With “Moby Dick” opening at Metropolitan Opera this week, audiences will experience a deep American story of unidentified ambitions, frustrated grievances and self-destructive desire for revenge.
Based on Herman Melville's 1851 novel, Opera offers an economic and determined retelling of the fateful tale of Pequod, a ship that pursued the vengeful white whale. Libretto by Gene Scheer attacks the book's major conflict without tracking the action. Jake Heggie's score is elegant and driving. The opera's ending is solid and clear.
It's probably fair to say that more people know the white whale story, parody and outlined, than they've read “Moby Dick.” However, adaptation is not just a summary of the book's major events. An efficiency-obsessed society can over-focus on directness.
Although skilled, the opera, which premiered in Houston in 2010, has scrubbed, lethargic storytelling that leaves the novel's idiosyncraticity behind. This is a kind of adaptation that the audience has been dealing with for a long time. A simplification of the book's large wave structure to highlight that plot. But can an organized adaptation really represent this unruly book whose drama was born out of infinite uncertainty? Or is the purpose of adaptation different?
The composer decides which aspects of the story can be conveyed through music, but the script shapes the story through words thrown into the air by the song. Aria reveals the character's peculiarity and ambition. Sings them to announce what the characters want and the length they have to pursue to get it. Each creative turn adds a distance from the book.
Certainly, there are benefits to adapting a piece known as “Moby Dick.” While meeting reader approval, there is a center, end, which can serve as a ballast for creative reinterpretation many times. There is also less risk to production. Melville's original publisher Harper and the Brothers considered the book a commercial failure when it came out, but few of them compared influence to longevity.
There are also distinct drawbacks to adapting “Moby Dick.” Melville's language can be difficult. The book has hundreds of pages of expositions. And much of the story's predictions come through subtle clues, phelours, all stories.
At the heart of this novel is a moral story about how people deal with what they fear most, how they are spewing, and how they understand defeat. These are abstract agonies through a cast of characters that have not actually evolved. Instead, they push to become the archetype of unrealized ambition. Ishmael (known as Greenhorn from Scheer and Heggie's Opera) tells the book, while Captain Ahab (Tenor Brandon Jovanovich at the Met) is the star of the opera.
In the novel, Ahab is inconsistent, but the softest in his interactions with Pip, a 14-year-old cabin boy. In the opera, Pip's story serves as a turning point that reveals Ahab's heartlessness. Pip is innocent, and his naivete stands in contrast to the sailor's confidence. His survival is in the hands of the crew, and his presence raises the interests of the voyage. After the accident, Pip (sung by the soprano Janaiburger) suffers very much. His resulting fear portends the coming trouble. Pip's transformational moments are the first half of Scheer's narrative, a dramatic choice that line up stories and makes dramatic choices, while still maintaining all the essential notes of the novel.
It seems natural to set Melville's thorough and moody prose into music. Its lyrical quality brings the music to reach harmony. The text is filled with open vowel sounds made when the tongue does not interfere with the flow of air. It is useful for singers when they are in harmony, especially in choral performances.
Melville's dictionary is also eloquent, organized with the driving energy of sermons. In “Lee Shore,” in the funeral chapter, provided as testimony of a sailor who gets lost in the sea, the narrator overwhelms the disappointment of an unfulfilled life against the finality of death.
Despite the narration drifting between pessimism and optimism, Melville's sentences have a natural lyricism. Often he tries to name emotions that are deep and invisible. He does this by embracing the rhythmic patterns used in the poem. Consider the need for the narrator to consider “November of wet drizzling in my soul.” The sentences frequently cited in the opening paragraphs of the book take on a pattern of stress and intonation.
However, Melville's writing is often lengthy because it involves multiple ideas. This makes singing difficult. Scheer's Libretto is straightforward in its traits. The lines quickly lifted from the book are apparently simple and written in fantastic controls. Some are as short as one or two words. These monosyllable statements through the interpretation of the chorus muscle – “aye!”, “ding!” – short, uphon adorable.
Not all adaptations of “Moby Dick” are faithful to the disposal of the novel. Here, British composer Robert Longden and librettist Kay created a sleazy musical about staging “Moby Dick” by St. Godley Academy girls for young women. (It opened in the West End in 1992 and was widely panned and closed just a few months later.) Performance artist Laurie Anderson created an avant-garde version of “Moby Dick,” known as “The Songs and Stories of Moby Dick” in 1999. The book is really about “huge heads,” she says on the show. Specifically, it was from Melville, “full of theory, secrets and stories,” and the whale's was surprisingly large.
Some more general adaptations could be interpreted as devotion to Melville's messiness. The 2019 version of Dave Malloy, performed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took into account the eclectic style of each chapter. It also explores how gender and race can create their own subplots within the story. Another recent adaptation, created by British actor Sebastian Armourst and Simple 8, is a production company specializing in minimalistic productions, telling many of the key moments of the story through the sea hut.
But perhaps it's a bad idea to assume that “Moby Dick” retelling should do anything other than honor the adaptive artist's commitment to it. At best, their vision will become as identifiable as Melville. In the worst case scenario, I was always able to get the book.
One thing that distinguishes between Heggie and Scheer's adaptation is the frequency at which it was performed (a rare distinction even in modern operas). Before coming to the Met, it was performed by opera companies such as Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco and other locations. Even though he's only 15 years old, it can be argued that it has become standard.
Are Moby Dick adaptations too many? Probably not. The Hard Times breed bitter men like Captain Ahab. And there is always another person filled with complaints, full of his hat. Another person who always feels more than justified in his rage. Another person ready to own people around him in his misery.
Wendy S. Walters is a non-fiction professor in the writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts.
