A Fine Musical Bridge to ‘View’

Arthur Miller’s most operatic play, “A View From the Bridge,” is now, for the second time, an opera. The first was an obscure, old-fashioned, verismo Italian-language work by Renzo Rossellini, best known for his scores to the films of his brother, Roberto. The new “View,” by William Bolcom, has a libretto by Arnold Weinstein in collaboration with Miller (the first time the playwright has worked in traditional opera). It was given its high-profile premiere by Chicago Lyric Opera on Saturday night as the culmination of the company’s program of performing a recent or new American opera each season this decade.

This second “View” is admirable. Bolcom has said that he set out to create a Brooklyn-ized Italian opera, and that is exactly what Miller’s 1957 play, a view of festering emotions of Italian American dockworkers on the Brooklyn waterfront, implies. Weinstein has done a brilliant job of demonstrating just how much Miller’s dialogue (some taken from an earlier version of the play) is often a sly poetry that already implies song.

And Bolcom has written terrific music. He and Weinstein are collaborators of 30 years, and together they have produced some of the best of modern American song, next to Sondheim. The aria “New York Lights,” which is sung by Rodolpho, an illegal immigrant newly off the boat from Italy, is another small masterpiece from them; I still can’t get it out of my head and don’t want to.

Bolcom is America’s most impressive musical eclectic. His first opera, “McTeague,” which premiered at Lyric Opera seven years ago, is a stylistic panorama. “View” is less so. Although jazz, blues and ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll are all implied--and a thematic element of the score is the old standard “Paper Doll,” a song that also recurs as a thematic element in the play--Bolcom has managed to find here a style that is consistent, current, distinct yet just spongy enough to absorb what he needs. His vocal writing is gracious; he makes words mean something.

Some Troubling Questions Persist

And yet his opera, good as it is, asks troubling questions, questions Bolcom says in the program book that he asked himself over and over again during the creation of this project. Why write this opera? Would his music be merely a gilding of the lily of this great American play?

Although I only read the notes afterward, I found myself asking those same questions as well during the performance. Miller’s play follows the slow combustion of a tragic figure, Eddie Carbone, who has repressed his lust for his niece, Catherine, and lets it erode his sanity, as he takes out his frustrations on his wife Beatrice’s two illegal immigrant cousins whom they are harboring. One, Rodolpho, falls in love with Catherine; the other, Marco, ends up killing Eddie.

“View” is an extraordinary play precisely because it is so operatic without music. Its subversive implication of music operates on us just the way Eddie’s inchoate emotions do on him--something wants out. The tension is acute.

Bolcom, as only a master could, has found exactly the music Miller implied. And wonderful though it may be, letting it out diffuses the drama. For instance, when Beatrice asks Eddie when he will be a husband to her again, her climactic singing does not allow the audience that quiet split-second of revelation that a great stage actress will bring to the play.

In the end we don’t have Bolcom’s “View” so much as we have Bolcom’s Miller, a subtle but crucial difference. Miller encouraged “operatizing” the text, and Weinstein and Bolcom did so creatively (their use of the neighborhood people as a kind of Greek chorus is a stroke of genius). But if Bolcom does go beyond gilding the lily, it is to explain Miller to us, not to transform him. And Lyric Opera has reinforced that with Santo Loquasto’s traditional if clever set and Frank Galati’s conventional if highly competent production, which further underlines every emotion.

A Highly Polished Cast and Conductor

It is almost impossible to find fault in the uniformly excellent cast. Kim Josephson has captured every tic of Eddie; Catherine Malfitano relishes making Beatrice the moral soul of the opera; Juliana Rambaldi’s Catherine is a fine portrayal of young womanhood in bloom; Gregory Turay is the ebullient Rodolpho; Mark McCrory is a marvelously intimidating Marco. Only Timothy Nolan’s role as the lawyer Alfieri seemed dispensable, because the character has been partially turned into the leader of the chorus narrating the events. Dennis Russell Davies is the conductor, and he is one of a kind. This did not feel like the first performance at all, but one that had already been completely internalized.

Like “McTeague” before it--and even more so--”A View From the Bridge” shows Bolcom and Weinstein on the verge of a great American opera. Anyone eager to commission the next collaboration from this pair could get very lucky.

* “A View From the Bridge” runs through Nov. 5 at the Civic Opera House, Chicago. (312) 332-2244, Ext. 500. https://www.lyricopera.org.