San Francisco. (North America).(Opera Review)

For San Francisco Opera to undertake Olivier Messiaen's Saint Francois d'Assise--as the American stage premiere of an opera now nineteen years old--represented an act of faith several times over: above all, the faith of Pamela Rosenberg's new management that an audience coddled on easy-listening new operas (Dead Man Walking, A Streetcar Named Desire, etc.) might be lured further into unknown territory with a work genuinely one-of-a-kind and challenging. The circumstances were favorable--to a point, at least: where better to produce an opera about Saint Francis than in the city bearing his name? Even so, the word was out: this was a daunting, five-hour confrontation with music, mostly slow, in an opera with few singing roles and little stage action. San Francisco's premiere (Sept. 27), the first of six performances, drew a distinguished sell-out crowd; before the long night's end, however, blocks of empty seats were visible throughout the house.

The opera has fared reasonably well over the years, certainly beyond the expectations of those (this writer included) who attended the helter-skelter 1983 premiere at the Paris Opera. Productions in Berlin and Salzburg, and a DG recording under Kent Nagano's sure baton [DG 445176], have eased its path. The opera is still hard to love, however. Over its vast time-scale, one is invited to observe, without much in the way of confirming incident (the healing of the Leper aside), the growth in spirit and wisdom of Assisi's legendary saint, his rise above the lesser spirits among his co-believers, his communion with Nature's other creatures, most of all her birds. Birds, birds, birds: for something like forty-five minutes--one-half the length of Act II--the saintly Messiaen proclaims his own kinship with the saintly Francis in this matter of ornithological passion. One fidgets, vainly waiting for the feathered, chattering hordes to get baked into a pie, or at least to fly the coop.

There are few surprises in Messiaen's orchestra here, except for its sheer exuberance in the marshalling of his usual massed, apocalyptic brass, the urgent summonings of clattering mallet instruments and no fewer than three of his iconic noisemakers, the wailing, throbbing keyboards known as the ondes martenot. Around and above all of this--and truly surprising--is the choral writing, the dense chording of semitones and microtones. In San Francisco's extraordinary production, a congruence occurs between the deep and expansive choral texture and the visual effect of singers on a slow turntable seeming to fill an entire world with their presence and their sound. Overall, it is texture, more than melody and harmony (which here--as elsewhere in the Messiaen oeuvre--borders on the banal and, now and then, crosses the line), that earns the most admiring attention in this ecstatic yet sporadically off-putting score.

Jose van Dam had pretty much owned the title role since the 1983 premiere; ownership has now passed, in glory, to Willard White. Aside from that title role, the attendant ...