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A Provocative Twist on the Bible & the Baroque
Soprano Rebecca Duren plays the boy-soprano role of Jonathan against Brian Cummings's David in American Opera Theater's production of the 1688 work. Behind them is Colin Levin.
(By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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"It's a little bit of a problem for the audience," said Bruce Gustafson, a scholar of French baroque music who teaches at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. "You are given these wonderful emotional reflections on a story that you have not been told. The basic narrative of the story that was in the play isn't there. If you are looking for emotional impact, it's there and it's wonderful, but the nuts and bolts of the plot are not. You are supposed to know who these people are, and what their problem is."
Their problem, as laid out in the Old Testament's First Book of Samuel, is that the Israelites and Philistines are at war, again, and the people are starting to think David might make a better king than Saul. The opera opens with Saul visiting the Witch of Endor, who predicts his demise, and closes with David lamenting the death of Jonathan, who loved him "better than a woman."
Ah, yes. And David loved Jonathan. The nature of that love has given rise to considerable theological debate. Tod Linafelt, a biblical studies professor at Georgetown University, will enter the fray this fall, when the Journal of Religion publishes his article analyzing David's lament. Linafelt took a hard look at the ancient Hebrew, and came away convinced that the writer intended to convey David and Jonathan's relationship as "ambiguous and complex."
"You can't say for sure if their relationship was romantic," Linafelt said. "But there is a lot of homoerotic language there."
Gustafson and other scholars strongly doubt that Charpentier had homosexuality on the brain when he wrote the opera back in the 17th century. Nelson acknowledges this, and says his staging of "David et Jonathas" is not a political statement, but an aesthetic practicality. The role of Jonathas was written for a boy soprano, a student at the Jesuit school. If Nelson put a 12-year-old boy in the role today, he'd be "in a heap of trouble," he says. So instead he cast Duren as a cross-dressing soprano.
It remains to be seen whether the work can bear out Nelson's large-scale ambitions. Attendance at the company's first production in Georgetown, a staged Renaissance song cycle called "Ground," was so poor that Nelson proclaimed it a disaster on his blog ( http:/
"I don't know of another opera like this," Nelson said. "It's so powerful to see a typical opera love story -- tragic death, the whole caboodle -- except it's between two men."
