The Hunchback Variations

The Hunchback Variations – In Mark Messing’s chamber opera, The Hunchback Variations, Quasimodo, the deformed bellringer of Notre Dame, distinguishes between two types of failure: some failures, the hunchback sings, yield derision, booing, rude noises, and laughter, but there is another kind of failure even more awful – the type of artistic calamity that results in stony, aghast silence. For a moment, at the end of this 90 minute opera, there is, indeed, silence – but this silence is the product of awe, surprise, and a surfeit of emotion: the audience grasps that they are in the presence of a work of genius. Messing’s score to a brilliant libretto by Mickle Maher relies upon two male voices, a piano sometimes played by plucking or striking its strings, and cello. Ludwig van Beethoven, nattily dressed and, almost oppressively optimistic and gay, has joined the dour, surly baritone, Quasimodo for a panel discussion. The two men sit at a table, Quasimodo’s side laden with various noisemakers – battered banjos, bicycle horns, drums. Beethoven tells the audience that the two men intend to discuss their efforts to recreate a strange and mysterious sound effect found in Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard. We learn that that the sound effect described by the dying Chekhov – he was ill and perishing when The Cherry Orchard was written – is integral to the play’s plot, a sound “that seems to come from the sky,” said to be like “a string snapping,” that dies “mournfully away.” Chekhov attended, we learn, the premiere of the play directed by Stanislavski, and described the great director’s sound effect contrived for the show as miserably “inadequate.” Quasimodo lives in a hut in the swamp, his wretched shack built around a “bell-table” (literally a bell stolen from Notre Dame). Beethoven tells us that he and Quasimodo spent many hours in that shack attempting to devise the sound that Chekhov requires for this his play – but they failed; hence, Quasimodo’s growled peroration on the two types of artistic failure. Beethoven and Quasimodo sing, mostly at and against one another, about their failure to reproduce the sound – each section, about five or six minutes long, reaches an impasse, ends with a black-out and, then, begins anew with Beethoven cheerfully greeting the audience, explaining that it is 1826 and that the format shall be a panel discussion. “We don’t take questions from the audience,” Beethoven says, “because, of course, we are both stone-deaf.” There are eleven separate variations – each of them sonically quite distinct: sometimes, the music is atonal, sometimes, dance-like, sometimes declamatory, and ending with an intensely moving hymn-like aria by Quasimodo. Quasimodo’s make-up is grotesque –one of his eyes is half expelled from its socket – and he wears ragged clothing. Beethoven is dressed casually in a jacket, shirt, and tie – he spends much of his time grinning in a particularly avuncular and sinister way. Quasimodo seems to blame Beethoven for their failure to produce the sound – an endeavor that he regards as tragically significant. Beethoven, ever the great man, is cheerful and somewhat indifferent: he has concluded that the sound may be simulated by thumbing the pages of a book of verse by Emily Dickinson. This outrages Quasimodo who believes that the sound must be literally reproduced from Chekhov’s opaque stage-direction. He shouts that Beethoven has not even attempted to make the sound and that his suggestion involving the book of poetry is a travesty – “Emily Dickinson has not even been born yet!’ Quasimodo bellows. Of course, Beethoven reminds the hunchback that he was born himself in the 14th century, that the panel discussion is occurring in 1826, and that Chekhov, for that matter, hasn’t been born yet either. (Much of the opera is exceedingly funny). As the opera progresses, the dialogue comes to resemble conversation in a play by Samuel Beckett – the two characters are trapped in a loop of failure, doomed to be unsuccessful since what they are attempting seems to be by definition impossible. So the opera is about how we fail, how life and art fails us, and how we must confront failure – should we be resigned or enraged or merely sardonically amused like Beethoven? In the end, Quasimodo’s great final hymn seems to suggest that life and experience will ultimately teach us what the sound means, how it might ring against a sky darkening as the light fades – everyone fails, life, indeed, is defined by failure. The task set for us is simply too much for our weak powers of imagination, invention, and courage. In a sense, the opera seems to me to perfectly distill Chekhov’s resignation, his sorrow, as well as his abundant and heartbreaking wit. The opera is an analog for Chekhov’s plays. I have rarely been so moved by an art work. Many people in the audience were in tears when the opera ended. This is the rarest of things – a great new work of art, but one that probably very few people will ever see. I hope that I am mistaken in that regard. (I saw this opera at a small theater – it seats 50 – called E59E on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on Sunday, July 1, 2012 at 3:15 pm; the theater is located at East 59th Street a half block from Park Avenue).