I saw the new opera Margaret Garner last night at New York City Opera, popping my opera cherry here in New York (long overdue given how long I’ve lived here). The opera’s libretto was written by Toni Morrison and the music was composed by Richard Danielpour. Morrison based her famous novelBeloved on the historical events concerning the fugitive slave Margaret Garner who fled Kentucky to the free state of Ohio in the 1850s, but upon recapture slit the throat of one of her four children (in the opera she only has two and slays them both, like Medea) rather than have them return to a life of slavery. One of the notes in the program stuck with me: whereas Beloved is about forgetting,Margaret Garner is about remembering, and the final scene of the opera proved this as Tracie Luck, who plays Margaret, wanders as a spirit about the stage fully illumined in her white dress, weaving her way through the assembled cast who all stand in silence and darkness, her story and the memory of her story restless, haunting us to this day. That was perhaps the best choice of the entire production.
I found myself editing the pacing of the opera as many scenes seemed to go on a tad too long. I know part of the convention of opera is to slow things down and to repeat single, simple lines over and over again in the arias, but the supposed emotional return of such a drawn-out convention had little impact, instead causing the entire production to lose its forward momentum. I also found myself taking issue with the music—too often it did not complement the libretto text. Now I can imagine a smart work that puts the text and music at odds or angles to each other to great effect, but this just seemed a blatant disregard for the words and their meaning (and from what I’ve learned about Danielpour’s ego, I’m not surprised).
One moment I’m not sure is clear to the audience is that Garner takes her own life in this version of the story (I believe historically she was just sent down river and died of typhoid fever). The statement is obvious: that she will be the master of her own fate and take her own life and through such an act of will defy the slave culture and make a statement that she is not someone else’s property but she and she alone owns her life and will decide when to end it.
The trial is interesting as they debate whether to try her for theft and damage of property since her children were considered the property of Gaines, or for murder since she killed two human beings. Both had the same result: execution, but for the lone daughter of Gaines who was advocating an end to slavery, the latter would grant human status to an entire population seen only as property. It ties into the discourse on love that runs throughout the production which too often runs to cliché (sometimes on purpose to make Margaret’s thoughts on love seem fresh and unique) but lines such as “love’s weapon of choice” left me shaking my head no no no.
My other quibbles concern the odd time jumps, done in part to show her children growing up, but the escape scene in Act II could have been condensed into a few days rather than telling us three weeks pass by; it would have had greater urgency to feel as if the slave owner Gaines was always on their heels. And then at her trial and execution no time jump is indicated, and we’re to believe it all happens overnight, Garner’s elderly mother Cilla somehow managing to travel to the sit of the execution. Finally, though Luck uses more of her lower registry in Act II to mark her deepening sorrow, I felt that on a whole that deeper register could have been used in many of the spirituals and laments. That shrilly soprano range did nothing for the events and story at hand.
I plan to see more opera, hoping I get over my distaste for the melodrama and the “opera voice” as I’ve been calling it, which rings unpleasant in my untrained ear.