MUSIC : Symbionese Liberation Opera : ‘Tania’ uses Patty Hearst as a vehicle to raise questions about revolution, social change and the disintegration of personal identity

Yesterday’s news is today’s libretto.

That’s become a maxim for contemporary opera, best exemplified by John Adams’ “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer.” But even before Adams, there was composer Anthony Davis, who in 1986 premiered his “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.” Along with those works, and a handful of others, it suggests that opera, and society, are undergoing an interesting evolution.

“Opera has been hiding out,” Davis says. “It buried itself in its own past, its own traditions; it was much more secure to deal with Greek myths or other, distant historical themes.”

Now Davis is again making a contribution to the genre with “Tania,” which opens at Philadelphia’s American Music Theater Festival on Wednesday. It’s the product of two unlikely inspirations: Mozart’s “Abduction From the Seraglio” and the media spectacle of Patty Hearst’s kidnaping. Davis was looking for a subject that would raise questions about revolution, social change and the disintegration of personal identity. At first he thought Mozart’s 1782 comic opera could be updated and restaged in the confusing, violent milieu of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

“I wonder if ‘Abduction’ could be done as the Patty Hearst story, but I knew the Mozart, the music, wouldn’t support it,” says Davis, after an intense, all-day rehearsal. “I decided it made more sense to write original music for the story, and to distance it, artistically, from the actual events of the kidnaping so as to emphasize the more general drama of Patty’s transformation, her change from Patty to Tania (the name given her by the Symbionese Liberation Army) back to Patty.”

The result is a free-form one-act fantasy on the life of a wealthy heiress with a suspicious resemblance to Patty Hearst (but named simply Patty in the opera). The work mixes video images with live performance, and concentrates on the psychological changes in its title character, rather than on the details of her capture, brainwashing and rehabilitation. Fidel Castro and Betty Ford make cameo appearances in this often-surreal work. The libretto is by Michael John LaChiusa (a composer and the 1987 winner of the Stephen Sondheim Award for composition). The production is directed by Christopher Alden, a veteran of opera’s avant-garde, who might easily be tempted to follow through with Davis’ original idea about restaging Mozart.

In an opera world that often celebrates the director over the composer, the importance of Davis’ decision to create a new work, rather than gussy up an old one, is easily overlooked. Indeed, the traditional opera Establishment has been overlooking Anthony Davis for a long time. Despite his skillful and energetic fusion of atonality, jazz and lyricism, despite his originality and keen dramatic sense, his widely acclaimed “X” hasn’t been produced since it appeared at the New York City Opera in 1986. (A concert version has toured, however.) He is hoping that the well-monied decision-makers of the opera world, who find it difficult to label Davis’ quirky talents, will treat “Tania” a little more generously.

A lot depends on a critical milieu that is still wrestling with the juxtaposition of a traditional form with current events. But it isn’t just that opera is trying to take on relevant subject matter, or gain attention through controversy. (Davis chose his subject in part because it was 20 years old and is thus free of any cheap shock value.) Davis’ “Tania” suggests something deeper about society: It seems that our media-dominated, fractured and frenetic world is an inherently more operatic place than it used to be. The visions CNN dishes up around the clock--major politicians arguing with fictional TV characters, for instance--are no more absurd than, say, the libretto of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.” Something has changed about reality itself.

“It is a really wild story,” says librettist LaChiusa about Hearst’s kidnaping and her infamous participation in an SLA bank robbery. “It is as wild and implausible as ‘Turandot.’ That really attracted me to the story.”

Davis agrees: “It was such a bizarre and unlikely transformation, and I think the implausibility of it is what makes it so fun--and so operatic. Patty Hearst’s story stretches things, and opera has always stretched things, always pushed the limits of the credible. I felt the same way about the odyssey of Malcolm X, through his spiritual changes. Both of these characters work because they are larger than life, they are icons in their own time.”

But there is more to opera than strange, unlikely story lines. Davis also suggests that the scenario of “Tania” is, like many operas, mythological.

“It is easy to do another Oedipus, or Orpheus story, but it is more challenging to look for, and explore the myths of our own time, our own American mythology,” says Davis, who argues that the power of media and electronic communication makes even very recent events take on societal, and mythological, resonance.

To demonstrate that, “Tania” features a continual interaction between its live singers and their images on television. These mirror images, and the disturbing power of the television to instantly transform, commodify and mythologize history, clearly fascinate everyone involved in the project, including soprano Cynthia Aaronson, who takes the title role.

“She was a media star, a media creation,” Aaronson says. “Every week it was ‘Where is Patty now?’ and ‘What is she up to?’ I think she was really the first big, gossipy kind of media phenomenon, the kind of story people followed and followed and followed.”

LaChiusa, who says he used to play “Patty Hearst and the SLA” games as a child, sees the power of the media as the defining characteristic of our time. “We used to define ourselves through the words, the actions, of our leaders and artists. But today we’ve created a celebrity-based society. Celebrity, which means nothing by itself, is the only thing that gives people identity. It created Patty Hearst, it created Tania. Image is all-important.”

While Davis regrets the political and social consequences of our sophisticated media culture, he is self-conscious about the artistic possibilities it creates. His opera, he argues, uses the same media techniques--to invent, inflect and rearrange events. It has allowed him to turn “Tania” into a personal mediation on identity, free from any documentary concern for accuracy.

“As an artist, I’m not a slave to the event, but the event, rather, serves the art. I am just as bad as the media in that sense,” he says, laughing. One senses that, for a composer like Davis, even the media sound bite has musical consequences; the leitmotif and the jingle share a common ancestry.

Despite the television screens, the pointed references to our materialistic present and the disturbing visions of modern terrorism, “Tania” is still part of the traditional continuum of opera. Not only is it implausible and mythic, but it also reproduces opera’s centuries-old fascination with the destruction of women, as well as the 19th-Century (and very Wagnerian) fantasy of sexual liberation. Sexual aggression and the search for personal identity have replaced the usual operatic mix of romance and duty, but Patty is still a close cousin to the femmes fatales of opera past. That may be the work’s most disturbing and controversial aspect.

“Even though we are not really doing the Patty Hearst story, but just a Patty story, I always feel, after being blindfolded, pushed around and raped, that it must have been amazing what she went through,” Aaronson says. “The rape, for me, is also, in some ways, a release. It is the sort of shock to the system that left her so vulnerable to the probing, the brainwashing.”

“It is part of the ultimate disintegration of her personality,” adds Davis, whose soft-spoken, shy personality contrasts starkly with the violence and pessimism of his work. He acknowledges that this most recent work offers no encouraging sense of spiritual discovery, as did his opera about Malcolm X, and that it depicts a frustrating sense of impotence that is just below the surface of contemporary society.

“Anger and rage are everywhere. We never confront it in this society. There is too much inequity, too much anger. Everyone needs a vehicle for it, some way to confront it and go past it.”

That rage has definite implications for the artist as well. “If you don’t violate the comfort zone, then you’re only reinforcing people’s assumptions about things, and you might as well be making a commercial,” says Davis, using perhaps the strongest epithet available to the electronic-media-conscious composer.