The Romance of the Rose’ Review: An Opera on Love’s Disorder

Composer and librettist Kate Soper’s inventive, uneven adaptation of a 13th-century French poem at Long Beach Opera explores the messiness of romantic love.

Laurel Irene and Lucas Steele

PHOTO: JORDAN GEIGER

By Heidi Waleson

Feb. 21, 2023 6:11 pm ET

San Pedro, Calif.

‘Le Roman de la Rose,” a 13th-century, 21,000-line poem written in Old French, is an allegorical anatomization of love, with forays into numerous other fields, including astronomy and predestination. The composer Kate Soper has cherry-picked elements from this exhaustive compendium, added new ones, and adapted the tale into her eccentric but basically operatic “The Romance of the Rose,” which had its world premiere by the Long Beach Opera at the Warner Grand Theatre on Saturday. Though wildly imaginative and studded with ingenious musical effects, “Rose” doesn’t jell into a coherent evening. 

The opera’s text is wide-ranging, including snippets of the original French version (mostly from the God of Love); Ms. Soper’s modern interpretations of the poem’s themes; and rose-centered verses by Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and others. Spoken dialogue is often used for zingers, such as Lady Reason’s “There is no such thing as ‘sad music’!” or the Lover’s bewildered “Wait . . . does that mean I want to have sex with a plant?” With nearly 2 1/2 hours of music and dialogue, the piece feels long and repetitive, overly reliant on words, particularly spoken ones, to make its points.

Bernardo Bermudez, Phillip Bullock, Tiffany Townsend and Tivoli Treloar (front)

PHOTO: JORDAN GEIGER

This is ironic, given Ms. Soper’s fertile musical imagination and wit. The combatants have distinctive musical identities: The God of Love often veers into his falsetto range, and there is reverb on his singing (everyone is miked); while Lady Reason, prone to scientific jargon, is accompanied by a vocoder, which creates a robotic underlay for her voice. Shame spouts obscenities in a dizzyingly jagged vocal line against loud and chaotic distortions and instrumentals. The techniques aren’t gimmicky, and Ms. Soper can turn them into comic moments and alluring sequences, such as Lady Reason’s diatribe about how music and love are “twin sicknesses” and her list of alternatives to romantic love, a catchy tune backed by marimba and saxophone. 

Historical forms, such as madrigals, offer the audience a taste of familiarity, though never for long. Ballad duets sung by the Dreamer and the Lover—a sweet one to a text from Shakespeare (“O Mistress Mine”) and a more intense paean taken from Tennyson—are rudely interrupted by Lady Reason and Shame, respectively. Idleness (Tiffany Townsend) and Pleasure (Bernardo Bermudez), the God of Love’s henchmen, duet on a delectable torch song, which is both sincere and a sendup. The orchestral accompaniment, a nine-person ensemble ably led by Christopher Rountree, is also pointed, judiciously allotting string solos, harp riffs, heavy guitar licks, and the Rose Theme itself, an insistent ostinato. 

Anna Schubert and Tivoli Treloar

PHOTO: JORDAN GEIGER

The capable singers were game for the opera’s extended techniques; a standout was Ms. Schubert, who made Lady Reason’s robotic insistence affecting as well as comic, especially in Act 2, when she dresses up—and then strips down—to seduce the Lover into the camp of rationality. Mr. Steele made an appealing narrator, but his voice lacked the warmth that the opera singers could summon, so a lament like “A rose once blown must die,” which concludes Act 1, lost some poignancy. 

The set, designed by Prairie T. Trivuth, suggested minimal resources—white walls, a few plants, and doorframes hung with colored streamers could only hint at a dream pleasure garden. The rose itself, marooned on a platform in the middle of the audience, remained stubbornly out of reach until the Lover secured it in Act 2 and then dismembered its paper petals. Molly Irelan’s costumes relied heavily on bright colors and shimmery lamé; Pablo Santiago’s lighting was unsubtle, going from flat to lurid pink or orange in an instant. Director James Darrahworked hard to shape the opera into a narrative arc, but the form resisted his efforts. For all its invention, “Rose” came across as an exercise in cleverness. 

Ms. Soper ventures regularly into these waters. Her witty vaudeville chamber piece, “Here Be Sirens,” for female trio and tortured piano, produced in New York in 2014, similarly plumbed old texts and mythologies, but was tighter and more effective. Her new chamber opera, “The Hunt,” in which three virgins, passing time in a meadow, await the appearance of a unicorn, will have its premiere at New York’s Miller Theatre in October. But exhilarating as it is to channel archaic lore into modern dress, the operatic form itself demands theatrical consistency that goes beyond adroit amusement. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).