Paul Bunyan (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Paul Bunyan Mary Louise Hill Paul Bunyan. Libretto by W. H. Auden, score by Benjamin Britten. Glimmerglass Opera Festival. Cooperstown, New York. 15 July–20 August 1995. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. James David Lynn, Thomas R. Trotter, Kevin Murray, Scott Murphree, and Jeffrey Lentz in the Glimmerglass Opera production of Britten’s Paul Bunyan, conducted by Stewart Robertson, directed by Mark Lamos. Photo: George Mott/Glimmerglass Opera. The Columbia University premiere of Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden’s opera Paul Bunyan on 5 May 1941 was met by negative criticism, most of it finding fault with the work’s weak text and predictable score. Auden himself ultimately apologized to Britten for the libretto. The composer subsequently withdrew it from his repertoire for about twenty years. [End Page 229] Only in retrospect, and through a carefully staged presentation such as Glimmerglass Opera House’s summer 1995 production by Mark Lamos, can the timeliness and foresight of this much-maligned opera crystalize. Lamos’s conception exposed the ambivalent undertones in American mythology that Auden saw with an insight that perhaps only an expatriate Englishman in 1941 could have possessed. Indeed, it may well have been this insight that his contemporary critics really found fault with. Influenced in part by Kurt Weill’s work, in particular on Der Jasager with Bertolt Brecht, Britten and Auden wrote a “school opera” that asked young singers to contemplate the death of American collective myths and the rise of individual responsibility. Auden’s text calls attention to what might happen should that responsibility go astray, and the result is a sizzling, satirical pill that depression-weary America might have not wanted to swallow—at least not in the theatre. Auden’s libretto met with considerably more understanding laughter from the Glimmerglass’s audience, sitting in an opera house known for its daring productions and in part maintained by unreliable NEA funding. Similarly, the contemporary audience had no problem with the absent Bunyan, another detail that put the 1940s critics into a lather. People expected to see Bunyan at its 1941 premiere, but Britten and Auden’s work called for a disembodied voice on high—something perhaps better realized by today’s technology. Furthermore, in performance this detail incriminated America’s tendency to substitute a state religion with a state mythology that advocates nationalism, unity, and a certain kind of progress, no matter what the cost. The emphasis on such costs proved one of the most powerful elements of Lamos’s production. The opera begins with a chorus of trees, most of which resist the inevitable approach of progress. Realizing the possible triteness of dressing people as trees, set and costumer designers Paul Steinberg and Constance Hoffman produced a striking stage picture of blue rocking chairs in which blue-clad chorus members rocked against a yellow background, holding trees on their laps while they sang. The rocking chairs, the chorus, the trees, and the contrasting blue and yellow became recurring [End Page 230] scenic elements of this production’s own unique language, a language that often expressed itself through minimal movement or tableaux. The first stage picture presented a gently swaying forest that gained energy and action less from physical movement than from the build-up of music and voices. With bitter irony, the opera’s final tableau contrasted this first picture with the aftermath of the Bunyan myth: as the lights dimmed, business-suited men and women collapsed one by one onto the bare stage floor, where their weary bodies joined a clutter of dead, used Christmas trees. In the grey shadows cast just before the curtain dropped, the audience saw the physical shape of what can be lost in the name of progress: the whimsical forest, the brilliance of myth, and with it, collective hope. Between these powerful opening and closing images, the opera cartwheeled forward, a collage of brightly colored, corrugated cut-outs and various musical and theatrical styles. Lush orchestral buildups gave way to musical comedy patter, to bluesy interludes, to reflective arias. In addition, the ballad singer, an ever-present reminder of Britten’s American folk sources, kept the narrative going through tales with a...