The Henry Mollicone underground operas

Who ever said that opera had to be grand? It wasn’t in the original mission statement when opera was invented more than 400 years ago with composers setting out to recapture the power of once-sung Greek drama. And they did so in royal courts that couldn’t have been very large. But even as opera became gargantuan, smaller chamber works have been written, performed and loved over the centuries but rarely embraced with the fervor of bigger, louder Elektra and Turandot.

The starting point of this grandeur-challenging train of thought was the Chelsea Opera’s recent double bill of small-scale one-act operas by Henry Mollicone. Though the West Coast-based composer wrote one of the most popular operas by a living American composer – The Face on the Barroom Floor – the piece itself is largely unknown to most Metropolitan Opera subscribers.

Though only a half-hour long, Face on the Barroom Floor has two parallel plots, two fights, two death scenes, a soprano aria that’s mournfully similar in
character to the “The King of Thule” in Berlioz’ Damnation of Faust and a
trio whose melodic inspiration and dramatic function work hand-in-hand in a way that even the best operatic set pieces do not. Set in the Wild West (and based on a ballad poem that was popular school-boy fare in the early 20th century), a penniless prospector ambles into a bar and pays his tab by painting a portrait of his loved one of the floor – who turns out to be the tough bartender’s current girlfriend. A fight ensues, but she’s the one who is shot. The plot is framed and mirrored in modern times with a fledgling opera soprano in Central City who is being squired around by her East Coast boyfriend – and into the bar where she had an affair with the bartender the previous summer.

It’s an ideal young-artist opera, partly because anybody who masters that level of singing and brawling is likely to be extremely well equipped for anything else that might come their way in grand opera, where narratives don’t have the cinematic swiftness of Mollicone.

I didn’t know the opera or even that it existed until I was hired to work on a documentary film that was shot in Colorado at the Central City Opera a few summers ago. By itself, the recording was puzzling. Later, I found myself, camera in hand, in the company’s compact studio theater (with bleacher-style seats on three sides of the stage) finally understanding what a gem it is. Though an “underground opera” – so to speak – it’s not obscure or oblique. Musically, Face falls neatly into opera history somewhere between Puccini, Menotti and Heggie. But until you’re right down inside something that moves this fast, you’re less likely to realize that Face on the Barroom Floor – and its more harmonically-evolved Chelsea Opera double-bill companion Emperor Norton – is as theatrically effective and melodically memorable as anything in American opera.

Everything was in order in the Chelsea Opera production at St. Peter’s Church on West 20th Street in New York. The cast, which was vocally stronger than in Central City, was led by Mollicone and directed by Lynne Hayden-Findlay with perfectly logical motivation. Still, only 70 percent of the opera revealed itself.  These aren’t like big operas only smaller. They’re a medium unto themselves that need their own kind of theater. Traditional stages stand too far apart from the audience. Time, place and plot changes that are crystal clear at close proximity become murky on a traditional stage.

Emperor Norton, which I was hearing for the first time, takes on the even more elusive dramatic problem of self-delusion, the sordid details of which are withheld from the audience for most of the opera. This time we’re in San Francisco where the self-styled emperor visits restaurants where he believes himself to be above having to pay the bill, but was once the owner of a business gone bust. The opera also has a double plot: Norton’s story is being acted out in the a play workshop where a mysterious actor turns up, clearly the ghost of Norton, to pilot the project in more truthful directions.

Again, I felt too far away. With all of the best efforts of Justin Ryan (Norton), you had little sense of the title character’s complicated inner life, or his mental illness rescuing him from pain that simply can’t be lived with. The ego tug-of-war between Norton’s truth and the playwright’s need for control could’ve been a sharper electrical current running through the piece. Again, the only solution is a breakdown in the physical theater itself, which means fewer seats to sell and even less earned income in the every-penny-counts world of small-scale American opera.

Beside needing a sympathetic performing space, these operas also need to be presented in the thick of whatever community they’re in, almost as an early-in-the-evening after-work presentation that can make what is normally a special-occasion outing to the opera something that’s more embedded into everyday life. An entire body of work is waiting to be discovered, because in the world of underground opera, Mollicone has plenty of company.