“We have made killing a part of the healing process.”
         --Remark made about the execution of Timothy McVeigh

 

In “Sotto Voce: Notes on the Libretto as a Literary Form,” Dana Gioia quotes Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte on the status of the libretto:

The poet of the opera house and the idiot were at a certain time synonymous among the learned of London.

Gioia himself admits, “No major poetic genre in English currently ranks lower in general literary esteem than the opera libretto.”

Why attempt an opera? The answers are, like the libretto Gioia produced, fascinating, complex, mythic, and rather Italian. One reason is the author’s obvious love of the form--and, as he states in “Sotto Voce,” of the music of Alva Henderson, his collaborator. Henderson’s earlier operas, Medea (1972, text by Robinson Jeffers), The Last of the Mohicans (1976, libretto by Janet Lewis) and The Last Leaf (1979, libretto by the composer) greatly impressed Gioia.

Another reason is Gioia’s desire to write a contemporary  verse tragedy--an ambition shared by earlier poets such as William Butler Yeats and W.H. Auden. “Opera,” Gioia writes, “is the only living form of poetic drama...the only surviving form of contemporary tragic theater”:

If a contemporary poet wants to write verse tragedy, he or she has only two practical alternatives--translate the classics or write for the opera house.

In choosing to write Nosferatu, Gioia “resolved to write poetry that would be equally interesting on the page and on the stage--though perhaps in different ways.” Unlike his strictly literary counterpart, the poet writing for opera must remember that the audience will not actually hear a fair amount of his verse. When the music soars, his thrilling phrases become nothing but vowels and consonants in a singer’s mouth--aspects of a performance which is communicating in many ways besides the verbal.

Since the publication of “Can Poetry Matter?” in 1991, Dana Gioia has been known for his brilliant, often combative literary essays. This year he has published Interrogations at Noon, a new book of poems--his first since The Gods of Winter in 1991--and Nosferatu. Both books are extraordinary examples of something new in poetry masking itself as something old.

The “old” is easy to see. Gioia’s interest in forms and his recreation of a late nineteen-century mode suggest something retro. It turns out that, like Ernest Dowson or Francis Thompson, he is offering us a kind of aesthetic, “dark” Catholicism. Yet it is amazing to find such a sentiment surfacing at this moment--a moment in which Catholicism, always important but always secondary and beleaguered in American culture, is making, via the increased visibility of Hispanics, a kind of comeback. Gioia is one of the leading lights of a literary movement, “The New Formalism,” which centers on aesthetic questions and, as the name implies, form. Yet behind his interest in forms is an interest in ritual--specifically in the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. Gioia’s audience gets the esthetic experience it wants and expects, but it also discovers that, in doing so, it has been opened to a rich torrent of deep religious feelings. Nosferatu is a kind of Mass, and, like the Mass, it maintains a powerful consciousness of the persons to whom it is addressed. It is perhaps not going too far to suggest that, like the vampire which is its principal subject and in the manner of Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty,”  Nosferatu attempts to wound its audience: it forces us into the “little death” of self-knowledge, a condition which simultaneously distances us from the world and draws us closer to ourselves.

Gioia’s libretto is based on F.W. Murnau’s classic 1922 silent film of the same title, which is itself based on Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 novel, Dracula. Murnau had to change the title--“Nosferatu” means “The Undead”--because of copyright restrictions.

The book contains, in addition to the libretto, an interesting foreword by Anne Williams, “Listening to the Children of the Night: The Vampire and Romantic Mythology,” and Gioia’s essay, mentioned above, “Sotto Voce: Notes on the Libretto as a Literary Form.” “Sotto voce,” Gioia explains, is “Italian for ‘under the voice.’ A direction in vocal music to sing barely audibly, an aside.” Yet there is very little which is “sotto voce” about this opera. It is intense, lyrical, at times terrifying. This is the conclusion of “Ellen’s Dream”:

I came down a stair to a bolted door.
I touched the lock, and it fell away.
I found a vast and sunless room.
I wanted to leave but had to stay.
The room was a chapel lit by candles,
But the cross had been broken in two.
The priest held a chalice of blood in his hands,
And on the altar--was you.

Who is “you”? The character addressed? The audience? The concluding lines of this passage deliberately suggest a Black Mass--but the entire opera is a Black Mass: it culminates in the priestly vampire’s attempt to drink the blood of the heroine. Gioia’s immigrant villain is essentially an inverted Christ who attempts to destroy the beloved--to drink her blood rather than offering his own. At the culminating moment in which he applies his fangs to Ellen’s neck, he is parodying not only sexual union but the Eucharist: Christ gives blood; the vampire takes it away. Indeed, unlike Murnau’s film, the opera contains bits and pieces of the Catholic liturgy--sometimes quoted in Latin.

Why should we bother with such stuff? Why was The Exorcist so terrifying a movie? In a deeply Protestant culture, Catholicism tends to become Christianity’s dark side.

Gioia’s language is usually fairly simple--as in the example quoted above; yet it is always mythically charged. Throughout the play, our awareness of Nosferatu causes “ordinary” statements to take on a resonance which they would not “ordinarily” have: our awareness of the myth and its implications charges language with an intensity of meaning which the immediate circumstances of the action would not justify in themselves. In effect, language is becoming constantly symbolic--though exactly what it symbolizes is rarely grasped by the characters. This dream-like quality, in which words release themselves from their immediate circumstances in order to signify in various directions, is one of the strengths of this libretto, which is constantly moving us away from the ordinary into “another” realm. “Ellen’s Dream” is a particularly resonant instance of this technique.

Simultaneously Gothic and current--note the popularity of TV’s Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off, Angel, note the popularity of “Goth”--Nosferatu plunges us into a poetic area in which almost anything is possible and in which the simplest statements are saturated with multiple ironies. A love song which begins, “Flesh of my flesh, heart of my heart, / Nothing on earth can tear us apart,” ends with a reference to blood. Similarly, Nosferatu’s arrival in Wisborg causes the town to experience a “plague.” Gioia himself points out that, these days, “plague” is a near synonym for AIDS. At a time when “performance poetry” is primarily associated with adolescents and “slams,” Gioia’s libretto suggests artistic possibilities and themes which are far more sophisticated and liberating than anything one is likely to find in the slam context.

Alva Henderson’s music is more than equal to the complexities of Gioia’s text. It is powerfully and grandly melodic yet simultaneously open to dissonance--especially in the case of Nosferatu, whose suffering it is important to emphasize. (The vampire’s “Nocturne”--a rather beautiful love poem--ends with chords which subtly suggest “The Funeral March.”) When Gioia first proposed the subject of Nosferatu, Henderson was hesitant. He wondered whether it would be anything more than “three hours of scary chords.” What he produced is considerably more than that, but the “scary chords” are very much in evidence. At times the music seems to plunge ahead of the singer--as if anxious to arrive at the horror it knows will momentarily be present; at times it deliberately--and with a hint of parody--evokes the kind of music which accompanied silent films. The score is dizzying, frenetic, nervous, intensely dramatic, and stunningly lyrical. Its whole reason for being is passion and beauty--it’s an opera--yet it knows that passion and beauty lead to annihilation. What it values most is precisely what undoes it. Indeed, both text and music are continually subversive of one another. Henderson remarks, “The orchestral texture”--an interesting word here--“is the subtext of the text”: there are “unexpected contradictions between what’s said and what the orchestra is doing.”

Arias and scenes from Nosferatu were presented recently at the seventh annual West Chester University Poetry Conference at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. The performance was the high point of four days of discussion and presentation of poetry. Nosferatu received--and deserved--a standing ovation.

The plot of the opera centers on what Sergei Eisenstein would have called “the bourgeois triangle.” Ellen and Eric Hutter are a young couple living in the Baltic seaport of Wisborg in the mid-nineteenth century. They have, like many young couples, money problems--though Ellen experiences other difficulties as well: she has debilitating dreams (they turn out to be prophetic) and is a somnambulist. Eric’s employer, a wealthy merchant, convinces the young man to travel to Hungary to cement a deal with a nobleman, Count Orlock, who is interested in buying some property. The property is far from prime, so Eric is involved in a slightly shady transaction--but the shadiness of the transaction is nothing compared to the shadiness of the buyer: Nosferatu. Seeing Ellen’s picture in a locket, Nosferatu--not the total monster he is in Murnau’s film but “a tall, thin man in his late sixties”--madly but accurately realizes that she is his fated bride. Despite distance, Nosferatu and Ellen are able to speak--indeed, sing--to one another. Nosferatu initially intends to murder Eric but spares him for the sake of Ellen (“He is my gift to you”), and, in a thrilling moment, the three of them perform a trio which crosses over the separations of geography. If it is true for Eric and Ellen that “Nothing on earth can tear us apart,” that fact is also true for Ellen and Nosferatu.

Though Eric leaves Wisborg, it is Nosferatu who returns. The equivalence of Nosferatu and Eric is important to notice: Nosferatu is a threat to Ellen’s idealized marriage--but he is also the unacknowledged darkness at the heart of her marriage, “the shadow that falls wherever you pass.” With Nosferatu comes a plague which begins to destroy Wisborg. Eric eventually finds his way back to the town, but he is hopelessly insane. In Stoker’s novel, Ellen (who is “Mina” in the book) is a victim saved by others. In both Murnau’s and Gioia’s version, Ellen is not only victim but savior. Learning that if she can hold Nosferatu spellbound until dawn,

He would be caught by daylight unawares,
Far from his coffin and his native earth,
Then he would vanish into smoke and ashes,

Ellen determines to do just that. In the climactic scene she tells Nosferatu, “The night is over. / And I am yours— / Yours forever,” and then “staggers over to the windows and pulls the drapes apart”:

Nosferatu stands transfixed by the light. He starts to turn away but deliberately turns back to face the window and is slowly destroyed. 

Soprano Susan Gundunas was perfect in the crucial and demanding role of Ellen--which was written with her in mind. While remaining wonderfully musical, she was also able to convey the character’s terror, uncertainty and eventual strength and determination. John Kramar was not far behind her in his portrayal of a vivid, elegant, virile, constantly suffering Nosferatu. When Kramar sang, “I rule a kingdom of the dead,” you felt the contradictions inherent in that phase resonate in his rich baritone. Tenor Jonathan Boyd as Eric was, I felt, a little weak in the ensemble work but shone in his mad song. Mezzo-soprano Sarah L. Holman was excellent as Ellen’s sister, Marthe. The production was aided immeasurably by pianist John Keene--for the first time I was able to hear the dissonances in this work quite clearly--and by a choral ensemble which performed a hair-raising Dies Irae (Day of Wrath). I’m certain that much of the audience had, at best, a limited tolerance for opera--but this one had them on the edge of their seats.

Perhaps the music that is closest to Alva Henderson’s Nosferatu is not an opera at all but Bernard Herrmann’s marvelously frenetic score to Psycho, which I thought of occasionally during this performance. Like Psycho, Nosferatu is an example of the “dark side” of American consciousness, of what Harry Levin called “the power of blackness.” The debate over “forms, measured forms” goes back after all to Melville’s Billy Budd (1891). “At every level,” writes Levin, “our loyalties waver so ambivalently between two different worlds”: