The stage of the Opéra de la Monnaie in Brussels suggests the rehearsal room of a theater school. The singers sit on tables around the empty playing area, dangle their legs and jump up every now and then to actively interfere in the story being negotiated here. Tables and chairs are moved from the edge of the stage to and fro as required, and serve as a school desk, hospital bed or dining table. The historical cuts of the epic family saga, which is about in the new opera “The Time of our Singing” by Kris Defoort, are documented with original film material on a large screen. When in the end, accompanied by a threatening roar of the low strings, images of the civil war-like “Los Angeles Riots” from 1992 rage across the screen, the director Ted Huffman lets the actors thunder the furniture into the center of the stage. The firstborn son of the family, Jonah, who made a career as a star tenor in Europe, is driving remorse back to the United States, right into the middle of these street battles. A stone caught his head. He dies.
Richard Power’s 800-page novel “The Time of our Singing”, which was published in Germany in 2004 under the clumsy title “The Sound of Time”, tells the story of the emigrated German-Jewish physicist David Strom and the black Delia Daley, who against all Resistance to start a family – at a time when a third of the American states were still criminalizing “interracial marriages”. For Defoort, who was born in Bruges in 1959 and is stylistically sitting between chairs, who studied baroque music and jazz, worked as a bar pianist and composed three operas that premiered in Brussels and at the Ruhrtriennale, this seems to be ideal material. For Powers not only cuts different levels of time and narrative against each other in his book, he also introduces music as the central protagonist. As a contemporary art that shows how harmony can succeed without suppressing polyphony, it forms the utopian counterpart to social reality.
Singing together every day welds the Strom-Daley family together. However, their different musical paths alienate the three siblings from one another. Successful in the classical world, Jonah is despised as a traitor by his younger sister Ruthie. Ruthie defines herself as black, joins the revolutionary movement of the Black Panthers and is musically at home in hip hop. Joey is desperate between the two worlds and tries to bring the family back together. In a society whose racist will to segregate is merciless, as children of a mixed marriage they are internally torn. Defoort, who describes a colorful eclecticism of idioms as his “compositional DNA”, is preparing to reconcile this conflict with his music.
The composer Kris Defoort is at home in all styles and has already written three operas.
(Photo: Stefaan Temmerman / Théâtre de la Monnaie)
In the ditch, the conductor Kwamé Ryan fires the chamber orchestra of the Opéra de la Monnaie, which has been expanded to include a jazz ensemble. A melancholy saxophone solo opens the prelude and, as a fateful theme, will conclude the musical arc after a good two and a half hours. In between the styles collide. The fabulous Claron McFadden sings her way into the hearts of the audience as Delia with beguiling blues singing and vocalises, the actress and singer Abigail Abraham rushes across the stage with a powerful voice in the hip-hop and rap interludes of the brat Ruthie in a green mini dress and Afro hairstyle. The baritone Simon Bailey exudes himself as David in a melos based on the Viennese school, albeit tonal, while the bulky fourth melody that Mark S. Doss as Delia’s father William sings with a patriarchal-pervasive bass baritone is more like a jazzy “roll over” of the first Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony sounds. Everything is available, from musical notes to a stylized scale exercise and the operatic tenoral splendor of Levy Sekgapane as Jonah to gospel-like ensembles and echoes of Bach, Purcell or Dowland: spoken chants and arias, songs, melodrama and spoken passages.
The piece seems to hit a nerve. Because racism is also a burning issue in Belgium
Peter van Kraaij has successfully reduced Power’s epic to a libretto of three acts and twenty scenes, which, in contrast to the novel, strictly preserves the chronology of the narrative. In order to break this straightforward narrative, the story is told alternately by all protagonists from different perspectives. Again and again the director lets his actors act directly in the audience. After learning about the circumstances of her death, Delia steps up to the ramp with an accusing look: a possibly deliberate fire that is never solved.
The fact that the opera finally tips over into a superficial mixture of didactic piece and musical, despite the brilliant performance of the entire ensemble, is due to the fact that Defoort does not believe his music, whose eminent power is so eloquently praised, to have an independent meaning. The style quotations are simply conjured up as semantic ciphers, like little advertising signs that refer to the respective musical environment. Defoort is thus slipping into clichés. This becomes clearest in the scenes that have the family singing together as the theme. Suddenly one hears the staccato piano accompaniment of the 2nd movement of Schubert’s E-flat major piano trio from the strings of the orchestra, a music of the most intimate, lonely inwardness. The singers on stage fall in with the gesture of courageous musicians with the funeral song of the cello theme bleeding inward, roll it out to a sociable party hit and ride it to death with a modal final twist.
Nevertheless, the premiere turned out to be a frenetically celebrated success. It seems to hit a nerve. Racism is also a hot topic in Belgium. Just a year ago, the Belgian parliament voted to come to terms with the crimes of the colonial era, the ideology of which is still felt today. Eight to ten million Congolese found their deaths in the Congo Atrocities of 1888-1908: around half of the population at that time.