Heart of a Soldier, San Francisco Opera, Sept. 18 2011

Mozart last night; brand-new opera this afternoon. David Gockley’s project to bring the book “Heart of a Soldier” to the operatic stage, a project initiated when he was director of Houston Grand Opera, finally came to fruition. The book tells the life story of Rick Rescorla, the head of security for Morgan Stanley, who led 2700 employees in the World Trade Center to safety after the attacks of Sept. 11, only to lose his own life when he went back to search for stragglers. The opera, by composer Christopher Theofanidis and librettist Donna DiNovelli, follows the book very closely. Of course, with only 1 hour 40 minutes of music, some of the details have to be omitted, but nearly all of the important events do make it to the stage.

The backdrop for the entire production is a representation of the Twin Towers. We see four stories of each building, each with seven bays facing the audience; the insides are bare except for people and the emergency exit stairway. The towers will be obscured by drop-downs from time to time, but the physical structures stay in place through both acts.

Act 1 opens with the young Cyril (Rick’s actual given name, he adopted “Rick” in honor of the American soldiers) making friends with the American soldiers who were in Cornwall preparing for D-Day. In the next scene, we see the inside of a bar in Rhodesia, with walls of corrugated sheet metal, where Rick meets his life-long friend Dan Hill. Rick is borne in on the shoulders of other men; they are all celebrating his killing of a lion that has been menacing the local village. Rick shouts “Who is ready to wrestle the strongest man in Rhodesia?” and the first words of Dan Hill are “I’m ready to wrestle the second strongest man in Rhodesia!” (The pre-performance talk had advised us that yes, there were humorous lines, and despite the serious nature of the story, we should feel free to laugh at the right times.)

There is a brief scene in Ft. Benning, Georgia, where Rick and Dan are in Officer’s Candidate School. An ordinary rigging pole descends from on high and a number of men use it to do pull-ups. (I heard that these supers were super-athletes, capable of 100 pull-ups and 200 push-ups, and magnificent physical specimens, though we only got to see their backs.) Then it’s off to Viet Nam, with another large piece of corrugated metal with a jagged gash through it serving as the backdrop, while projections of jungle plants are displayed on it. The final scene depicts Rick’s wedding to “a bride” who has no music to sing. We see a number of large round tables set for a wedding reception, and Rick and his bride enter through an archway of crossed swords. The women tend to gather on the left side of the stage, Rick and his military buddies on the right side, echoing the point made in the book that Rick paid little attention to his bride at the reception.

After intermission, the twin towers are on full display, as Rick leads his charges in evacuation drills. Dan Hill is there, describing what it would take to bring down the towers. (Dan had eerily predicted both the 1993 truck bomb in the basement of WTC, as well as the 2001 attacks.) Then there is an interlude where we see Susan, who will become Rick’s second wife, relaxing in the park with her dog. The only suggestion of a park is a large red fire hydrant mounted on a short platform. Rick comes by, jogging in his bare feet (he’s writing a book on a barefoot runner), meets Susan, and before long they are having coffee. Then it’s back to WTC. The stage towers do not actually fall (this is not an updated version of Samson and Dalila), but the destruction is represented by lights suddenly going off, emergency lights coming on, and lots and lots of paper floating down from on high. In a short epilog, without voices, Dan Hill and Susan Rescorla kneel and smear their arms with concrete dust, echoing Rick’s ritual of smearing his skin with the blood of the lion he had killed in Rhodesia, the idea being to acquire the strength that the dead had possessed.

Our cast:
Rick Rescorla: Thomas Hampson
Dan Hill: William Burden
Susan Rescorla: Melody Moore
(and 28 minor characters)
Conductor: Patrick Summers
Director: Francesca Zambello

Thomas Hampson was involved with the project nearly from the beginning, and he portrayed his character perfectly with his acting and singing and craggy good looks. William Burden and Melody Moore supported him ably. This time, Zambello’s staging was spot-on, perfectly suited to the material at hand, and avoiding the directorial conceit so much in evidence in San Francisco’s Ring of a few months ago.

But how was the music? Lots of people are afraid of modern opera, and often with good reason. What little of Theofanidis's other music I have heard suggests “movie music,” which is not necessarily bad; it certainly goes down better than Berg and Schoenberg and Ligeti. Here the music serves the story well, without calling attention to itself unduly. Much of the vocal line is almost recitative. Rick gets one full-blown aria, in the second act, the thrust of which I forget.

How was the story? As previously mentioned, the libretto was very true to the book. The librettist did leave out a lot of the Viet Nam story, but wisely so. Going in, I had my concerns about an opera comprising lots of little scenes (there is a prologue and five scenes before intermission), based on last year’s Anna Karenina at Opera San Jose, whose 19 separate scenes seemed rather disjointed. These scenes were long enough to be more than thumbnail-size stories, and though there was no smooth transition between the scenes (note that we jumped from the jungles of Viet Name to Rick’s first wedding), the story line worked. The details of the libretto, however, left a bit to be desired. There were too many rhyming couplets, and I do have to credit the line “I’m going to have to give you a geography lesson” as being as mundane as “Who was that on the telephone?” (Angle of Repose, Andrew Imbrie, 1976).

Bottom line: I enjoyed it. It’s definitely one of the better modern operas that I have seen, though Götterdämmerung has nothing to worry about. I’m looking forward to seeing it again in a few days. A beta.