OPERA REVIEW : Henze, Mishima: An Odd Coupling

Hans Werner Henze’s latest opera--his 10th major effort for the stage--is called “Das Verratene Meer,” or, if you will, “The Sea Betrayed.” Abrasive yet lyrical, brutal yet introspective, it deals with betrayal on several levels--not all of them intentional.

For his literary source, the left-wing German composer, now 65, chose “Gogo No Eiko,” written in 1963 by a right-wing Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima. Americans know it in John Nathan’s translation as “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea,” the title that also adorned a simplistic film version with Sarah Miles and Kris Kristofferson in 1976.

Henze’s terse little shocker, which received its U.S. premiere at the San Francisco Opera on Friday, wants desperately to be tough, relevant and poignant. Despite moments of striking success, it ends up seeming self-consciously intellectual, emotionally confused and, its clanging musical and dramatic dissonances notwithstanding, a bit mushy.

After all his years as an avant-gardist, Henze emerges here as something of a closet romantic.

Together with his accommodating librettist, the poet Hans-Ulrich Treichel, the composer tried valiantly to unravel the gnarled knot of inter-related problems that troubled Mishima: the erosion of tradition, the clash or opposing cultures and of succeeding generations, the universality of guilt, the fatal conflict between personal honor and political passion.

Mishima saw ancient concepts of idealism corrupted by social evolution, by military expediency and sexual frustration. The inevitable result was violence, both physical and philosophical. That doesn’t translate easily into music.

The plot revolves around Fusako, a young widow who runs a European-style boutique in post-War Yokohama. She is torn between the needs of her precocious 13-year-old son, Noboru, and those of her lover, Ryuji, a dashing naval officer. The boy is obsessed with erotic confusion, with the symbolic allure of the sea and, crucially, with existential values that he shares with a gang of disaffected sadomasochists who might be misplaced refugees from “Clockwork Orange.” The man abandons his life of maritime adventure to become an amiable homebody, earning the boy’s fatal contempt in the process.

Henze has created music of immense complexity to accommodate the triangular crisis. Gentle strings are assigned to Fusako’s soprano cantilena, which erupts in frustrated lyrical spurts. Piano and an exotic percussion chorus nervously reinforce the expanded Sprechgesang of Noboru, here an awkwardly mature tenor. The winds are employed, not surprisingly, to buoy the ascending, would-be heroic utterances of Ryuji, a high baritone.

Although the instrumental typecasting is strikingly effective at first, the distinctions soon blur in ensembles that allow the principals and a huge Wagnerian orchestra to scream against each other. Passages of affecting delicacy and transparency give way to passages of numbing turgidity.

A past master of form, texture and structure, Henze manipulates his unwieldy forces with undeniable flexibility, if without much rhythmic vitality. He toys knowingly with serial techniques, and proves that the harmonic lessons of “Lulu” were not taught in vain.

He stoops to the facile device of taped sound effects, however, to evoke the lure of threatened nature here and the chaos of modern industry there. More disappointing, he studiously avoids cathartic climaxes, and often seems to confuse frenzy with passion. Ever cool and oddly conventional, “Das Verratene Meer” betrays dramatic pathos in favor of cerebral diligence.

There may be less here than meets the ear.

The San Francisco production was brilliantly conducted--with compelling sweep and amazing clarity--by Markus Stenz, who had led the Berlin premiere in May, 1990. At 26, he is one of Henze’s most persuasive exponents as well as one of his most faithful proteges. . Rhetorical sprawl and unwieldy force obviously do not intimidate him.

The uniformly strong cast seemed daunted neither by the angular vocal lines nor by the potentially awkward theatrical demands.

Ashley Putnam looked and sounded properly seductive as the willowy Fusako, though her radiant, fragile tones were sometimes blanketed by the massive orchestra. (The role was created in Berlin by Stephanie Sundine, a dramatic soprano capable of Tosca and Salome.) Craig Estep projected the pathetic desperation of Noboru with uncanny sensitivity and point. Tom Fox brought the innocent virility of Ryuji well into focus, and sang with firm baritonal ardor.

Noboru’s pals, who torture and kill a cat as prelude to dispatching the fallen sailor, were dominated with sinister authority by LeRoy Villanueva. A bravura countertenor named Brian Asawa magnetized attention as the slinkiest cohort. Timothy Jon Sarris and Micah Graber offered appreciatively insidious support. Still, one had to be troubled by Henze’s decision to send in men to do jobs intended for boys.

Christopher Alden, noted for the wildly adventurous productions he has staged in Long Beach, approached this challenge in a surprisingly conventional frame of mind. Within an economical unit set designed by Paul Steinberg (some evasive screens, a bank of glaring lights, a pair of sliding steel walls, a few pieces of furniture on a shiny raked stage), he moved the action with fluid ease from Zen garden to shady warehouse to dockside hide-out to bourgeois living room.

He focused the action deftly and defined the figures neatly, but avoided the flamboyant interpretive gestures that mark his most stimulating work. Perhaps he harbors too much respect for living composers.

The opera about Japan was sung by an American cast in the original German (beautifully articulated by all). This forced the distracted audience to pay undue attention to the supertitles projected high atop the proscenium. It may be worth noting that a sensible Italian translation was utilized when the opera was performed, as “Lo Sdegno del Mare,” at La Scala last March.

Incidental intelligence:

* The cast wore politically correct, geographically incorrect make-up that minimized Asian allusions and illusions.

* Strange newspaper ads for the premiere omitted the composer’s name and reduced the title of the opera to “Das V. Meer.”

* Opening-night attendance on the orchestra level was amazingly, painfully sparse.

* This boldface disclaimer was prominently printed in the program magazine: “The kitten used in all performances is at no time in danger of mistreatment and is at all times under the supervision of a professional handler. At the appropriate moment in the opera, it is replaced by a prop, while the live kitten ends up safely backstage.” Nevertheless, the feline victim of the gang of five must be a good actor, for it looked convincingly frightened at the grisly climax of Act One.