#soprano line seems slightly unpleasant to sing but it is nice to listen to

[autism-disco]

not gonna lie, locus iste a deo factus est

[baeowulfisbae]

A review of Jesse Raccio’s Beowulf

This week, we discussed modern interpretations and adaptations of Beowulf. I read the dragon chapter of Grendel, which was really perfect--and I watched Jesse Raccio’s and Buffy Sharpe’s operatic adaptation of the poem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo02DllRRFo). The opera was exactly what I expected: young singers deconstructing voice pathos over minimalistic, repetitive triads. It was disappointing, initially, but I warmed up to it and I think this team did a lot of things very well with their adaption.

In his studies on fairy tales, Jack Zipes distinguishes between duplication ("produc[ing] a lookalike") and revision ("creat[ing] something new that incorporates critical and creative thinking of the producer and corresponds to changed demands and tastes of audiences") (9). Zipes says that, "a result of transformed values, [revisions] alter the reader's views of traditional patterns, images, and codes" though such alterations are not necessarily "improvements" or "progressive" (9). As far as adaptations go, Sharpe's reading of the Beowulf story is progressive in its deconstruction of harmonic form and voice pathos, but slightly regressive, in its characterization of some figures in the story.

What this opera does well: Voice pathos gesture to the binaries within the text. We have spoken of pairs of binary oppositions, in class, and Tolkien addresses this, to some degree, in his Monsters and Critics essay, noting that the poem is “essentially balance, an opposition of endings and beginnings. In simple terms, it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and old age, first achievement and final death" (5).

When I speak of voice pathos, I am referring to the roles and melodies composers write for particular voice types. I am a dramatic soprano, for example, and the last two roles I played were Delilah and Salome. My voice has weight to it and women with weighted voices never play love interests. I will always be cutting off someone's head, because weighted voices are powerful voices and powerful women, prior to the 20th century, were always disruptive figures. As far as general rules for pre-20th C voice parts go, the heroes are always tenors, the love interests are always lyric sopranos, the servants are generally basses (or mezzo-sopranos, for teenage boy servants), the wise, older male figures are baritones, the grandmothers are contraltos, the strong female figures are dramatic sopranos or coloratura sopranos. Raccio's voices her opera as such:1. Aeschere: counter tenor 2. Grendel's mother: dramatic soprano 3. Hrothgar: baritone4. Beowulf: tenor  5. Wealtheow: Lyric soprano

The voicing was the first component of the opera that impressed me, since Aeschere is--at the first listen--seemingly misvoiced. In the Beowulf story, of course, Aeschere doesn't speak at all, but Sharpe writes him into Grendel's mother's entrance and Raccio uses a counter tenor (or a tenor trying to sing a counter tenor's range). It's disconcerting, hearing a dramatic soprano paired with a counter tenor; there's too much power on stage and the melodic lines are jagged, the melody never going where my ear tells me it should go. It's unpleasant and symbolic: a lot of power on stage, but misplaced power, out of range and out of key, like Grendel's mother bursting into the safety of the Hall.

By contrast, Hrothgar has very simple, musically-logical melodic lines that move within a more traditional, Western harmonic structure (C-F-G-C sorts of progressions, overall). Beowulf tends to get the soaring heroic tenor melodies and there is really no better way, musically, to signify boasting than to write a heroic tenor melody. The wonderfully creative revision that Raccio makes, with the boasting, is that--while Beowulf's melody is less jagged and sounds properly-voiced, the text, "Fear not," (as in--Fear not. I will go after Grendelkin) is sung on a minor second. In music theory, the minor second is always used to denote tension (the two repeated notes from the Jaws theme constitute a minor second, for example), so that while Beowulf is voiced from a place of musical stability, there is an element of tension, to the scene, also. Raccio is not the first composer to play with a story that has some of its basis in Norse mythology and it is really nice to see her playing with the kinds of conventions Wagner does. Wagner's well-known leitmotifs--symbolic chords--are structured on a premise of nothing resolving the way that it is meant to, in the way of chord progressions. I sense that Raccio's playfulness with musical tensions may be a nod to Wagner, especially when she moves from epic or heroic chords to...improperly resolved chords. (Stephen Fry discusses Wagnerian leitmotifs and musical tension, in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWLp7lBomW8)

What the opera does not do well:

The librettist, Sharpe, writes Grendel's mother in a way that devastated me, to some degree, as a dramatic soprano. Grendel's mother is a siren--which gestures back to some of the critical writings we've discussed on epics--but she does not need to be a siren. In the Grendel opera, adapted from John Gardner's book, the mother is strictly physically powerful. She's threatening because she's physically threatening. I know that there are many good feminist essays on this subject--and on the subject of Beowulf's sword melting in Grendel's mother's body--but it seems lazy to me to automatically eroticize her power. I'm not opposed to erotic power outright, but there are so few moments, in literature, in which women have an outright physical advantage and Raccio and Sharpe have written that out of the text just so that this singer has a more legato aria. Putting this this woman's powerful voice to good use is understandable, but, reasonably, they could have also written her a reflective/solitary aria(or lullaby) of grief, and then broken the melody into a more recitative-style (with conversation-like snippets of sound), as she enters the hall to avenge her son's death. Composers don't like to put weighted voices into faster melodies, but it can be really effective when they do (case-in-point: Norman, 30 seconds into this aria--https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H9LTixHHug). Hearing Aeschere say, "She's a siren. She's a minx. She is not as she appears to me," then, is a bit irritating, especially given Aeschere’s age. On the other hand, though, the slow seduction leaves affective space for a slow exit from the Hall. In that moment, she cradles Grendel's arm in hers and it is actually quite moving. 

Overall then, this opera has its strength in Raccio's experimentation with sound and harmonic form, in the moments in which Heorot has been compromised. The libretto, though, has far too much seduction and romance and we don't get the engagement with the community, that we see in the original text and I don’t like reading this story without it. 

Tolkien, J.R.R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” Beowulf: A Verse Translation. Ed. Daniel Donoghue. New York: Norton, 2002. 

Zipes, Jack. Fairytale as Myth/Myth as Fairytale. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994.