ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
Such sentiments were perhaps not altogether foreign to those who bugged out early from the opening-night presentation of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Lyric Opera. In all justice, those who fled before the end of the first act and during the intermission should have had the patience to hang on to the end; it was a very short evening, after all, and it’s not likely that they will ever see this work performed again. But the numbers who left early paled beside the stampede that took place as the curtain went down on the second and final act. Even I, hard-bitten as I am, was amazed and a bit embarrassed at the unseemly rush to depart before even a modicum of polite applause had been dispensed to the hardworking players.
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Antony has had a brief and checkered history since debuting as the commissioned opener of the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966. Although it was written as a star vehicle for Leontyne Price, her formidable presence was unable to make the work a success. The reasons generally trotted out to explain the opera’s lukewarm reception are that it was considered overlong by the audience and that the production, designed by Franco Zeffirelli, was overdone, in both the aesthetic and mechanical senses. Barber, assisted by Gian Carlo Menotti, made haste to correct the first of these difficulties by performing radical surgery on the score, and he is credited in Lyric’s program as librettist (after Shakespeare) for this version, whereas Zeffirelli is listed as the adapter for the 1966 original.
Perhaps because of the extensive revision of this show, the lesser principals never seem to develop any individuating traits. They seem to be mere fragments of characters. This is understandable and expected in the several characters who have only a few lines for the evening, but even the role of Caesar gave Jacque Trussel little scope for any emotion other than petulance until the penultimate scene, when his regret over Antony’s death finally gave this character some depth. This does not really seem to be Trussel’s fault–he has established himself as a fine singing actor in other productions here–but rather that of the underlying dramatic weakness in the text. The character of Enobarbus suffers from a similar lack of continuity; he seems a mere appendage for most of the show, then gives vent to inconsolable grief for an unseen treason against the person of Antony. The dramatic sense has been hacked from the libretto in the interest of providing a shorter evening.
