Is Missy Mazzoli (music) and Royce Vavrek’s adaptation of Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s 1996 cult classic Breaking the Waves the first opera to depict a toilet onstage? If not – and suddenly I’m remembering Thomas Adès’s provocative Powder Your Face (1995), which would not surprise me for showing a toilet – but Waves is certainly the first opera to stage a sex scene on a toilet, of that I can be sure.
There is more of that to come in this most contemporary and shocking opera from 2016, a co-production with Opera Ventures, Scottish Opera, Théâtre National de l’Opera Comique, and Adelaide Festival.
It is said that sex is more powerful than any nuclear bomb. It is the life force above all. It’s the basic commandment from God: Be fruitful and multiply. But faith has a sinuous deception when it comes to sex. Yes, it is God’s handiwork, but it must be done within marriage. So say the all-male congregation on the Scottish Isle of Skye. Woe to those who disobey.
Bess “the good,” she with the “golden heart,” obeys her husband, but disobeys her church, is banished and shunned from her strict community, is horribly persecuted, damned, but yet her very sexual acts redeem her paralyzed husband. He is saved through her sin.
Von Triers is sinuously deceptive, too. Sex has awakened the innocent, perhaps neurotic Bess. For both of them, the joy of their union is unrelenting, celestial. Jan is an outsider, an oil rigger. The church does not approve. But the marriage is wrecked as soon as it starts. Jan must go back to work on the oil rig and is paralyzed in an injury. He is dying. Unable to perform or feel anything, he gently but fervently persuades her to go and have sex with men and then describe her happiness to him. He will know the pleasure that he cannot give her. They can still share their love.
If you ask me, it’s a bit misguided and a little creepy. At first, Bess is hesitant, horrified by such a request, but he is her husband, and she must obey. When she prays to God, the chorus of men slithers out from the stony columns on its revolving stage. They are not comforting. They chant, Do what you are tasked. She has no choice.
So begins her voyage of the damned, or is that the voyage of the most faithful? Answers aren’t given, either in the libretto or in the music. She goes from one man to another, at first trying to seduce Jan’s doctor. She discards her bra, and is removing her panties, when the doctor stops her. She is shamed, but must continue her journey. Jan must be saved. Random acts with random men continue, until the final degradation on the ill-fated Red Boat with the “sick fuckers,” who viciously rape and mutilate her.
She is “deposed,” like Christ from the cross into her friend Dodo and her mother’s arms. She is damned to hell by the congregation, but Jan spirits her body away and buries her at sea. He will meet her at the whirlpool, he promises, heartsick at losing her. Bess undulates in the sea currents to Mazzoli’s swirling strings, just like at the beginning of the opera.
The tale is almost Biblical, something out of the Old Testament, like Susanna and the Elders, or David and Bathsheba. Fables that tell of sin and redemption, wickedness and righteousness. Moral stories that teach us about right and wrong.
Although Mazzoli’s music is complex and wondrously orchestrated, it’s still jagged and edgy like most contemporary scores. The churchmen have the most lyrical lines, like old medieval chants given a Scottish burr. Even the passion in the couple’s lovemaking is unromantic and not very thrilling. It just sounds like typical modern music, a bit frayed and jangled, a lot of troubled high strings. There’s no romance in the sound, and not much love. But there’s a whole lot of psychosis going on. The sounds of the sea, implied or out front, have the bubble of Britten with hints of crashing waves and the caw of soaring sea birds.
The production is marvelously sung, however. Mazzoli gives them a workout. Lauren Snouffer is outstanding as conflicted Bess, out of her league as a sex worker, but utterly determined to please her man. Her high notes were stratospheric in the extreme, beautifully phrased, and as an actress she can’t be bettered. This is a defining portrait, and she ran with it with every fiber of her being.
Her man is baritone Ryan McKinny, and he boomed out his passion and joy with chasms to spare. Built like a castle wall, he has immense stage presence and a naked ass that rivals Teddy Tahu Rhodes from The End of the Affair, seen at HGO in 2004. The sight was worth the wait. (By the way, the intimacy director Samantha Kaufman must have worked triple overtime on this opera with all its simulated sex scenes. She deserves some type of award.)
Other standouts in the cast included soprano Michelle Bradley’s gospel-infused Mother; mezzo Marie Therese Carmack’s Dodo; and baritone Michael Mayes’ Councilman. The unit set by Soutra Gilmour was stunning – a ring of stone columns imaginatively lit by Richard Howell with projections from Will Duke which morphed from granite spires to an oil rig to church interior to hospital room. Seamless and flawless, constantly moving. Maestro Patrick Summers leads his orchestra into the turbulent eddies of Mazzoli’s pungent soundscape with vigor and dexterity.
Whether Breaking the Waves will withstand the future is up for grabs. The story is indeed shocking and purposely provocative, hip in its sexuality, but the music does it no great service. And Mazzoli blows the ending. In the film, Jan is brought out of the hospital, saved with Bess dead, but in the final shot, unlike anything else in the film – no handheld camera, no washed-out color – in extreme long shot are the bells of heaven ringing a benediction through the parting clouds. It is surreal and so right. There is nothing like this in the opera. In Mazzoli, the bells are mute.
Breaking the Waves continues through May 4 at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 26; 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 30; 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 2; and 2 p.m. Sunday, May 4 at Houston Grand Opera, Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas. Sung in English with projected English text. Not suitable for young audiences. For more information, call 713-228-6737 or visit houstongrandopera.org. $25-$210.
