Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which had its première last month at the Metropolitan Opera, begins with a prologue marked “Dreamily, from the depths.” Woodwinds skitter about and trill; harps glissando mysteriously; strings sustain a distant dissonant chord; brass emit softly clashing tones. Over this wash of sound, the chorus sings fragmentary phrases that coalesce into a familiar sentence: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” This, we are meant to think, is the creative subconscious of Virginia Woolf as she works on “Mrs. Dalloway,” her most famous novel, in 1923. Later, we see Woolf struggling to recall that opening line, which came to her as she was waking up. Her husband, Leonard, tells her, “You’ll find it again.”
“The Hours” is based on Michael Cunningham’s novel, which appeared in 1998, and on Stephen Daldry’s film adaptation of the book, which was released in 2002. All three works feature Woolf as a central character and emulate the themes of “Mrs. Dalloway.” Three stories are intertwined: that of Clarissa, a book editor who is leading a Dalloway-like life in modern New York; that of Laura, a postwar Los Angeles housewife who is reading “Mrs. Dalloway” and battling depression; and that of Woolf herself, writing through inner crisis.
Dramatizing the creative process of a major artist always risks bathos. I enjoy cringing at the memory of the Paris-in-the-twenties film “The Moderns,” in which Hemingway mutters to himself, “Paris is a bon repas, a travelling picnic. . . . Paris is a portable banquet.” The sentence-hunting exercise in the various iterations of “The Hours” isn’t as risible as that, but it still has the odor of cliché. Furthermore, it’s at odds with the textual history of the novel. An earlier version of the line, in a story published in 1923, was “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself.” Woolf inserted the flowers at a later stage. But revision doesn’t lend itself to romanticization.
Bio-pic tropes aside, “The Hours” is a finely crafted, smartly paced opera, one that maintains and even deepens the intricate narrative structure it inherits from the novel and the film. The libretto is by Greg Pierce, who in 2016 collaborated with the composer Gregory Spears on “Fellow Travelers,” a haunting tale of gay life during the Cold War. Pierce is expert at engineering deft transitions and at condensing personalities into terse lines. For “The Hours,” he has designed duets and trios in which the three main characters commune with one another across time, their psychologies and preoccupations overlapping. The première production, directed by Phelim McDermott, capitalizes on that chronological blur, with rapidly shifting backdrops and scurrying squads of choristers, dancers, and supernumeraries.
What the opera lacks, however, is a compositional identity distinct enough to hold its own against the jumpy genius of Woolf’s prose—or, for that matter, against the indelible musical signature of Philip Glass, who scored the film. Puts takes cues from the American neo-Romantic tradition, particularly the lush nostalgia of Samuel Barber. He fashions sumptuous orchestrations and writes singable, soaring vocal lines. But he does not generate memorable melodies, and he leans too often on sombrely swelling textures, which bring to mind the consolatory end-credits music for a Hollywood war epic. In the prologue, he tries for something more experimental, echoing Kaija Saariaho and John Adams. The net effect is glib and insubstantial—sleek professionalism in place of raw imagination.
“The Hours” is still worth seeing for its formidable cast—above all, for Joyce DiDonato. The increasingly incomparable mezzo-soprano delivers an astonishing physical impersonation of Woolf, her body language hunched, flinching, but determined; several times, I had to remind myself who was onstage. DiDonato was last seen at the Met in the glittering, devious title role of Handel’s “Agrippina.” In “The Hours,” she adopts a drastically different vocal persona, unleashing foghorn tones in her lower range and searchlight timbres up top. Most important, she finds passion and wit in a character who, in Nicole Kidman’s portrayal, came across as relentlessly dour.
Renée Fleming, absent from the Met since 2017, returns with her celebrated high notes remarkably well preserved. If, on opening night, she struggled to make herself heard in the middle and lower registers, she nonetheless delineated her role sharply. Kelli O’Hara, as Laura, showed off the crisp diction and pointed phrasing one expects of a Broadway veteran. Among a host of gifted supporting singers, Kyle Ketelsen stood out for his wrenching turn as Richard, a poet-novelist in the grip of aids dementia. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, in the pit, luxuriated in Puts’s orchestral colors without overwhelming the singers. Given that “The Hours” pays tribute to an august feminist writer, the maleness of the lead creative team was conspicuous: the choreographer Annie-B Parson was the only woman in the group.
Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’s “Omar,” an operatic meditation on suffering and spirituality in nineteenth-century Black America, had its première at the Spoleto Festival this past spring and played at L.A. Opera in October and November. It’s part of a welcome wave of Black opera at leading American companies; last season, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” triumphed at the Met and Anthony Davis’s “X” had a notable revival at Detroit Opera. Giddens, who composed “Omar” with Abels, also belongs to a growing cohort of American women taking possession of contemporary opera. “Omar” can be named alongside Du Yun’s “In Our Daughter’s Eyes,” another L.A. Opera presentation, and Missy Mazzoli’s “The Listeners,” accessible on streaming video from the Norwegian Opera, as one of the year’s strongest music-theatre scores.
The libretto of “Omar,” fashioned by Giddens, is based on the life of Omar ibn Said, a West African Muslim scholar who was enslaved and brought to South Carolina in 1807, and who later wrote a memoir, in Arabic. The opera recounts the terrors of the Middle Passage, Omar’s ordeal under a sadistic plantation owner, his escape and recapture, and his subsequent life in a less inhumane environment. A somewhat thinly sketched group of characters surrounds the protagonist; the strength of the conception lies less in its narrative energy than in its ritual atmosphere.
The composers thrive on the intersection of traditions. Giddens, a North Carolina native, is a singular presence in American culture: an Oberlin-trained opera singer who has turned to the cultivation of banjo and fiddle music, with an emphasis on its Black roots. Abels has made his name in concert music, choral music, and film scoring, winning notice especially for his chameleonic contributions to Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” “Us,” and “Nope.” Giddens insures a freshness of melodic invention and rhythmic play; Abels is as virtuosic an orchestrator as Puts. Spirituals, hymns, Islamic cantillation, West African drumming, square dancing, Italianate lyricism, and Wagnerian grandeur coexist in uneasy vitality, showing both the promise and the limitations of music as a medium of cross-cultural understanding.
Kaneza Schaal directed the show with a keen sense of ceremonial movement. The sets, by Christopher Myers, made mesmerizing use of textual motifs, in Arabic and English. Jamez McCorkle delivered a grittily noble performance as Omar, his tenor focussed in pitch and rugged in timbre. Amanda Lynn Bottoms lent weight to the formulaic role of Omar’s sorrowing mother; Jacqueline Echols, as an enslaved woman named Julie, sang with a room-filling radiance of tone that promises a major career. Kazem Abdullah elicited vibrant sounds from the L.A. Opera orchestra and chorus. In the final scene, soloists and choristers left the stage and took positions all around the auditorium, singing a meticulously layered, hypnotically incantatory hymn in praise of Allah. This was the second time this year that I had heard such an anthem in the opera house; the first was Malcolm X’s pilgrimage to Mecca in “X.” In both cases, the shiver of exaltation stayed with me for a long while. ♦
