We’ve had “The Shining” and “Cold Mountain,” “The Hours” and “Dead Man Walking,” and works based on the lives of Steve Jobs, Malcolm X and Frida Kahlo. “Lincoln in the Bardo” and “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” are coming soon.
Opera audiences, traditionalists even before the pandemic, have ventured back warier than ever about buying tickets for anything other than the standards. So as companies try to present contemporary pieces alongside “Aida” and “La Bohème,” they bank on familiar titles and subjects.
Many classic operas were adaptations; “Bohème,” for example, was inspired by a collection of stories. But lately the results have tended to feel less like great art than like bending over backward to coax a cautious public. Something special comes from being truly original: It’s no coincidence that perhaps the best opera of our time, Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence” (2021), was that rarity, a brand-new story.
So is “The Righteous,” commissioned by Santa Fe Opera from the composer Gregory Spears and the poet Tracy K. Smith. Spears and Smith also created from scratch their first full-length collaboration, “Castor and Patience” (2022). They deserve great credit for this. These days it’s remarkable to sit at a premiere and be able to think, with admiration, “Here are imaginations at work” instead of “I’d rather be watching the movie.”
Taking place over a few weeks, “Castor and Patience” was an intimate family drama — though one with larger societal implications. While a family is also at the center of “The Righteous,” which opened on July 13, the new opera is in every way a more sprawling piece, stretching from 1979 through the early 1990s, with a large cast and chorus and booming climaxes to match its impassioned lyricism.
At its core is a man’s progress from youthful idealism to profound moral compromise. The main character, David, is a talented, devoted preacher who’s grown up close to a wealthy, well-connected oil family in the American Southwest. He marries the family’s daughter and, as his scrappy ministry grows in size and influence, he’s tempted more and more by the prospect of political power. As he climbs, he leaves betrayals both personal and ideological in his wake.
This summary is more straightforward than what comes across in the theater — more like the streamlined Faustian melodrama that this opera might have been. For both better and worse, Spears and Smith haven’t painted their theme in black and white; while not based on a book, “The Righteous” aims for novelistic scope and crowded complexity, without easy heroes or villains.
Almost all of the many characters, especially David’s first and second wives, are depicted with detail and sensitivity. This is a caricature-free zone, and, as in “Castor and Patience,” you find yourself truly caring about these people. Figures are introduced who do their best to link what’s happening to a range of issues that simmered in the Reagan ’80s: race, the crack epidemic and the war on drugs, homosexuality and AIDS, women’s place in religion and government, the rise of identity politics.
The opera’s ambitions are grand, but the storytelling is fundamentally measured, living in the gray zone between evil and virtue. That’s not a bad thing, but it jars a bit with the score’s anything-but-gray fervor. Spears has dialed the soaring sweetness and crashing fortes up to 11, creating the kind of music that might have supported the bluntly effective libretto of, say, “Tosca” — in which you’re never in doubt about who’s good and not — better than Smith’s subtleties.
His orchestra is traditional, as it has been for all his major works. His gift for songful melody and patient, emotionally loaded refrains, both unusual in high-end contemporary composition, remains intact and is well suited to arias that often take the form of extended prayers. “The Righteous” draws on Christian hymns and Coplandesque expanses for its fresh, clear, all-American sound, with a crispness that hints at the Baroque and Classical.
There are many beautiful moments that trouble the lushness with uneasy shadows. But the characters all seem to sing in roughly the same ardently stirring style. And, given all the heated vocal lines and orchestral blasts at the end of burning numbers, the dramatic stakes of “The Righteous” just don’t feel quite high enough. In this faintly biblical tale of family tensions, succession and adultery, David’s missteps are certainly bad but not awful. The impact he has on others isn’t, in the end, disastrous; to put it in blunt operatic terms, he doesn’t kill anyone.
The general vibe is of forgiveness and healing, wistful and just shy of mournful. This ambivalence might well be true to the nuances of real life, but it doesn’t make for the kind of supercharged theater that Spears’s score seems to be asking for. The concentrated conflict of “Castor and Patience” was a better match of sound and story.
“The Righteous” has been produced lovingly in Santa Fe, with the orchestra, conducted by Jordan de Souza, sounding rich but never sluggish in this sentimental music at the performance on Friday. Racing to keep up with many swiftly flowing scene changes, Kevin Newbury’s staging rolls all manner of walls and furniture in and out of the blond-wood panels at the sides of Mimi Lien’s set. Designed by Devario Simmons, the costumes (and the fantastically evocative wigs) are perfectly calibrated to the period.
The cast is superb, with the baritone Michael Mayes alternately booming with confidence and wounded with self-doubt as David, a surprisingly vulnerable bull of a man. His first wife Michele’s pain and strength are voluptuously captured by the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano; the incisive soprano Elena Villalón radiates warmth as his second wife, Sheila.
The bass-baritone Greer Grimsley is a sturdy Paul, the family patriarch; his wife, Marilyn, is sung with gentle care by the soprano Wendy Bryn Harmer. Anthony Roth Costanzo’s countertenor is a bit sharp-edged, but he is uncannily youthful as Jonathan, whose childhood crush on David is echoed in a final embrace.
“Life is long and wisdom slow,” David sings after that encounter, a sentiment taken up by the full cast with sumptuous force. The feeling isn’t entirely triumphant, but the takeaway is that David hasn’t been entirely lost as a decent man — or as a decent leader.
It’s a poignantly humane conclusion. Whether its benevolence squares with the actual state of our country — worn nearly to the breaking point over the past half century by ever more toxic alliances between religion and politics — is another story.
The Righteous
Through Aug. 13 at Santa Fe Opera, Santa Fe, N.M.; santafeopera.org.
Read More: Review: ‘The Righteous’ Brings Stirring Prayer to Santa Fe Opera
