The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, San Francisco Opera, July 7 2013

Four performances of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene? Well, that’s the way it worked out for me, and I think I got a little bit more out of it each time. (See the dress rehearsal for a description of the sets, and the premiere performance for comments on the singing.)

My appreciation of Act 1 was dimmed considerably by a lack of sleep the night before, my ORD-to-SFO flight having been delayed five hours by the crash landing of Asiana flight 214 at SFO. I know that I completely missed the scene in which Yeshua persuades Peter and the other disciples to kneel before Mary, and several times I recovered from a drooping head. I was somewhat embarrassed to stand up at intermission and see the composer seated just two rows behind me, and add to that the fact that my head sticks up rather higher than those of others around me. But intermission refreshments rejuvenated me, and I was able to pay full attention to Act 2.

All of my prior comments about the singing continued to apply. What struck me more this time than previously was the beauty of the soloists-plus-chorus number at the beginning of Act 2, where the singers proclaim that the only law is love, and discourse on the Golden Rule, though it’s not named as such. The music is sinking in enough that I can almost remember how it goes in this scene. But overall, the opera continues to lack theatricality and emotional range, and still sounds pretty much the same from beginning to end.  I have yet to hear whether any other opera company has scheduled it for production. It remains a smidgen better than a gamma.