Flight

Flight is a beautiful and profound opera scored by Jonathan Dove to a libretto by April De Angelis.  The opera was premiered in 1998 at  Glyndebourne and has been mounted many times since that time.  Flight is a work that seems poised to enter the opera repertoire and is artistically more successful than many other recent operas including the much-praised, but clueless Silent Night.  Dove understands the form and grasps that characters must be broadly rendered yet still be recognizably human.  The opera has a classical form, three acts that can be understood as setting up the action and identifying conflicts that must be resolved, a central bridge that represents the issues that the work poses in a more stylized and, even, visionary mode, and, then, at last, a climax that resolves most of the conflicts.  In opera, it's important that the orchestra be accorded a primary role in driving the action, or commenting on it -- Dove grasps this and doesn't merely illustrate the libretto (although he does this with exquisite taste) but, also, provides musical rhetoric that amplifies and complicates his themes.

Flight's form is ancient, harkening back to Boccaccio and Chaucer -- stranded travelers tell one another their stories and interact during a hiatus in their pilgrimage.  The opera is set in an anonymous airport terminal, near the gates.  (In 1998, you could just walk up to a gate -- of course, post 9-11 security is not in evidence.)  The gate area is depicted with reasonable factual accuracy and some of the action involves the push-carts, enigmatic cabinets on wheels, that are ubiquitous in airports.  About 8 screens are stacked up above a steel stairway that represents the jetway to the plane.  The screens, forming a big rectangle, represent the exterior:  sometimes, all screens combine to show us the turbulent sky foaming with big clouds; sometimes, the screens give us a vision of the sky from the cockpit of a flying jet; on other occasions, the screens show separate images simultaneously presenting images of the sky, the control tower, and planes either landing or taking off.  As the action commences, we see travelers, very convincingly represented in sweatshirts and stretchpants, de-planing past a shabby-looking man who seems to be from North Africa.  This is the Refugee, a stateless immigrant who has been trapped in the airport for many months, possibly even years.  He pushes a cart with a sack containing his belongings and idly begs for food or money from the passengers rushing by him.  Tina and Bill are a married couple, planning a holiday in some warm place with beaches.  They are estranged and have decided that the holiday will be their last effort at reconciling -- if only, perhaps, sexually.  Tina carries something like self-help marriage manual and she accuses Bill of being sexually uninventive and unimaginative.  A lonely 52-year old woman has come to the gate to meet her "fiancée" -- actually a young man from some Third World country with whom she had a brief affair and with whom she has been corresponding.  The young man has said he will fly to see her on a Wednesday, but hasn't specified which Wednesday.  A pregnant woman is bound for Minsk with her diplomat husband -- at the last moment, she becomes violently fearful and homesick and can't bring herself to board the plane.  Her diplomat husband goes ahead without her and takes off on the plane -- we see his worried-looking face projected in one of the screen above the stage.  A steward and stewardess in red uniforms are conducting a torrid, purely physical sexual affair -- they couple in broom-closets (although I wasn't able to see the sex scene because my seat doesn't provide me with a line-of-sight to the extreme left of the stage -- this is unfortunate, because the scene was apparently very funny:  everyone else who could see it laughed merrily.)   A thunderstorm blows up over the airport and there is high wind, much lightning, and a downpour.  All flights are delayed.  The second act has a Shakespearean tinge, a bit like one of his enchanted forests in which lovers wander, separating and, then, reconnecting with one another after various misadventures  -- during the period that the passengers are stranded, they get drunk, confess secrets to one another, and get involved in various kinds of mischief.  The diplomat's wife confesses that she is depressed because the baby that she is about to deliver will destroy her freedom; Bill and Tina argue more violently and Bill, trying to seduce the randy Stewardess, ends up in a sexual encounter with the Steward instead.  The 52-year old woman gets drunk with Tina, the diplomat's wife, and the Stewardess who is planning, it seems, to break things off with the Steward.

It's dawn as the third act begins.  The skies are clear and the sunrise is beautiful.  Bill confesses his liaison with the Steward -- he doesn't have much choice since the Steward wanders into the scene wearing Bill's trousers (Bill is without pants).  Tina knocks Bill out with the self-help sex manual.  The diplomat's wife has her baby, immediately after her husband returns, having flown back from Minsk.  The lonely middle-aged woman realizes that her lover is not coming to meet her.  The presence of the baby has a magical effect on the characters:  the infant represents hope and new beginnings and Bill reconciles with Tina (when he wakes up); the Steward and Stewardess fly off on separate planes; the middle-aged lady flies off on a holiday herself, accompanying Bill and Tina.  The trapped Refugee is left alone on stage as the music vaults skyward, fanfares announcing the planes ascending into the clouds.

The pivotal figure in the opera is the Refugee living as a nomad in the airport terminal.  (The story is based on a real event involving a man who was trapped for ten years or more at the De Gaulle Airport -- in 2006, Steven Spielberg used this premise as the basis for his movie, The Terminal).  The Refugee is an exotic magical figure, a sort of melancholy soothsayer, and he is set apart from the others because of his very high counter-tenor voice.  He sings in a register higher than the women passengers, for instance.  The Refugee deals in supposedly magical stones that grant wishes and, in the course of the opera, he gives one stone to each of the couples, wishing them well on their travels.  During the interregnum in Act Two, the women all discover that they have been given, more or less identical stones, by the refugee and feel betrayed and defrauded -- they are drunk literally beat the Refugee unconscious and, then, hide is inert body in one of the luggage bins on wheels.  Later, after the baby's birth has brightened the mood and suggested new hope to everyone, the characters all league together to protect him against an Immigration Agent who has been prowling the airport looking for the Refugee -- the separate strands of the plot all unite convincingly in the scene in which the passengers defend the Refugee.  In the end, the Immigration Agent behaves as well as he can -- he agrees to allow the hapless Refugee to remain in the airport and does not take him into custody.  The Refugee, who is a character with quasi-supernatural aspects, a symbolic figure, has as his correlate t The Controller.  The Controller sings about an octave above the range of most coloratura sopranos -- most of the time, her voice comes from the tower, high above.  She is an angelic or divine presence who wears a red uniform when we see her briefly on-stage.  The Controller has been exchanging gazes with the Refugee and feels she has a special bond with him -- at the end of the opera, the Controller announces her joy that the Refugee will remain in the terminal, her solace during the happiest parts of the day or night when there are no people, no passengers, in the airport.  This is not a warm or fuzzy ending -- we have seen that the Controller is weirdly cruel on occasion and, in fact, seems to despise the people scurrying through her airport.  She is an indifferent God, mostly unconcerned about human suffering and, indeed, even contemptuous of it.  Her high-pitched shrieking arias convince us that the bond between the Refugee and the Controller has sinister implications -- she seems to be a "weird" sister, a witch that embodies malign Fate.

There is much to admire in the opera.  The libretto is composed in a telegraphically terse, internally rhymed poetry -- it's doggerel, what the  Germans call Knittelvers, somewhat similar to the laconic, alliterative poetry that Wagner forged for this Ring cycle:  "The pining wind/ pining us down" -- "The blue around the eyes/ is supposed to represent continuous surprise" (a description of the middle-aged woman's make-up).  The Immigration Officer ties all strands in the opera together with the line rendered to the Refugee:  "You can't fool rules/ They're inexorable/ As hair turning gray or love fading away."  These lines represent the Refugee's dilemma, the middle-aged woman's anxiety about being too young for her "fiancé", and the estrangement growing between Bill and Tina.  When the Immigration Agent sings about a "frozen man falling from the sky like a frozen star", he is referring to the fate of the Refugee's twin brother -- the two men stowed aboard a jet in the exterior wheel-well and the Refugee's sibling froze to death and fell from the plane while it was descending to land.  The reference to stars, however, also echoes poetry about the birth of the baby whose eyes are said to be radiant "stars" as well.  The opera is fundamentally kindly about human nature but it's not sentimental -- the women in the terminal beat the Refugee unconscious before they, later, try to save him.  The concluding bars in the opera are Wagnerian -- the Controllers wild whoops above thunderous music representing the jet taking off are like the cries of the Valkyries as they ride the storm over battlefields in Wagner's Ring.  The orchestral part is very complex, involving electronic sounds like beeps and radar pings, soft passages with xylophone that sound like Indonesian gamelan music, and spectacular vaulting fanfares representing planes taking off and swooping through majestic clouds.  The performance of the opera that I saw on the 2nd of February seemed pretty much flawless -- the only problem that I perceived was that it took the Refugee a few minutes to warm-up his biting counter-tenor and I couldn't hear his initial notes over the orchestra when he first sang.  There's a tremendous aria called "I bought this suit case in New York City" in which the mother-to-be laments her anticipated loss of freedom -- instead of Dior scarves, her suitcase will now have to be full of diapers and baby bottles.  As the song picks up force, the woman is accompanied by chorus of people snoring -- the sounds stylized into a sort of ambient drone.  It's wonderfully effective.  In general, the score features a huge range of sounds and spans as many octaves as you can imagine -- it leaps and lunges like a windhover.  At one point, I saw the musician playing a big tuba insert a yard-long mute into his horn -- this was a spectacular sight and consolation, I suppose, for the fact that, although my seat deprived me a vantage on the sex scene, I can look straight down into the orchestral pit. (The percussion parts must be very difficult:  the several percussionists in the band all beamed with relief when the piece was over and either high-fived or shook hands.)