OPERA REVIEWS : Dominick Argento’s ‘Aspern Papers’ Premieres

Pulitzer Prize-winning opera composer Dominick Argento says that writing minimalist music is trendy “because it’s pretty easy to do.” In his own, non-minimalist works, the “entire impulse is to flatter voices, to release them in song . . . to have the drama percolate up through musical sounds that are irresistible.”

The drama that percolates up through “The Aspern Papers”--which the Dallas Opera commissioned from Argento (“Postcard From Morocco,” “Casanova,” “Miss Havisham’s Fire,” “The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe”) and which was given its world premiere Saturday night in the Fair Park Music Hall--is sometimes as starchy as the highly formal prose of the 1888 Henry James novella on which it is based.

But when given free rein to be lush and sweeping, Argento’s music, which has some 12-tone techniques tucked into the tunes and traditional tonalities, can be pretty irresistible.

Argento’s two-act, two-hour reworking of James’ tale seesaws between 1895 and ancient diva Juliana Bordereau’s youth 60 years earlier.

Renting rooms in Juliana’s Lake Como villa, a musical scholar called only The Lodger attempts to gain possession of the materials he believes the old lady has hoarded since her lover, composer Jeffrey Aspern, drowned Shelley-like in the lake while swimming to a tryst with a rising young singer. (The jealous Juliana set his boat adrift.)

The gem of the papers is the lost score of “Medea.” Taking her cue from the vengeful heroine, Juliana “kills” their “child” by saying Aspern burned the score just prior to his death. But we see a bit of the opera mimed in The Lodger’s imagination, as a silent opera-within-an-opera about opera folk.

A founder of Minnesota Opera and a University of Minnesota faculty member since 1958, composer-librettist Argento, 61, uses many lines from James’ novella. (By sheer coincidence, Philip Hagemann’s opera on the same subject was also premiered Saturday night, at Northwestern University.)

Much of the writing in “The Aspern Papers” is quasi-recitative, sometimes on one note. The graceful vocal lines for which Argento is often praised flow naturally, even when they explore the top of the singers’ voices. The plaintive phrases, of which this sad story has many, droop affectingly. And the orchestration is arresting and colorful without being showy.

One of the most striking elements in Argento’s palette is the invisible, wordless choir employed to make the memory scenes more hauntingly evocative. The device is used to superb effect in the final scene, when Juliana’s spinster niece Tina, matured by the pain of The Lodger’s flight after she told him he could have the papers if he became her husband, sends him packing and then burns “Medea,” one page at a time.

Singing a barcarole that Aspern wrote for her now-dead aunt, Tina is joined by Juliana and Aspern, his new mistress, her former lover (Aspern’s impresario) and The Lodger in a ravishing sextet, to which the celestial voices give a dangerous but delicious butterfat content.

Dallas Opera artistic director Nicola Rescigno led members of the Dallas Symphony in a fastidious account of Argento’s kaleidoscopic score. The staging by Mark Lamos, artistic director of the Hartford Stage Company, was fluid, economical and well-acted. John Conklin’s unit set--the villa’s garden and music room--was attractive if plain.

Veteran Swedish soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom was touching both as the young, heartbroken Juliana and the old, lonely one, her fragile but still-silvery voice imbuing the music with a special poignancy. Baritone Richard Stilwell was strained by The Lodger’s forceful music but suave and caressing in tender phrases. Frederica von Stade was an ideal Tina, her light mezzo-soprano tinged with sadness and quivering longing. Tenor Neil Rosenshein sang Aspern with squeezed but ardent tone.

As Aspern’s new mistress, Sonia, mezzo Katherine Ciesinski sang her bel canto-flavored “Medea” aria with mellow but unsteady tone. As Barelli the impresario, Eric Halfvarson anchored the ensembles with a cavernous but throaty bass.

Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw” will probably remain the foremost opera based on a Henry James yarn. But Argento’s “The Aspern Papers,” well launched by the Dallas Opera, doesn’t deserve to go the way of Aspern’s “Medea.”