'St. Francois,' Worthy of A Pilgrimage

SAN FRANCISCO -- The San Francisco Opera's stunning, creative production of the late Olivier Messiaen's "Saint Francois d'Assise" must be counted as one of the supreme musical experiences of a lifetime.

To say that this massive work, which lasts more than five hours (with two intermissions) and received its U.S. premiere here on Friday night, aspires to greatness is to understate the case considerably. Messiaen, a devout Catholic mystic, composed "Saint Francois" -- his only opera -- over the course of eight years, completing it in 1983, when he was 75. He clearly planned it as a testament, as the fullest expression of his profound -- and profoundly idiosyncratic -- musical artistry. I can pay it no higher compliment than to say that it could have been written by no other composer. Indeed, nobody else could even have conceived of it.

"Saint Francois" is a series of eight vignettes, divided into three acts. Essentially -- and sometimes crushingly -- static in nature, it is not so much a music drama as a series of meditative tableaux on the life and teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi. The opera to which it is most profitably compared is probably the Philip Glass-Robert Wilson collaboration, "Einstein on the Beach," another one-of-a-kind. Like "Einstein," "Saint Francois" is unusually reiterative in its musical language and will likely bore the pants off listeners immune to its quirky spell (indeed, even fervent admirers will have moments when they will wish passionately to be elsewhere). Still, in both cases, if a spectator can surrender to these works -- as I did about halfway through Act 2 on Friday -- the result is nothing less than an ecstatic transport. Put it this way: I don't want to see or hear "Saint Francois" again for a very long time -- but I wouldn't have missed it for the world, and I expect to remember it all my life.

Messiaen scored the work for large orchestra, augmented by electronic instruments and a battery of percussion that flanked the stage. It is a typically personal mixture of harsh dissonance and churchy consonance, primal percussion and swooning strings. Almost all the vocal writing is for men (making for some of the same timbral monotony that mars Benjamin Britten's "Billy Budd"); when the radiantly sweet-toned Laura Aikin, who sang the role of the Angel, made her first appearance about an hour into the score, a glistening new dimension was added to the mix, all the more welcome for the long delay of its arrival.

It is a dicey business to judge a work of art by its cosmology. Still, it is only fair to say that those who feel strongly about Catholicism, one way or another, must be affected by the composer's ceaseless advocacy for the Christian faith. Messiaen's libretto can veer perilously close to self-parody ("What do you think of predestination?" was one memorable surtitle). And I confess that some of the preachier moments (the interminable "Sermon to the Birds," for example) left me panting for a good, gloomy book by Mencken or Nietzsche -- or even a couple of pints down the block with a tavern atheist.

But that would have meant forgoing an equally long scene titled "The Angel-Musician," which is so beautiful it hurts. This is music of the spheres -- the sonic depiction of "music of the invisible" revealed to Saint Francis in a dream. I listened to it in a state of rapt amazement, and when it was over I wanted it back, the way one so often does with dreams. The staging complemented it perfectly -- the angel was dressed up rather like a seraphic Teletubby and the whole scene had some of that awed, childlike sense of wonder that illumines the early, anonymously written "Lives of the Saints" that date from the beginning of the Christian era.

The casting was immaculate. Willard White, in the title role, sang with just the right mixture of fervor and dignity, as befits this elegant and compassionate holy man. The conviction that Chris Merritt brought to the Leper's agony made him seem all the more beatific once he was cured. The cast also included Johannes Martin Kranzle, Gran Wilson, Gabor Andrasy, Jay Hunter Morris, Hugh Russell and Kwang Shik Pang as Saint Francis's spiritual monastic brothers, and there was hardly a misstep among them.

Conductor Donald Runnicles seemed completely at home with this gigantic work (the printed score of which weighs more than 25 pounds). Not only was he a superb "traffic cop" -- making sure that all the instruments made their entrances and exits on time -- but he made joyful magic with Messiaen's prismatic orchestral colors, while linking them always to the stage action. What tension he brought to Messiaen's long rests! (And rarely is silence as carefully "composed" as it is in "Saint Francois.") All in all, this was the sort of performance that can make a reputation: From now on, Runnicles must be counted among the most accomplished and imaginative American conductors.

The production, set designs and costumes -- by Nicolas Brieger, Hans Dieter Schaal and Andrea Schmidt-Futterer -- might be likened to a gentler, less rigorous answer to the near-motionless theater of Robert Wilson (complete with a prop pathway that slowly ascends into the heavens, as a bed did so memorably in "Einstein.") Because very little "happens," in a dramatic sense, over the course of "Saint Francois," it was helpful to have visual images of such distinction (including some marvelously evocative silent film), through which the eye could roam. Pamela Rosenberg, the newly appointed general director of the San Francisco Opera, is off to a splendid start.

There will be five more performances of "Saint Francois" before it closes on Oct. 17. It is, to be sure, a "difficult" masterpiece -- to be approached with the same resolution required to make it through Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" or the more abstract films of Ingmar Bergman. But it is worth the struggle.