Tom CIPULLO (b. 1956)
The Parting (2019)
Laura Strickling (soprano) – Fanni, Catherine Cook (mezzo-soprano) – Death, Michael Mayes (baritone) – Miklós
Music of Remembrance/Alastair Willis
rec. 2019, Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, USA
NAXOS 8.669044 [65:11]
In his 1949 essay, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, Thomas Adorno wrote that ‘after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’. Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti thought differently. Born in 1909, Radnóti was a significant voice among socialist and left-orientated Hungarian intellectuals and artists during the inter-war years, and especially while he was a university student in Szeged (1930-35). He subsequently moved to Budapest and became increasingly alarmed not just by the threat posed by the Third Reich but also by the involvement of some Hungarian intellectuals and politicians in anti-Semitic activities and propaganda.
His Jewish heritage led to Radnóti being conscripted for forced labour. He and his wife, Fanni, had converted to Catholicism in 1943, but he could not escape a third spell in a labour camp. In November 1944, following a long march across Serbia, an exhausted and sick Radnóti was executed along with about twenty other prisoners by their Hungarian guards, and their bodies dumped in a mass grave. In June 1946, the poet’s corpse was recovered: in his coat pocket was the Borinotesz, a volume of poems chronicling both his gruesome experiences and the tender love he felt for his wife. In death, the poet spoke.
Tom Cipullo’s chamber opera, The Parting, presents the evening of 19 May 1944, the eve of Radnóti’s departure for his final, fatal spell of enforced labour. In David Mason’s libretto, as the poet and Fanni share an evening meal, the figure of Death lingers beside them – a palpable female presence who seems to interact with the couple, answering their questions, guiding and reassuring. The Parting was commissioned by Music of Remembrance, a non-profit organisation which, founded in 1988 by pianist Mina Miller to whom Cipullo’s opera is dedicated, endeavours to remember the Holocaust through music. It is Cipullo’s second MOR opera commission and also his second collaboration with Mason with whom he created After Life in 2015, which imagined a dramatic confrontation between the ghosts of Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso.
The Parting is more contemplative than dramatic. I found it difficult to imagine how it would work in the theatre, though the music itself is eloquent and moving at times, and the score lucidly perceived and presented by conductor Alastair Willis. There is no ‘action’, as such; instead, there are sung – and spoken – thoughts. The words are the source of the power; the music makes the emotions they express visceral. There are two intersecting timeframes: first, the ‘real time’ of the night of ‘parting’, and second, an imagined future in the form of projections of events to come. In the latter stages of the one-hour opera, a sequence of alternating arias is both eloquent and poignant, as Fanni pens letters to which her husband cannot reply, and Miklós writes poems for which he is beaten and which she does not receive until after his death.
Mason incorporates some of Radnóti’s poetry into his libretto, as translated by John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott. But, if the Devil has all the best tunes, then in The Parting Death has many of the best lines. An omnipresent commentator and truthsayer, a figure who declares she is ‘in love with poetry’, in the opera’s opening monologue Death warns, “You have never to look far to see that for some evil is right next door”. Death is Radnóti’s self-declared ‘friend’, “who knows you will wake to the world … I’ll sing with you and then leave you to the dream of your life”. When Miklós struggles to comprehend the ‘meaning’ of life which must end in death, she explains his purpose: “To learn what life is. To love. To make beautiful things. To die.”
Cipullo’s score is composed for a chamber quintet of piano, violin, cello, clarinet and flute. The language is largely tonal, the prevailing idiom lyrical. There are passages that sound like Puccini and others that sound like Broadway musical theatre, both, initially at least, tempered by a changeful restlessness of harmony and texture. In this way, although Romantic ardour dominates, Cipullo injects contrasting and disrupting dissonance and fragmentation which reflect the characters’ thoughts and feelings. For example, when Miklós angrily objects, “This is the third time they’ve called me up”, and ponders his likely death, frantic instrumental turbulence conveys frustration and injustice. As the opera progresses, such moments are less frequent, and the opera closes with a duet in which Fanni’s and Miklós’ souls are united as they confirm their eternal love and a trio of transfiguration, both of which put me in mind of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
While Cipullo has a sure grasp of vocal lyricism, the singers – principally Death, performed by mezzo-soprano Catherine Cook – also communicate through parlando and, less effectively, spoken text. I found these verbal interjections increasingly off-putting: they seem to diminish the intensity and sincerity, and Cook does not deliver the spoken lines with any great conviction or actorly instinct. For instance, at the start, Death reflects sympathetically that Fanni is a “hard worker”: “It can’t be easy living with a man for whom destiny is made of words,” Cook sneers, “destiny” curling up like a wrinkled nose and “words” morphing into a sinking, three-syllable “worm” – a pity since the sentiment expressed is the essence of the opera. Death also recites Miklós’ final poem. Cipullo may have spurned the sort of dreamlike lyricism that he adopts when setting other of Radnóti’s poems – ‘Fragment’ which develops into a emotional apotheosis and ‘Sky Flying Clouds’ which ends the opera with a serene fusion of “movement and smoke and life” – as inappropriate for the terrible imagery: a dead body as taut as a gut string ready to snap and muddied blood caking on the poet’s ear. But, Cook’s prosaic spoken tone makes such images seem unreal or banal. When she switches to song, however, Cook is on much surer interpretative ground and her tone is richly coloured, though an overly wide and unremittingly applied vibrato is unfortunate.
Evidently, like so many creative visionaries, Radnóti was not an ‘easy’ man to love or be married to. Tenor Michael Mayes certainly conveys the poet’s self-absorption and intensity. Indeed, the volume and weight feels a little relentless at times – there’s rather too much of the ‘gut-punching power’ that I observed, and admired, when Mayes’ took the role of Joseph De Rocher in the belated premiere of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking at the Barbican in February 2018. It doesn’t help that the recorded sound is very resonant too. When Miklós recites his love poem, ‘After April Rain’, a gentle flute prelude prepares a mood of freshness and renewal, but Mayes is forthright and rather inflexible: the phrase “clean-rinsed in light, my voice rings”, reverberates sonorously but seems out of kilter with the ensuing image, “like that bird’s up to his middle, now, in the crystal puddle’ and the poignant instrumental accompaniment. Elsewhere, though, we can enjoy some of the countering delicacy and fragility that I noted in the aforementioned Barbican performance. Mayes ventures a brave mezza voce at the top, “The night is ours, my love, the only night we have”, strengthening our appreciation of Miklós’ fragility and humanity. Similarly, a more veiled, hushed quality is employed when the poet imagines his projected future, as “a captive animal among worms” as “fleas renew their siege again”.
Soprano Laura Strickling communicates Fanni’s patient forbearance and also her unwavering love. “The night is ours” soars with reverence and optimism, and Fanni’s vision of birds and lilac blossoming by the Danube is warm and genuine. Strickling copes easily with the numerous sudden and large rises in pitch and intensity, particularly when Fanni’s frustrations get the better of her: “I know he’s a poet. I know he lives to write. […] Does he think he’s a martyr? What about me?” The musical highpoints are the couple’s duets. The unaccompanied duet in which Miklós and Fanni rock back and forth in each other’s arm finds both singers rising to beautiful vocal peaks, with a quiet rapture which momentarily dispels the inevitable horror to come: “In your two arms, as through a dream, I will pass through”.
When Miklós’ takes his leave of Fanni, he urges her to keep all his poems, but he takes with him the ‘Fragment’, “The one I’m trying to finish. Art against death.” In its finest moments, The Parting is a thought-provoking, and consoling, meditation on the art that survives us and denies death.
Claire Seymour
Performers
Zart Dombourian-Ely (flute); Laura DeLuca (clarinet); Mikhail Shmidt (violin); Walter Gray (cello); Jessica Choe (piano)
