RUDERS: Tjenerindens Fortaelling.(Brief Article)(Review)

RUDERS: Tjenerindens Fortaelling [] Rorholm, Dahl, Mai-Mai, Fischer, Resmark; Henning-Jensen, Elming Morgny Haugland; Royal Danish Opera Chorus and Orchestra, Schonwandt. Text and translations. Dacapo 8.224165-66 (2) (Naxos, dist.)

Margaret Atwood's highly disturbing novel The Handmaid's Tale is not an easy book to read, nor is Poul Ruders's new opera, based on the book, always easy to listen to; but, like the book, the opera demands (and sustains) its audience's attention according to its own rules. This double-disc set, recorded live during the world-premiere run at the Royal Danish Theatre in March 2000 and conducted with obvious mastery by Michael Schonwandt, makes one eager for a U.S. production.

Ruders misses no chance to spell out in hyperbolic musical terms much that is only implied in the book. While not always subtle, the effect is overwhelming; the opera is frequently disorienting, often terrifying, occasionally startlingly beautiful.

Atwood's novel, also the basis for an unsuccessful 1988 movie, is the story of Offred, a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, which, in 2002, is the totalitarian theocracy that used to be the U.S. Here, fertile women are scarce in number, due to recent nuclear-waste spillage. Consequently, those females who have committed various procreational sins (giving birth out of wedlock, or in second marriages) are now slaves of the state; they are held captive, brainwashed, assigned to the home of a Commander and his wife and required to undergo impersonal monthly impregnation rituals. They have no value to society save their ability to bear healthy children.

Paul Bentley's libretto (written in English and translated into Danish by Ruders) is quite faithful to the book, albeit with some restructuring. Flashbacks to Offred's life before the revolution are treated at greater length and with more consistency, so that events past and present unfold with similar inexorability, sometimes simultaneously. In one memorable sequence, the wife of Offred's Commander is watching a videotape of herself (she had been a popular singing evangelist on a gospel program). Offred overhears this, and we flash back immediately to the Young Offred (Hanne Fischer) in a hotel room with her illicit lover, Luke. The same program is on. In overlapping layers of sound, we have a chugging, minimalistic ostinato ...