Looking-glass Opera.(Alice in Wonderland)(Opera review)

The labyrinthine fantasy of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" begins in deceptively lulling tones, with the idyllic phrase "All in the golden afternoon." Unsuk Chin's opera "Alice in Wonderland," which recently had its premiere at the Bavarian State Opera, in Munich, opens in distinctly more ominous fashion, with a bass-drum rumble, ritual strokes on gongs and chimes, and darksome chords produced by beating on the lower strings of the piano and the harp with the palm of the hand. Chin's sound world is seductively cavernous, suggesting not only the magical rabbit hole down which Alice tumbles but also the psychological crevasses beneath the surface of Carroll's writing. From the depths arise fluttering woodwinds, a hypnotically chiming celesta, and an ambient haze of strings. Within a few minutes, the entire orchestra is glittering weirdly: familiar shapes hover at odd angles; age-old harmonies materialize from clouds of timbre and texture; childlike snatches of song appear and disappear, like the body of the Cheshire Cat.

Chin, who was born in Seoul in 1961, and has been living in Berlin since 1988, has a knack for binding together seemingly irreconcilable extremes. A youthful enthusiast of the late-twentieth-century European avant-garde, she studied in the eighties with Gyorgy Ligeti, a pioneer of alien soundscapes. Yet, even in her breakthrough work, the 1993 song cycle "Akrostichon-Wortspiel" ("Acrostic Wordplay"), she showed a yen for graceful, lyrical turns of phrase. That work was partly inspired by the Alice stories, which Chin had loved since childhood. Her teacher, too, had long been under Alice's spell, and planned to write an opera on the subject. When it became clear that Ligeti would be unable to realize his dream project--he died last year, after a long illness--Chin set to work on an Alice opera of her own, using a libretto co-written by herself and the playwright David Henry Hwang. The text hews closely to Carroll's first book, although the collaborators indulge in a few extra flights of fancy, as when the Dormouse enlivens the Mad Hatter's tea party using words beginning with the letter "m": "mints, minks, monks, Mickey Mouse, Mars, Mao, Marx . . ."

Ligeti's ghost haunts many passages of the score, not least the shimmering web of instrumental lines that evoke the Cheshire Cat. But this is no homage or pastiche. Ligeti would probably never have committed to paper anything as uncomplicatedly sweet as Chin's chorus of Baby Animals, which resembles one of Britten's tautly imagined children's pieces, or her delirious fantasia on "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" (or "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat," as Carroll has it), which sounds like Hindemith on laughing gas. A little aria of lament for Alice--"It's always too late, it's always too soon"--unfolds as a polished blues, replete with plaintive harmonica. At the same time, Chin stays alert to the tale's complexities and perplexities. The Mad Hatter sings of being "arrested by time, sentenced by time, tortured by time" over dense chords that sway in pendulum rhythm, as in the doom-laced Coronation Scene of Moussorgsky's "Boris Godunov." The wondrous thing is how effortlessly Chin changes pace, from delicacy to grotesquerie, from cutesiness to dementia. Everything flows organically. The one thing lacking, perhaps, is individuality of dramatic characterization: Alice, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, and the rest come across as extensions of a coolly fabulous musical machine.

The premiere production was by Achim Freyer, who once studied under Brecht in East Germany. Not surprisingly, Freyer emphasized the grimmer, grittier hues in the opera's palette. The characters were represented mainly by starkly cartoonish puppets, with most of the singers positioned at the front of the stage; Sally Matthews, who portrayed Alice, was the only one who fully acted out her part, negotiating a steeply raked stage in a kind of antique-doll costume. On its own terms, the production was an engrossing, intricately disturbing ...