Andrew Clements CD of the week
Some of the most successful American operas of the 1980s and 1990s have been documentary pieces, perhaps encouraged by the success of John Adams’s Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. Stewart Wallace’s Harvey Milk comes from very much the same stable: it was premiered in Houston in 1995, went on to New York and, slightly revised, to San Francisco, where this recording was made. Few recent music-theatre pieces, Philip Glass’s endlessly hyped efforts apart, have attracted so much attention.
Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States; he rose to become a supervisor of San Francisco, and proved himself a shrewd political operator until he was shot by one of fellow supervisors, Dan White, in November 1978. Since his death he has acquired a kind of mythical status – exactly the stuff of opera, and Michael Korpe’s three-act libretto cleanly and imaginatively charts Milk’s life in crisply focused scenes.
It certainly works dramatically, and Wallace’s score, unashamedly eclectic, draws on whatever sources it needs to chart the drama. The music is more illustrative than anything else.
Sometimes one longs to find out what Wallace’s musical personality is really like: he manipulates his material so expertly – whipping up the fury of the Stonewall riots or sending up a chorus of opera queens just as confidently as he writes an introspective aria for Harvey Milk himself – that the idioms seem seamlessly blended.
It may not be opera as we traditionally recognise it. Unlike, say, Nixon in China, it builds by narrative association rather than musical structure, but there is a real sense of identity and coherence which holds the attention throughout these action-packed two hours.
Evoking local colour seems more
important than psychological characterisation, and pastiche and parody are the score’s calling cards.
It follows him from boyhood through his brief career as a Wall Street broker, his decision to become a gay activist, and his campaigns for public office, to the confrontations leading to his murder, and the popular canonisation that followed it.