When Leonard Foglia was invited to direct An opera Based on Herman Melville’s masterpiece on a white whale, his first reaction was: “Moby-Deck. Brilliant!”
“Then I ran to a library used and obtained the book,” he recalled, “and I thought: ‘Oh my God, what am I here?’ He is so discouraging. “
How did he and his collaborators be exhibited in the Metropolitan opera As of March 3. The opera is composed of Jake Heggie to a script designed by Gene Scheer.
To start, Scheer had to whittle A novel of more than 600 pages to a 64 -page libretto. He maintained Melville’s greatest amount of language as possible, and estimates that from 40% to 50% of his script can be found in the original text, although he often modified the writing to make it more singable.
Heggie and his initial partner, Terrence McNally (who retired for health reasons), had already decided to drop the opening chapters, which take place on land. They established all the opera aboard the Pequod whale hunting ship.
Another crucial change was to change the narrator’s name, calling him Greenhorn to reflect his rookie status aboard the ship. Now the famous book opening line, “Call Me Ismael”, is transposed at the end of the opera when the character has matured.
“In the novel, Ismael is telling a story that happened many years ago,” said Scheer. “But in the theater, you want to see what happens in real time. … We are seeing it enjoy all the experiences so that when I say ‘Call me Ismael’, you are ready to write the book. In essence, this opera is Ismael’s education. “
The tenor Stephen Costello, who is playing the role for the fifth time and is the only enriching of the Dallas premiere in 2010, sees his character as “the only one who really has an arc.”
“Go up to Pequod because there was nothing to him on the ground,” Costello said. “Then he will die at sea or discover who he is.”
In addition to Costello, the Met cast includes Tenor Brandon Jovanovich as Captain Ahab obsessed with revenge. Pip, his booth boy, is written as a “paper of pants” (a male character portrayed by a woman) and will be sung by the soprano Janai Brugger. Starbuck, the first partner, will be the baritone Peter Mattei, and Bass-Baritone Ryan Speedo Green will sing the Queequeg part. Karen Kamensek performs eight performances until March 29.
The opera, in charge of celebrating the opening of a new opera in Dallas, has been a success from the beginning, praising the public and critics, and even academics.
Bob Wallace, professor at Northern Kentucky University and former president of Melville Society, admired the opera so much that a book about its creation wrote.
“Scheer and Heggie did a brilliant job by reducing the novel to fit the stage and yet preserve much of their essence,” he said in an interview.
As much as the critics admired the adaptation of Scheer and the Heggie score, atmospheric and sometimes exciting, special praise on physical production, with Robert Brill sets and projections of Elaine J. McCarthy.
The action, Steve Smith wrote at the New York Times, “He played against an enriched multimedia enriched that went from striking to almost miraculous.”
Perhaps the most impressive effect is the way in which the animated projections overlapping on a climbing wall that curves a bit like a skirt ramp creates the illusion of the crew left by the Pequod to board three whaling ships.
“Much of the emotion and emotion of seeing this is due to the work of the production team,” said Scheer. “Lenny told me: ‘You imagine how you want it and let me discover how to do it.”
That often involved imposing unusual physical demands on singers. For example, when PIP is lost in the sea, his character sings the equivalent of a crazy opeistic scene hanging over the stage, with projections that seem to be treading water.
“I told Janai when we rehearse it for the first time,” Foglia recalled, “that’s fine, you can get angry with me now, because you have to sing your hardest aria hanging even a complete harness, just a cable.”
In addition, Queequeg and Greenhorn go up and down the stairs to sing at the top of the heads. Ahab, who has lost a leg in a previous encounter with Moby-Deck, has to limit in a wooden prosthesis. And Greenhorn, finally called Ismael, ends the opera grabbing a whale hook of a ship that passes it to a safe place.
“Brome with them that everything that opera singers tell in life, with both feet planted on the ground, I have removed,” said Foglia.
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This story was published for the first time on February 26, 2025. It was updated on February 28, 2025 to correct the name of the Northern Kentucky University.
