The Composer’s View of the Work
My opera, Call Me Ishmael, was largely composed along with the writing of the libretto between November 1987 and March 1988 in Amsterdam. The work was very intensive, involving 12-14 hours daily with scarcely a day’s break. Each day I would dip into Melville’s glorious text and mine the gold which I found there, trying to employ material which would be suitable for the musical stage. The first act was orchestrated in the spring of 1988 but the second and third acts were not completed until 2003 in the tiny village of Negremont in the Limousin region of France. Finally, I inputted the complete orchestral score into the Finale program and created the vocal score for the singers, so that all the required parts could finally be printed out and bound.
The opera has been been recently revised by myself and Nicholas Heath, director of the British opera company Opera A La Carte and a singer with the Royal Opera at London’s Covent Garden for the last ten years. It is now in its final form which encompasses a two-act structure with one intermission. The first act takes place on the land and is approximately 55 minutes in length. The second act takes place on the sea and lasts roughly 75 minutes, giving a total running time of two hours and 10 minutes; with a 20-minute intermission the performance totals 2 1/2 hours.
“Call me Ishmael.” is the opening line of the novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. It is has been long regarded as the great classic of American literature. However, for a hundred years after its publication in 1851 it was neglected and left to gather dust on library shelves after suffering largely unfavorable reviews and poor sales. Only after the appearance of Charles Olsen’s famous essay Call Me Ishmael, published in 1947, was Moby-Dick finally recognized nationally and internationally as a masterpiece. In its scope Moby-Dick can only be compared to the plays of Shakespeare, and other epic novels such as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable or Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Since the time of Melville the world has changed greatly of course, and with it the nature of the work’s complex symbolism. For example, the white whale itself, Moby-Dick, which perhaps represented for Melville the depth of the human soul or the unfathomable nature of heavenly or diabolical forces, for us today has become a symbol of a threatened environment and in the minds of some the struggle to save it. Here are the five major subjects or themes of my opera as I see it:
(1) Captain Ahab as the monomaniac leader of the Pequod and its crew, seeking revenge for Moby-Dick’s amputation of his leg in an earlier struggle, travels all over the world in search of his nemesis – to hunt and to kill it. He represents in our time the crazy dictators (Hitler, Stalin and more contemporary ones) who through their obsessions with power endanger all of humanity and risk precipitating an apocalypse.
(2) The crew of the Pequod as the symbol of all humanity, with all races and religions present. Like the medieval Ship of Fools, they come to represent the world sailing to its doom under the leadership of a madman.
(3) The whale as the symbol of the environment. Combining these first three themes, literally, we get the following statement: The crazy dictator (Ahab) leads the world (the crew) to its destruction through the killing of the environment (the whale). Although this statement is simplistic, it does shed light on how our current world situation is mirrored in the action of the drama. As such, it makes the opera a powerful political statement.
(4) The meeting of Ishmael and Queequeg introduces the theme of love of man for man. Forced by strange circumstances to share the same bed, they become fast friends and perhaps even lovers. As Melville is highly suggestive on this subject (Queequeg sleeps with his arm around Ishmael’s shoulders, “our legs intertwined”, etc.) but not exactly explicit, I leave the issue open to interpretation by each member of the audience. I only show them sharing a bed and singing their own name and that of the other person, with some variations. The ideal here is that of friendship.
(5) There is an undeniable theme of survival in the opera and of the apocalypse. Ishmael alone survives at the end of Melville’s novel and at the end of the opera. Although he sings the aria “I Alone” as the last musical number, he is joined by the spirits of the dead sailors (a potent idea of director Nicholas Heath), perhaps representing the spirit of mankind which can never really die. In this sense hope is held out for humanity. Ishmael serves to unite the cast on stage with the audience in the theater. Thus humanity unites as one world.
If one major theme emerges from the opera it is that of tolerance. Through recognizing our essential oneness as human beings, we unite in embodying our common human heritage.
The music itself is a post-modern combination of many different styles and genres with which I grew up in Philadelphia: symphonic, rock, jazz, classical, minimal, operatic and musical comedy elements are all found in my score. The work is dedicated to my dear friend and wonderfully innovative American composer Terry Riley, who gave me so much artistic support and encouragement over the years.
Gary Goldschneider, 2004
Back
|