The Music of Fading Memory: Seattle Opera’s “Lucidity”

There is a place in the brain where music lives,
Where music plays. Time cannot touch it.
Through music we reach into that place,
Open the hidden door to bring out memory.

This eloquent quatrain opens Lucidity, the new opera by composer Laura Kaminsky and librettist David Cote, which received its West Coast premiere at Seattle Opera last Thursday. Happily, this eloquence persists in every facet of composition and performance throughout its 90-minute duration.

The opera, given its world premiere just two weeks ago in New York by On Site Opera, is an intimate chamber piece, featuring a cast of four singers and two on-stage instrumentalists. It concerns a famous soprano named Lili (Lucy Shelton) now retired and suffering through the early stages of dementia. Lili’s principal caregiver is her adult son Dante (baritone Eric McKeever,) thwarted in his earlier career as a pianist and now embittered by the vagaries of his mother’s behavior.

A former voice student of Lili’s, the neuroscientist Dr. Claire Klugman (mezzo-soprano Blythe Gaissert), is laboring to finish a book about music’s role in accessing memory among Alzheimer’s patients. Knowing Lili to suffer from the condition, she sends Sunny (soprano Cristina Maria Castro,) a young clarinetist, to her apartment, hoping that music therapy might engage her old teacher and perhaps help draw out buried memories.   

Central to the plot is Franz Schubert’s “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen” (“The Shepherd on the Rock.”) The song, when played by Dante and Sunny (it is scored for soprano, clarinet, and piano), brings back a flood of memories to Lili, who sang it at her junior recital. One of Schubert’s last compositions, the text expresses consolation despite loneliness, and the famous melody, which recurs at critical points in the opera, serves as a sort of musical idée fixe.   

“Lucy [Shelton] had done a beautiful recording of ‘Shepherd on the Rock,’ earlier in her career,” says composer Kaminsky, “and because I knew both the clarinetist and the pianist that she had recorded with, it became a metaphor within the story.” Shelton and Kaminsky have known each other for 40 years, and on the heels of the soprano’s 75^th birthday, she requested that Kaminsky write something for her. “The idea of weaving this piece into the fabric of the opera became a constructive principle for us, but it also became a kind of a personal gift back to Lucy.”

The duality built into “The Shepherd on the Rock” points up the irreconcilables within each character. Dante, who gave up a piano career for another life (caring for his famous mother); Sunny, who gave up another life (an unborn child) for a career as a musician; Dr. Klugman, who aspired to become a singer, but “the voice, it never bloomed,” so she now serves music through her scientific research; and finally Lili, whose international career depended on her memory and whose mind is now forsaking her. As each character arrives at some level of acceptance, the cast ultimately finds solace in the duality of “music and silence.”  

Seattle Opera produced in 2016 Kaminsky’s chamber opera As One, about a transgender woman’s journey through her transition. Kaminsky, a past music department chair at the Cornish College of the Arts, took inspiration for Lucidity from her own life. “When my dad was suffering from dementia, he found his greatest joy singing in a chorus for people with memory problems,” she recounts. “Because of his disassociation from reality, he had a lot of anger and a huge amount of fear. But every week at this chorus he would sit up straight in his wheelchair, and he knew every lyric of every song from the American Songbook. It filled him with joy, and it gave him the energy to keep going, and I think it gave him a lot of peace.”

Librettist Cote, whose previous credits include the opera Scarlet Ibis, also drew from events close to him. “I was a caregiver for my wife who had cancer,” he says, “and when she was in her final years I was in that bizarre universe of dutifulness and action.” Life for him was reduced to a checklist, he recalls. “You have to do this, this, this, and this. You have to do these things or otherwise you’re going to fall apart. So the stress and drama of being a caregiver was fascinating to me.”

The iteration of the opera given here differs from the New York version in one key respect: the strings and percussion from the On Site Opera production were excised from the score, leaving just a piano and clarinet. Pianist Kyle P. Walker absorbed a number of percussive effects into his performance, including wood-block-like strikes rapped out under the keyboard, but I don’t know how much of the string music was rescored into the piano part. In the event, the writing for piano, sometimes angular and disorienting, at other times orderly and orchestral, lacked for nothing, so that the strings weren’t missed. Walker navigated this version of the score with assurance.

Fine as Walker’s performance was, clarinet virtuoso Yasmina Spiegelberg deserves special mention. The part demands onstage interaction with other characters, whether it be dubbing Sunny’s playing, or in one inspired moment, the music playing inside Lili’s head. Like Kaminsky’s idiomatic writing for the piano, her writing for clarinet is well suited to the instrument. Spiegelberg executed all manner of spiky flourishes with apparent ease, but it was her long-winded phrasing and burnished tone that made the lasting impression.

Tagney Jones Hall, the 200-seat performance space at the Opera Center, proved an effective venue for the production. Only in a room of this intimacy could the refinement of Lucy Shelton’s performance be truly appreciated. The 80-year-old singer, a newcomer to opera who built her career on contemporary music, gave the kind of detailed interpretation only a life-long lieder singer could realize. Kaminsky wrote the part of Lili specifically for her, incorporating many of Shelton’s known strengths, such as her facility with sprechstimme and improvisation.

According to Kaminsky, the lack of roles for older women was a principal force driving the composition of Lucidity. “For most women in opera, their careers are over after menopause. There just aren’t roles for them once they hit that age.” Kaminsky continued, “It’s interesting to me that in the jazz world, we have these beautiful older singers who’ve lost a lot of their technical facility at vocal production, which Lucy has not. But their life experience gives such profundity to their performances and their interpretations of lyrics and storytelling that we accept it.” She paused. “But we don’t accept it in opera. In opera, you have to hit the high note perfectly, you have to have perfect tone. You’re expected to be perfect.”

Kaminsky also created the role of Dr. Klugman with mezzo-soprano Blythe Gaissert in mind. “Blythe is someone I trust my opera life to, because she workshopped As One for me and has now been in five of my seven operas. She knows all the things I do wrong, and I know she’ll be completely, brutally honest with me.” In many ways Dr. Klugman seemed the most vulnerable of the four characters, and in the final moments of the show, during Lili’s performance of her song “Chosen Son,” Gaissert’s tearful reaction set off the waterworks in the seats around me.  

Baritone Eric McKeever managed his voice effectively, gradually sounding smoother and more self-assured as Dante, the adopted pianist son turned reluctant caregiver who finds a friend in Sunny and gains some traction with his mother.

Soprano Christina Maria Castro may have had the most difficult assignment as Sunny, the music therapist. In what (on paper at least) looks like the most contrived of roles, Sunny’s nature shone through by dint of her youthful voice and undaunted optimism. Castro delivered her aria, the outset of which consists of a painful one-sided phone conversation with her estranged parents, with evident emotion. “Life is precious: what you are given,” she managed to sing through tears, “what you choose: what you cannot choose.”

Conductor Geoffrey McDonald kept the score moving, but the cast, both vocal and instrumental, seemed to be operating independently, as befits a conversational score of this nature. Director Sarah Meyers worked very closely with the composer on detailed blocking “I’m very visual,” Kaminsky confessed, “so when I’m setting a line, I’m actually seeing in my imagination what that singer is doing physically. Are they looking up? Or are they looking away? Are they looking directly in the eyes of the person they’re singing to? Or are they looking into their mind?”

This phrase-to-phrase management of movement was worth the trouble, effectively punctuating each musical gesture. “I’m not sure it was that easy in the beginning for the singers,” Kaminsky recalled with a smile, “because Sarah was saying, ‘No, I want you to look away for this much time and then I want you to turn.’ And they were probably thinking ‘I’m trying to just sing this damn thing!’”