'Handmaid' finds her voice

Uniting a political novel with opera usually makes for strange bedfellows, but in the case of The Handmaid's Tale, it may be a marriage made in heaven.

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 5, 2001

You've read the book. Now hear (and see) the opera. Lately, that's been the pitch as operas have been adapted, or are in the process of being adapted, from a host of novels, including The Great Gatsby, McTeague, An American Tragedy, Therese Raquin and Little Women.

Judging from the ones I've taken in, the transformation from page to musical stage can be problematic. It's tough to compete against a reader's attachment to a great book. John Harbison discovered this with the lukewarm reception to his treatment of Gatsby, though the opera has reportedly benefited from revisions by the composer-librettist since its premiere in 2000.

Then what about a less than great book? Margaret Atwood's 1986 novel The Handmaid's Tale has its fans, but not many would call it great. A brilliant piece of agitprop, certainly, but its nightmarish story of a U.S. takeover by the Christian right is more feminist polemic than literary masterpiece.

Atwood's novel did not make a particularly good movie, even with a script by Harold Pinter and a strong cast including Natasha Richardson, Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway.

But it turns out that The Handmaid's Tale makes a tremendous opera in the hands of Danish composer Poul Ruders. There's something about Atwood's lurid, provocative parable -- superbly streamlined in the libretto by English writer Paul Bentley -- that is perfect for Ruders' prodigious grasp of how a thoroughly contemporary musical vocabulary can work theatrically.

I had not been familiar with Ruders, 52, until reviewing this year a recording of his Concerto in Pieces, which struck me as simply wonderful. Its mastery of a theme and variations for symphony orchestra was just the right combination of old form and new music. It whetted my appetite for The Handmaid's Tale, which premiered last year at the Royal Danish Opera and got rave reviews. Now a recording of that performance has been released in a two-CD set by Da Capo that includes the Danish text and translations in English and German. (Interestingly, Ruders and Bentley originally wrote the work in English, then translated it into Danish for the production in Copenhagen.)

At first, Atwood's novel would not seem ripe for singing. For the most part, it is an unrelentingly grim vision of the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, a fundamentalist police state, run by men, that has made divorce and abortion capital crimes. Women are classified according to their duties and wear uniforms: green-clad housekeepers called Marthas, stern monitors in brown called Aunts, privileged Wives in blue, worker Econowives in stripes.

Industrial pollution and nuclear radiation have made most women infertile, giving rise to a class called the Handmaids, after a figure in Genesis. They wear bright red uniforms and are required to breed with the ruling men, called Commanders, whose names they take on -- "Offred" is the Handmaid of Fred; "Ofglen," of Glen, and so forth.

Atwood, a Canadian, wrote the The Handmaid's Tale as a cautionary response to the rise of the Moral Majority, as well as Islamic anti-woman regimes in Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It contains shrewd commentary on the war between advocates of free speech and feminism with references to a campaign to shut down porn shops and a book burning scene in which the tinder is a bondage magazine.

Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay the opera is that listening to it as I followed along with English libretto definitely enhanced my understanding of the novel. Where Atwood's terse, impressionistic prose gives a chilly detachment to her characters, Ruders' score fleshes them out and adds an emotional dimension that speaks to the heart, especially that of the title character, Offred, in a remarkable performance by mezzo-soprano Marianne Rorholm.

In one of the opera's most effective devices, Offred sometimes confronts her pre-Handmaid self, "Offred in the Time Before" (mezzo-soprano Hanne Fischer), by way of flashbacks signaled by chirpy minimalist arpeggios. Deeply moving is the pair's second-act "duet for one," in which they mourn the disappearance of a 5-year-old daughter, taken into custody by the authorities because of Offred's adulterous affair. Even an aria to the menstrual cycle seemed right in this opera dominated by women.

The orchestral writing is magnificent, from slithery high strings that establish the opera's keening central instrumental voice to pounding percussive effects that mark dramatic plot turns. With the opulent sounds he pulls from a symphony orchestra plus organ, digital keyboards and samplers, Ruders is "the Richard Strauss of the computer-age orchestra," in the words of annotator Stephen Johnson.

Naturally, given the darkness of the tale, much of the music is harsh and atonal, a striking setting for the lyrical vocal lines. The score supports the narrative in a way that kept me on the edge of my seat. I can only dream of what a great ride it must have been in live performance.

Ruders makes skillful use of quotation, with Amazing Grace serving as something of a motif for the relationship between Offred and her Commander's barren wife, a former gospel singer named Serena Joy (mezzo-soprano Susanne Resmark). Maybe the most amazing moment is when a fragment of Bach's love song Bist du bei mir is heard as soldiers take Offred's child away.

For all its tragedy, Atwood's novel is leavened with a certain sly wit (those wickedly over-the-top uniforms and classifications for women), and Ruders mirrors that with deft comic touches, such as the bubbly foxtrot introducing a scene in Jezebel's, a sort of Playboy Club where the Commanders go to let their hair down, or the tango violin solo that plays when Offred is tarted up in a Victoria's Secret-style outfit.

Politics has never made for effective opera, an art form in which romance and death and fantasy are the main things. Verdi was one of the few opera composers with a taste for the cut and thrust of public life. Simon Boccanegra is probably his most successful work in the genre, as the weight of rule on the title character, the noble doge of Genoa, is deeply felt, but even that opera is more about family than politics. Simon's recognition of his daughter is the big number.

Still, there have been persuasive political operas, though they haven't found a place in the permanent repertory. In 1920s and '30s Germany, Kurt Weill composed a string of political theater works, and his largely forgotten opera, Die Burgschaft, was a powerful and prescient dramatization of conditions that led to the rise of the Third Reich. One of the most outstanding aspects of Anton Coppola's Sacco & Vanzetti, premiered this year in Tampa, was how it dealt with issues such as immigration, the death penalty and radical Italian politics.

Could The Handmaid's Tale be the political opera for our times? That will depend, to some extent, on the times. It's intriguing to imagine how an American production might be received if the generally rightward shift of sex and gender politics since Reagan proceeds apace.

There's lots of time to tell which way the political winds are blowing, because conservative American opera companies move slowly. Heaven forbid that another production of Boheme or Butterfly be bumped from the schedule for an exciting new work.

The Handmaid's Tale is not slated to receive its U.S. premiere until the spring of 2003 at Minnesota Opera. By then it could either be hotly topical or a quaint artifact, but whatever the political climate, Ruders' score should carry the day as an engrossing musical thriller.

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