanitized adaptations of Shakespeare for children (and for ladies) shadow this established American tradition of desatirizing Méliès, and also shadow the very concept of opera for children; like The Family Shakespeare promised to be, does an “Opera for All Ages” need to be safe? There are well-established approaches to children’s opera: canonical (comedic) works, with bright costumes and considerable editing: my own first memory of opera is of falling asleep during The Magic Flute. Then there are the didactic works, easy to market to schools: operas “about” issues like bullying, mental health, history, and so on (an approach that has driven several recent commissions for adult audiences as well). The belief that the stage can, in and of itself, be a force for social good is likely as old as the stage itself; as Gilbert Murray famously observed, “Greek tragedies were introduced into Rome not on artistic but on superstitious grounds, as a katharmos against a pestilence.”38 Considering an opera in terms of its social influence risks reducing it to something like a very expensive, arduous, and un-portable Public Service Announcement that is neither cost-effective nor sustainable. But as opera companies seek new audiences through family presentations (and productions involving lots of children assumedly bring family-member audiences), and have to justify taxpayer and foundation funding by demonstrating educational value and outreach, social utility can be an appealingly succinct answer, though it glosses over a deeper question of audience. Thomas Bowdler eventually admitted that the Bowdler editions were “for” the adult men who read them aloud to their families: it was the prudish performer-presenter whose sense of propriety Bowdler appealed to.39 Ultimately, it is the parents who bring the children to the opera and who, if they are offended, do not bring them back. (And it is adults on opera company committees who worry about audience retention.) But Bowdler’s expurgations have been defended with the argument that he brought Shakespeare to young people, and that he fostered an early love of that literature that invited later adult engagement.40 Censorship and moralization are often conflated. Reflecting on his childhood intake of the moralistic novels of Horatio Alger Jr., literary critic Northrop Frye suggested that the moralizing around children’s literature cuts both ways: we are at once too quick to demand that art should try to inculcate certain values, and too quick to believe that it might suggest values to which we object. Children will probably enjoy the stories all the same, and will be neither bereft of moral instruction nor ruined by moral corruption.41 As one of the triumvirate commissioned for these LSO children’s operas, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies wrote: “Bearing in mind the involvement of children and students, I have not written down to them with any condescension—rather—I have written up, knowing, from long experience, that, taken absolutely seriously, children and students are wickedly perceptive, and not to be taken for granted. I have attempted to make the masque work on several levels, of interest to adults, students and children.”42 Certainly, opera for children (and their adults, because that is what “an opera for all ages” is, really) usually needs to be somewhat shorter and simpler, especially if the children are performing, but it is helpful to remember that what children find interesting is not necessarily what adults think is appropriate: simple need not be simplistic. Most children are quick to distinguish between a pet and a prisoner, that one has agency and the other does not; why not engage with the issue on stage? Why not let them see Méliès’s captured Selenite get its comeuppance as it is paraded on Earth, and vice versa, when Méliès’s astronauts are hauled up before the Moonish court? I note that this series of commissions was inspired by Benjamin Britten’s legacy as a composer of children’s opera,43 and that circumstance juxtaposes these commissions with Britten’s works: their endurance, as well as his mastery of emotional subtlety and ambiguity. Peter Grimes shows scenes of what could be described as “bullying”; the opera suggests ethical and moral questions, yet does not moralize. Can children’s opera engage the moral imagination in this more complex way? Should it? At the level of story, Norman’s A Trip to the Moon veers toward the didactic, and in an earnest effort to be wholesome it runs into more complex issues. Like Thomas Bowdler’s irony of audience (The Family Shakespeare being really The Squeamish Parent’s Shakespeare), Norman’s irony is a disjunction between what he says he wanted to do and what he actually did. A Trip to the Moon has been criticized for being a bit maxim-heavy, and there were some cringe-worthy moments.44 Certainly, Norman’s opera can be placed somewhere among the traditions of opéra féerie and Märchenoper: as Norman says, it seeks to teach tolerance of the “other.”45 But understood in the context of a longer American tradition of desatirizing Méliès, the suggestion that Norman is “babying” us misses a broader point, that if the parameters of a “children’s” commission seem to require a sort of usefulness—well, there’s opera to inform and opera to perform. The combined orchestra of LSO members and Guildhall students gave a polished, vigorous performance, the choirs were enthusiastic, and the adult singers and actors were excellent. Robert Murray (Georges) was in beautiful voice, and Sophia Burgos (Eoa) created extraordinary moments of ethereal Moonlit magic, her voice gleaming and shimmering through Norman’s orchestral textures. Stage director Karen Gillingham and designer Sean Turner made clever use of the semi-staged constraint; the orchestra used the back of the stage, under and behind the projection screen, while the cast and chorus used the side aisles as wings, and moved though the audience during the lengthy lament-chorus for the missing child. The latter was an ingenious decision that let the audience appreciate up-close Norman’s use of whirlies to create gentle drone-textures: it was clear that many of the audience had never heard these unconventional instruments before and were fascinated to hear them close up as the taller (adult) choristers swung them overhead. Norman has made a name for himself with pieces that make explicit the interactions of instrumental performance (e.g., physicality of performance gesture; an ensemble as community; orchestra as hierarchy—features of both Play and Switch),46 and this compositional thinking helped him here. The use of controlled aleatory and of simple motivic material (like the Moon-children’s Boomwhacker scale and the four-note Moonish call that begins with a rising fifth) helps amateur performers negotiate a new work, and the latter also helps audiences following the Moonish discussions. (Without Surtitles, we experience Moonish like the Earth-people: the point is clear.) Easily followed motivic materials also allowed Norman some fun: the missing Moon-child’s Boomwhacker is, of course, the missing tonic of the oft-repeated Moon-children’s Boomwhacker scale figure. (Rarely are tonics greeted with such amused satisfaction by audience members of all ages!) The excited chattering of the children leaving the theater, humming the choral motives and trying out their Moonish on one another; the young fellow in front of me, jumping to his feet; the suddenly bashful bows of the children on stage: these all draw the critical ear and eye past the opera’s more calculated and more troubling aspects. There were weak moments, when the beauty and skill of the music struggled to carry the work: the lament-chorus for the kidnapped Moon-child was sentimental, yes. But at the very moment I was resisting the musical beauty of that lovely passage (just as, cantankerously, I was resisting the cheerful energy of the rather prolonged celebration chorus near the end), I relaxed, because what mattered was that the children on stage were having fun. In fact, most of the children in the hall were on the stage, not in the audience, and thus for them the real experience was not about Selenites, or astronauts, the obscurantism of literary satire, or old silent films: it was about putting on a show. That is the thing that sticks, that adults remember when they buy tickets, when they become subscribers, when they pay their taxes, when they sign up their kids for choir, and that is where the heart of Norman’s Trip to the Moon rests: it is about community, in that way—not because magic sticks are exchanged, or Moonish pronouns are translated by one singer or another. The excitement, the glorious self-importance, and shared delight of each person on that stage is the real lesson in community. And you could tell—it was relished. Notes Cecilia Livingston is a Visiting Research Fellow in Music at King’s College London. A composer known across Canada and the United States for intensely dramatic chamber and vocal music, she is a 2015–2017 composition Fellow at American Opera Projects in New York. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Tempo and the Cambridge Opera Journal, and her research and creative work have been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Theodoros Mirkopoulos Fellowship in Composition at the University of Toronto. 1 After registering for free, readers can stream video of the second Berlin performance of the piece (June 18, 2017) at www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/23519, accessed July 24, 2017. 2 Jo Johnson, “A Trip to the Moon in words and pictures,” London Symphony Orchestra blog, July 10, 2017, lso.co.uk/ more/blog/669-a-trip-to-the-moon-in-words-and-pictures.html, accessed July 11, 2017. 3 “A Trip to the Moon: Interview with Andrew Norman,” European American Music Distributors Company, www.eamdc.com/psny/greenroom/a-trip-to-the-moon-an-interview-with-andrew-norman/, accessed July 20, 2017. This interview, conducted and published by Norman’s music publisher, Schott/EAM, through their digital Project Schott New York platform (hereafter, EAMDC), has been quoted frequently in promotional materials for the Berlin, London, and Los Angeles productions, and beyond. 4 See, for example, the LSO’s program, Norman’s own remarks (Interview) and Selznick’s almost constant references. Moreover, the LSO premiere coincided with an exhibit at the Barbican called “Into the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction” (June 3–September 1, 2017). 5 EAMDC, “Interview.” 6 Rebecca Schmid, “A Trip To The Moon: Gift to Amateurs, Laced with Maxim,” Classical Voice America, June 20, 2017, www.classicalvoiceamerica.org/2017/06/20/trip-to-the-moon-gift-to-amateurs-laced-with-cliche/, accessed July 24, 2017. 7 Nick Breckenfield, “LSO/Simon Rattle – A Trip to the Moon & Sibelius 2,” Classical Source, www.classicalsource.com/ db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=14656, accessed August 4, 2017. 8 EAMDC, “Interview.” 9 Tim Ashley, “A Trip to the Moon review – majestic mystery in moonish,” The Guardian, July 10, 2017, www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jul/10/a-trip-to-the-moon-review-simon-rattle-lso-community-barbican, accessed July 24, 2017. Previously, Norman had written just two short works for voice: “Lullaby” (2007) and “Don’t Even Listen,” (2010) “a short song written for Gabriel Kahane.” (www.andrewnormanmusic.com/archives/category/music, accessed August 7, 2017). Norman writes in his notes for the former that, “I have not written much vocal music, and whenever I have tried it, I inevitably find that settling on a poetic text was by far the hardest of many hard parts.” 10 Ashley, “A Trip.” 11 Anna Picard, “Concert review: A Trip to the Moon at the Barbican,” The Times, July 11, 2017, www.thetimes.co.uk/ article/concert-review-a-trip-to-the-moon-at-the-barbican-t5cwktzfx, accessed July 24, 2017. “As to the work itself,” Picard writes, “oh dear.” She compares it slightingly to recent productions of Verdi and Massenet with young performers, and dismisses it as an exercise in “babying” that musically reduces “Mahler, Copland, and Jerry Goldsmith to an essence of starry violins, twinkling percussion and yearning trumpets, then appl[ies] the tropes and rictus syncopations of vanilla minimalism.” 12 Breckenfield, “LSO.” Sophia Lambton, writing for Bachtrack, suggests that the fact that Norman’s singers are consistently microphoned and amplified also raises questions about the work’s generic status as opera. Sophia Lambton, “Reluctantly grounded, A Trip to the Moon misses its lift-off,” July 10, 2017, www.bachtrack.com/review-norman-moon-sibelius-rattle-london-symphony-july-2017, accessed July 24, 2017. 13 David Allan, “Review: Tricky Politics in Andrew Norman’s New Children’s Opera,” New York Times, July 10, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/arts/music/review-tricky-politics-in-andrew-normans-new-childrens-opera.html?mcubz=1, accessed July 24, 2017. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Anne Midgette, “New opera wants the same appeal as television. If only it could be as smart,” Washington Post, July 28, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/new-opera-wants-the-same-appeal-as-television-if-only-it-could-be-as-smart/2017/07/28/5b899960-70a4-11e7-803f-a6c989606ac7_story.html, accessed July 29, 2017. 18 I will not compare Norman’s rescoring to other scores for Méliès’s film, e.g., by the French electronic duo Air (Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel) in 2011; what is more interesting is how Norman’s rescoring of the first half of the film, as a prelude, functions within this opera as a whole. 19 00:09:45 in the Berlin Philharmonic production video, with titles indicating the start of the “Erster Akt” and its first scene, “Sonnenuntergang auf dem Mond” (sunset on the moon). 20 Ashley, “A Trip.” 21 00:16:50 in the Berlin Philharmonic production video, introducing the second scene, titled “Zwei fruende treffen sich” (two friends meet). 22 Though Norman’s EAMDC interviewer implies that Moonish is “a brand new language” that Norman “created” (he replies, “Well, as it turns out, inventing a language is a lot of work!”), Norman’s Moonish is not a constructed language per se, nor even something suggestively structured but indecipherable, like the Voynich Manuscript. The LSO’s “How to Speak Moonish” blog post (Jo Johnson; July 5, 2017) lists just nine words, phrases, or expressions “in Moonish which Andrew Norman has indicated do have meanings,” beyond the three pronouns and Eoa’s “My name is… .” exchange with Georges. www.lso.co.uk/more/blog/662-how-to-speak-moonish.html, accessed July 24, 2017. The rest is noise, however lovely, and what has assigned meaning is wholly arbitrary. Thus, Norman’s “language” is really an extremely limited cipher, much as James R. Knowlson concluded of Godwin’s music-based “moon-language” in an article in Modern Philology. James R. Knowlson, “A Note on Bishop Godwin's ‘Man in the Moone’: The East Indies Trade Route and a ‘Language’ of Musical Notes,” Modern Philology 65, no. 4 (1968): 357–91. 23 While this conceit is a clever one, it is by no means unprecedented in lunar narratives: see, for example, Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638) published posthumously under the pseudonym “Domingo Gonsales,” which also features a purely musical lunar language. Godwin’s is, however, a satire styled on More’s Utopia, and particularly on More’s moon-worshipping sect; Godwin’s lunar inhabitants are sized according to their social importance. H. Neville Davies, in an article surveying “Bishop Godwin's ′Lunatique Language′” (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 [1967]: 296–316) affirms the rather obvious fact that fictional languages and issues of translation are a commonplace bordering on cliché in fantastic voyages and in their satirical parodies, including those that we know Godwin read, e.g., More, Rabelais, and Joseph Hall’s 1605 Mundus Alter et Idem (under the pseudonym “Mercurius Britannicus”). 24 As Christopher Kendrick argues about the poetic reinvigoration of clichés more broadly, at its best, children’s art, like any art, “reinvent[s] or … reinvigorat[es] stock action … [it tries] to re-write cliché—linguistic clichés, inevitably, as well as narrative ones—in such a way that the force that made it cliché stands out anew.” Kendrick, Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form (1986; New York: Routledge, 2014), 103. Kendrick discusses the purpose of epic simile, but here he expands his remarks to the whole of epic poetry, and beyond this to “the literary dialectic set up with the onset of cliché” in general, with implications for the entire enterprise of human art. 25 In Berlin, unlike London, this coincided with the teacher’s being awakened by his students, back in their street-clothes, and thus withdrawing from the oneiric frame, only to find Eoa, partially recostumed as the theatre employee, sweeping the floor and singing the pronouns. 26 See both Matthew Solomon’s and Victoria Duckett’s contributions in Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, ed. Matthew Solomon (New York: SUNY Press, 2011). See also Elizabeth Ezra, George Méliès (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000). 27 “Georges Méliès, A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune), 1902,” www.moma.org/collection/works/ 89492, accessed July 24, 2017. The same text was also published in both editions of MoMA Highlights, ed. Harriet Schoenholz Bee, Cassandra Heliczer, and Sarah McFadden (1999; rev. ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 49. 28 See Solomon, Fantastic Voyages, 12. Solomon links the umbrella as a symbol of colonialism to Méliès’s political cartoons satirizing Western imperial ambition. 29 Gaston Méliès and Georges Méliès, Complete Catalogue of “Star” Films (New York, 1905). In this catalogue (both in the preface and in the description of the film), the brothers Méliès characterize the film in just this way. 30 Ezra, George Méliès, 149. 31 Reflecting, as best I can, Murrow’s odd pronunciation of Méliès’s name. 32 Solomon, Fantastic Voyages, 9; Solomon goes on to discuss Méliès as a satirist (9–12). See also Solomon, “Georges Méliès: Anti-Boulangist Caricature and the Incohérent Movement,” Framework: Journal of Cinema and Media 53, no. 2 (2012): 305–27. 33 The final episode of the series, broadcast May 10, 1998 was written by the actor Tom Hanks. 34 “Interview with Brian Selznick: The Inside Story on The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” www.scholastic.com/teachers/ articles/teaching-content/brian-selznick-gives-us-inside-story-invention-hugo-cabret/, accessed August 16, 2017. 35 EAMDC, “Interview.” 36 “About Georges,” www.theinventionofhugocabret.com/about_georges.htm, accessed August 16, 2017. 37 Picard, “Concert Review.” 38 Citing Livy’s History of Rome, Murray translates katharmos, or katharsis, as a ritual of “purification of the community from the taints and poisons of the past year, the old contagion of sin and death.” See Murray’s preface to Aristotle’s On the Art of Poetry, trans. Ingram Bywater (1909; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), 16. 39 Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler, The Family Shakespeare (London: Longman and Co., 1818), x. 40 “More nauseous and more foolish cant was never chattered than that which would deride the memory or depreciate the merits of Bowdler. No man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who [/] made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children.” Charles Swinburne, Studies in Prose and Poetry (1896; London: Chatto and Windus, 1915), 98–99. 41 Frye writes: “Alger probably did me no permanent damage, as I was never inspired to adopt the virtues of his heroes, and this leads me to hope that the children of today may emerge similarly unscathed from their similar experiences.” Frye, “The Developing Imagination” (Inglis Lecture at Harvard University, April 18, 1972), published as “The Developing Imagination,” Learning in Language and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 31–58. Reprinted in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education, ed. Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French, Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 7 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 154. 42 “Work of the Week – Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: The Hogboon,” Schott Music. June 20, 2016, www.en.schott-music.com/work-week-sir-peter-maxwell-davies-hogboon/, accessed August 17, 2017. 43 Kathryn McDowell (LSO Managing Director), “Welcome,” London Symphony Orchestra program booklet, “A Trip to the Moon,” July 9, 2017, www.lso.co.uk/images/pdf/09-07-Web.pdf, accessed July 10, 2017. 44 Schmid, “A Trip to the Moon.” See, for example, in Act II: “The Earth is beautiful. The Earth is generous. The Earth is powerful and violent and frightening, and fragile, and needy.” 45 EAMDC, “Interview.” 46 Norman: “I liked this idea that the percussionists in Playwould control, in a metaphorical sense, the goings-on in the rest of the orchestra, because what is an orchestra if not an elaborate system of hierarchical controls?” quoted in Anne Lanzilotti, “‘Cut to a Different World: Andrew Norman,” October 25, 2017, Music & Literature, http://www.musicandliterature.org/features/2016/10/25/cut-to-a-different-world-andrew-norman, accessed August 10, 2017. The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Andrew Norman: A Trip to the Moon, reviewed by Cecilia Livingston
JO - The Opera Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/oq/kbx026
DA - 2017-11-21
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/andrew-norman-a-trip-to-the-moon-reviewed-by-cecilia-livingston-Gi05bk6oye
SP - 188
EP - 202
VL - 33
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -