Moby Dick
San Francisco Opera Performance
October 26, 2012
Moby-Dick has been a source of joy and inspiration to me for many years. I often pick it up and peruse it and read sections from it. I came to this opera well disposed toward its subject hoping to like it. I knew that it would necessarily be an abbreviation; selections would have to be made, a concept and an approach would have to be developed. It is not an easy book to adapt for a staged presentation. Much of the book is reflective commentary, metaphorical descriptions, and symbolic representations. Any attempt to produce this for the stage will necessarily be an interpretation. One cannot expect the full grandeur of Melville’s sweeping prose to be reproduced in an opera that spans even several hours. I watched it suspending judgment, stifling a growing dissatisfaction until a point in the second act where Ahab and Starbuck sing a duet, and Starbuck tries to cloy Ahab into turning back from his quest to find the White Whale with sentimentalizing images of a boy waiting in a window in far off Nantucket. This nauseated me, and at that point I stopped trying to like it. The duet comes from section 132 of the book, entitled The Symphony. Starbuck and Ahab do indeed have such a conversation. Ahab recounts to Starbuck how he has been at sea for forty years, how he married a young girl when he was past fifty, and left her the day after the wedding to go back to the sea, “I see my wife and child in thine eye,” he tells him. Starbuck, seizing the chance, gives vent to his longing to flee this perilous life at sea and importunes the Captain to turn back and head for Nantucket. The operatic recreation engenders a feeling of a common bond between Starbuck and Ahab, that Ahab shares Starbuck’s homesickness and longing for the security and warmth of the hearth and home. It is not a faithful representation of that encounter and grossly misrepresents Ahab. They misunderstand Ahab’s comment to Starbuck, “I see my wife and child in thine eye.” What he meant was that he saw in Starbuck’s eye the longing to return to his home, his family in far off Nantucket. He did not mean that he felt the same longing. Ahab had long repudiated and walled himself off from any such feeling or desire for connection. Starbuck briefly reminded him of such long buried feelings, but he was not about to allow them to be rekindled. When Starbuck is making his plea, the text tells us, “Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last cindered apple to the soil. ‘What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? . . ” At the end of Ahab’s reverie Starbuck has gone. “But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the mate had stolen away.” (132)
This conversation is not properly represented by a duet. It is a supplication by Starbuck that was futile from the beginning. Ahab is beyond reach. These sentimental images of a boy’s face in a window will never reach Ahab. Starbuck and Ahab are not singing from the same score, and they have very different melodies in their hearts.
When the Pequod meets the Rachel, another whaling vessel they encountered at sea (128), the captain of the Rachel pleaded with Ahab to assist in the search for his son, who was lost in a small boat pursuing the White Whale on the previous day.
Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab; and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.
“I will not go,” said the stranger, “till you say aye to me. Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case. For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab — though but a child and nestling safely at home now — a child of your old age too — Yes, yes, you relent; I see it — run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards,”
“Avast,” cried Ahab — “touch not a rope-yarn;” then in a voice that prolongingly moulded every word — “Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good bye, good bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go.” . . . Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest suit. (128)
This gave me the clue to why I found this opera unsatisfying. It took me some time to figure it out and articulate it. I almost gave up and decided not to review it, but I persisted. I felt I owed it to all those many people who will come to this opera blissfully ignorant of Melville’s magnificent original. They will sit through this opera and emerge thinking they have seen Moby-Dick. That would be a travesty. On the night I went I saw a large group of adolescents that I surmised were some sort of class on a field trip, perhaps a high school literature class that was reading Moby-Dick. I hope the teacher makes the students redouble their application to the book after this performance. It is for them that I write this.
The problem with this opera is not a matter of facts or details, although there are many alterations of the original, but of spirit. This is a voyage of death and doom by men who are practically indifferent to life, the only exception being Starbuck. The opera treats them as a group of men who all harbor this middle class longing to get the job done and get back to their families and children, perhaps akin to soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq.
The book opens with the immortal line “Call me Ishmael.” The opera does not heed that admonition. It does not use the voice of Ishmael. Ishamel does not appear in this opera. The character closest to Ishmael is called “Greenhorn” in the opera. It was a significant departure from the tone and voice of the text that indicates that these authors intended to rewrite the story of Moby-Dick rather than faithfully recreate it. There is nothing wrong with taking inspiration from a classic work or the work of a predecessor and creating one’s own variant or take off from it. Many brilliant works of art have originated that way. Sometimes the derivative works are actually better and more successful than the original source. The risk that is run by taking a classic of the stature of Moby-Dick, reworking it and then putting the same title on it as the original, is that you invite comparisons between the classic work and your own revamped version which are unpromising. Let us consider the opening passage:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp and drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. (1)
Ishmael is a man on the verge of suicide, who has no strong investment in life, who chooses the peril and adventure and loneliness of life at sea in the company of likeminded men equally absorbed within their own private dungeons of torment and regret.
Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this . . . therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them — ‘Come hither, broken hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put up thy grave-stone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!’ (112)
It is this spirit of despair of life and indifference to death, punctuated by moments of high excitement, that is missing from the operatic recreation. There is a gloom that pervades this story, and ineffable darkness of the soul worthy of Wagner, that this opera fails to capture.
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar. (96)
This recreation by Scheer and Heggie stays on the plain. It doesn’t reach the deep gorges and exuberant sunny spaces that would give the performance a powerful dramatic intensity. By concentrating on characters and relationships rather than the inward pathos expressed through a myriad of symbols and metaphors in Melville’s text the character of the whole enterprise is fatefully transformed. The authors of the opera assume a bias favoring human relations and human connection. That’s how they created the opera by building it upon five main characters: Greenhorn, Queequeg, Pip, Starbuck, and Ahab. Each character is also substantially reworked from the original presentation in Melville. However, the people and the world that Melville describes in Moby-Dick are men who have reduced their human connectedness to the barest minimum. It is a world and a mindset of profound alienation. Moby-Dick is not a story about relationships and their vicissitudes. It is a searching commentary on life and on the world at large from the standpoint of a man who has little stake in it and little use for conventional values and outlook. This opera is a sanitized, normalized version of Moby-Dick crafted to appeal to a contemporary white American middle class audience.
Completely absent from the opera are any sexual allusions which Melville’s book is full of. There is one scene in the opera where the sailors on the ship dance with one another, but it is done in a farcical style that trivializes itself to the point of self-mockery. It brought chuckles from some in the audience. This opera is afraid to touch the same sex attractions that were and are a major attraction of men going to sea. The erotic overtones of the relationship between Queequeg and Ishmael are completely ignored. The sailors on the Pequod tend to be men for whom the avoidance of women and family responsibilities is a salient characteristic. That doesn’t mean they don’t have sex. But this production treats the sailors as homesick to return to their wives and children in Nantucket. Clearly a fantasy of the writers, not a representation of nineteenth century sailors, and certainly not of Melville’s work.
The introduction of a religious point of view through the character of Starbuck, who acts as a kind of conscience to Ahab, is particularly foreign and distasteful. There are allusions to religion, religious figures, and religious ideas throughout Moby-Dick, but they do not take the form of a moralistic conscience that is pressing against the whole way of life of sailing as in the opera. Moby-Dick does not have a moral point of view. It presents a tale that clearly illustrates the ultimate universal destructiveness of monomaniacal vengeance, but it does not say that this is a bad thing. Ishmael is clearly steeped in the religious ideology of his day, but he has his own take on it. His point of view and his use of religious allusion is very idiosyncratic and unorthodox, but the opera takes a very conventional outlook that will be readily acceptable to mainstream American viewers.
Also missing from this opera is the whale. Except for a cameo appearance at the end, the whale is scarcely mentioned. But a high percentage of Melville’s Moby-Dick is taken up with descriptions of whales, their characteristics, behavior, and the vicissitudes of hunting them and processing their corpses. The whale has powerful symbolic significance for Ishmael who sees the whale as an almost divine spirit, whom he both respects and reveres while at the same time seeking to kill it.
Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies. (105)
Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again, he has no face. (86)
This alludes to the biblical passage in Exodus 33 where Moses is on the mountain with God and God tells him “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live. And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me and thou shalt stand upon a rock: And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft by the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: by my face shall not be seen.” The whale to Ishmael is essentially isomorphic to God.
Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby-Dick not only ubiquitious, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen. (41)
Ahab cherished a wild vindicitiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. (41)
He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it. (41)
Moby-Dick can be seen as a defiant protest against God himself for all the ills of mankind, the accumulated slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that befall people in life from the beginning of time. It is a powerful repudiation of the religious quest to seek union and reconciliation with God. This is a story of those who are at war with God and seek to destroy him. It is also, I think, a pessimistic commentary on that undertaking. It is a very modern book. However, you won’t get that out of this opera. In fact the opera bypasses these most profound issues and even alters them and makes them conventional and palatable. The more I think about it, the more offensive it becomes.
What was good in this opera was the staging. The sets and the lighting and special effects were outstanding and highly effective. An A+ to lighting designer Gavan Swift and Projection Designer Elaine McCarthy. The imaginative stage presentation creates an engaging spectacle that holds the attention of the audience and keeps it rapt in the story. If you don’t know you are being snookered, you will probably like it on the strength of quality of the presentation. I’ve been thinking about it for over a week now, and the more I think about it, the more firmly I am turning against it. But it is a dazzling spectacle, well presented and well performed. Just don’t kid yourself that it is Moby-Dick.
