THE VOYAGE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE
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Dominick Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe is the first installment in the Lyric’s “Toward the 21st Century” initiative. Much heralded by the critical establishment, this docket of contemporary works planned for the next decade has been causing some apprehension in the ranks of Lyric Opera subscription holders. And that subscription program is the principal reason that a relatively new and almost entirely unheard of work can claim eight sold-out performances. Yet Saturday’s subscribers now know that The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe was not being administered to them for their own good, but is rather a legitimate work of 20th-century theater that shares an emotional universe with Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, even if its music is only slightly related.
The action revolves around the mysterious circumstances of Edgar Allan Poe’s death and the presumed psychological impact on the writer of the many tragedies that filled his personal life. Yet the details of Poe’s death are sufficiently foggy that this opera could be shaped as a psychological drama, not an attempt to portray literal events.
One of the great felicities of this production is that for once we have a contemporary work with a first-string cast in the leading roles–instead of players who have survived only by carving out niches as specialists in contemporary works. Christopher Keene, who conducted Satyagraha at Lyric in 1987, led the orchestra and chorus expertly through this difficult score. John Conklin’s set designs, in conjunction with John Boesche’s projections–which really can’t be talked about as two separate items–provided the correct atmosphere for this fundamentally pessimistic work. Frank Galati’s direction was effective in showing Poe’s decline, though at times it verged on the self-conscious. The surtitles for this English-language work were entirely in order, as operatic English can be hard to understand no matter how meticulous the diction of the singers. The occasional statements about events in Poe’s life that were mixed in with the text were also useful.
