A comfortable ‘Tragedy’

It was probably Puccini’s death in 1924 that caused the Metropolitan Opera to lose its taste for its times. But after a quarter-century of putting on not a single new opera, the Met finally began cautiously catching up in the early 1990s with occasional commissions.

These have turned out surprisingly well. Although none is a masterpiece, John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles,” Philip Glass’ “The Voyage” and John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby” have something to say dramatically and music worth hearing.

Unfortunately, the latest Met commission -- Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy,” which had its first performance Friday night -- has neither.

The production is handsome and sure. Friday’s performance proved enjoyable. Picker’s score contains lush, singable, flowing music, easy on the ear. Gene Scheer’s libretto is, to a fault, literate and considerate of composer, singer and audience.

But three-hours plus in the Met’s plush seats, hearing a plush pit orchestra play plush music under a plush set populated by plush-voiced singers, conventionally illustrating the high points of Theodore Dreiser’s classic novel, reminded me of those deluxe Grand Hyatt hotels springing up in places like Berlin and Tokyo. The decor is appealing, and the comfort level is very high. A veneer of sophistication is unmistakable, as is a certain design imagination. But even though such hotels hope to be attractions in their own right, they are ultimately bland, soulless places serving to shield the rich from a city’s culture.

Picker’s operas are similar shields. He pays lip service to social concerns and class differences, but ultimately his is an art of accommodation -- to singers stuck in the past, to audiences wanting what they already know and to opera companies eyeing donors’ checkbooks.

His first opera, “Emmeline,” is a tight, nasty, Oedipal drama in which passions sear through effective, if predictable, music and stagecraft. “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” written for Los Angeles Opera, pits nature against man but lacks enchantment and grit. “Theres Raquin” is Zola softened.

Picker turned to Dreiser out of sentiment. His father loved the 900-page classic, and he loved the 1951 classic film, “A Place in the Sun.” Everybody loves “A Place in the Sun,” with a magnetically brooding Montgomery Clift playing a young social climber and a 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor displaying her sexual awakening for all to admire. It won six Oscars, one, most deservedly, for Franz Waxman’s embracingly lush score.

Picker, however, went the opposite direction of George Stevens, the film’s director. Instead of updating the 1925 novel as “A Place in the Sun” does, the opera returns to the period of the turn-of-the-century murder trial that inspired Dreiser.

A factory owner’s poor relation falls in love with a young socialite after having gotten a woman on the assembly line pregnant. Needing the latter out of the way, he lures her into a canoe on a lake in upstate New York, intending to drown her. He can’t go through with it, but when she accidentally slips from the boat, he doesn’t save her. He is convicted of murder and sent to the electric chair.

The opera does a strong job of setting the scene. Picker’s inexorable stream of lyric music acts like a society. It has a mind of its own and can’t be stopped. Picker is traditional in his production of arias, duets, trios and ensemble numbers that seamlessly connect to a thread of arioso.

Francesca Zambello’s production is as fluid as the score. Working on Adrianne Lobel’s three-level set with elegant movable panels stunningly lighted by James F. Ingalls, Zambello cleverly creates a sense of drama gracefully taking place in many arenas. Dunya Ramicova’s costumes capture the era.

But the music is too pallid for strong characterization. Picker makes easy choices. Clyde Griffiths, sung by Nathan Gunn, is a too transparent protagonist. First seen as a boy (Graham Phillips) under the yoke of his evangelical mother (in a gripping performance by Dolora Zajick), his music is churchy. In the second act, a long, dramatically turgid scene in the pews seems to exist so that Picker can write some Puccini-esque church music on a grander scale.

This is just one of the opera’s many anticlimactic big climaxes, moments when the music works up to a big statement without having a real impact. As the socialite, Sondra Finchley, Susan Graham sings with succulent smoothness, but she brings little erotic charge. Her big aria, “New York has changed me,” is a gee-whiz Big Apple anthem, obviously intended to have a life of its own.

Patricia Racette, the factory girl Roberta Alden whom Clyde is accused of murdering, is lustier and hardly unappealing, which makes Clyde seem more manipulative than in either the novel or movie (in which Clift and Taylor exhibited some of Hollywood’s most memorable sexual chemistry, marvelously enhanced by Waxman).

Gunn’s Clyde, well enough sung but without personality, is a handsome hunk, who seems neither here nor there. He takes what is put before him. His moral dilemma -- which leads to his repentance for not saving Roberta -- doesn’t much register. You get the feeling that he could have gotten off if he had tried harder.

Richard Bernstein brings avid conviction to a dog-with-bone prosecutor, Orville Mason. But by the time we reach the trial scene, the hour is late and nearly all the steam has left the drama. Jennifer Larmore, not heard from much these days, is a powerhouse in her cameo as the society wife, Elizabeth Griffiths. The many small roles are all more than capable, with special notice to the high-flying singing of Anna Christy as Hortense, a chamber maid.

Picker writes expertly for orchestra -- his finest pieces are the orchestral scores he produced before turning to opera in 1996 -- and James Conlon had the Met orchestra sounding as excellent as ever. But Picker has an annoying habit of sounding too much like other composers at times. In “Fox” he came uncomfortably close to “Peter and the Wolf.” Here, a theme reminiscent of the storm music from Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” leads off the second act and returns often.

Word has it that the Met plans not only to accelerate its commissioning program once Peter Gelb takes over running the company next season, but that it will jump, head first, into the 21st century despite having all but missed three-quarters of the 20th. If that is so, “An American Tragedy” may come to be regarded as the company’s final bouquet thrown on the grave of Puccini.