‘The Anonymous Lover’ and ‘Handel: Made in America’ Reviews: New Angles on the 18th Century

Boston Lyric Opera gave the work by Guadeloupe-born composer Joseph Bologne a snappy staging without making a strong case for its score, while MetLiveArts deftly put the more famous composer’s work in a global context.

By Heidi Waleson 

Ashley Emerson and Brianna J. Robinson in ‘The Anonymous Lover’

PHOTO: NILE SCOTT STUDIOS

Boston and New York

With opera companies eager to perform works by creators from groups previously underrepresented on their stages, the biracial composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799), is having a contemporary moment.  Born in Guadeloupe, the son of a French planter and an enslaved woman, he was sent to Paris to be educated and had a brilliant career there, first as a fencer and then as a violinist, conductor and composer. “L’Amant Anonyme,” his only surviving complete opera, had its premiere in 1780 in the private theater of Madame de Montesson, wife of the Duc d’Orléans. LA Opera presented a socially distanced, streaming-only version in 2020; the Minnesota, Atlanta and Madison opera companies have mounted the work; and Chicago’s Haymarket Opera staged and recorded it in 2022. The latest production, a collaboration of Boston Lyric Opera and Opera Philadelphia, had its premiere here on Friday at the Huntington Theater as “The Anonymous Lover.”

The piece includes spoken dialogue and ballets in the French opéra comique style; its libretto by Desfontaines-Lavallée is based on a play by Madame de Genlis. The aristocratic principal characters, Léontine (Brianna J. Robinson) and Valcour (Omar Najmi), are afraid to confess their feelings for each other; meanwhile, for four years, Valcour has been showering Léontine with gifts in the guise of an “anonymous lover.” With the aid of their friends Ophémon (Evan Hughes) and Dorothée (Sandra Piques Eddy), and Jeannette and Colin (Ashley Emerson and Zhengyi Bai), a pair of villagers who are getting married, the truth is at last revealed.

Ms. Robinson

PHOTO: NILE SCOTT STUDIOS

The BLO version, sung in French, kept the 18th-century setting but tweaked the form. Playwright Kirsten Greenidge wrote snappy new English dialogue, updating the language and situations just enough to make it flow and spark a few laughs; the elimination of the dances streamlined the evening to an intermission-free 90 minutes. The modest production made do with a few pieces of furniture (including a harpsichord), colored lighting by Driscoll Otto, and quasi-period costumes by Leslie Travers. Some important turning points were unclear in Dennis Whitehead Darling’s otherwise efficient stage direction.

Bologne’s music proved charming and mellifluous if not very inventive. Vocal numbers were often internally repetitive—Léontine’s soul-searching arias about whether she can open her heart to love were conventional, and the small ensembles didn’t capture the accelerating cut and thrust of characters at cross purposes. Ms. Robinson’s sumptuous soprano was the most imposing voice of the evening; Ms. Emerson’s sparkle enlivened every scene in which she appeared, especially the strophic chanson, “Jouissez de l’allégresse” (“Enjoy the happiness”), with chorus, intended to send Léontine the message, “To love well is to live well.” Ms. Eddy showed a flair for comedy in her acting; in her aria—a piece interpolated from Bologne’s first opera, “Ernestine,” since the role of Dorothée as written has only dialogue—she exaggerated its mournfulness for comic effect. Mr. Najmi and Mr. Hughes pushed their voices; Mr. Bai’s pitch was insecure. David Angus, leading the 34-member orchestra, which was positioned upstage behind a scrim, began well with the sprightly Italianate overture, but his conducting for much of the rest of the show was rhythmically dull and unarticulated, and didn’t help make a case for this rediscovered score.

***

“Handel: Made in America,” presented by MetLiveArts at the Metropolitan Museum last week, looked at the representation issue from a different angle. In collaboration with director Pat Eakin Young and scholar Ellen T. Harris, Terrance McKnight, the WQXR radio host, constructed a program inspired by the luxury objects in the museum’s British Galleries of decorative arts, linking 18th-century global trade, colonialism and slavery with the artistic flourishing in London of musicians like George Frideric Handel during the same period. 

Terrance McKnight

PHOTO: HANJIE CHOW

Acting as narrator, Mr. McKnight deftly tracked these connections through his own life story—studying classical piano and accompanying hymns in his pastor father’s Baptist church; finding black male solidarity at Morehouse College, where Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony annually performed Handel’s “Messiah” with a Morehouse graduate as tenor soloist; finding a kinship with Handel, who temporarily lost the use of his right hand after having a stroke in 1737, when Mr. McKnight suffered a similarly catastrophic, potentially career-ending injury.

The excellent, all-black musical forces—four opera singers, a 14-voice chorus and a 13-member chamber orchestra, led by conductor and harpsichordist Malcolm J. Merriweather—became the extension of this exploration and the thorny question of how black American performers think about the music of Handel, given that the trafficking of their ancestors helped pay for the creation of his operas. (As Mr. McKnight noted, the Duke of Chandos, one of Handel’s principal patrons, as well as many investors in and subscribers to his Royal Academy of Music, were invested in the slave-trading Royal African Company.)  Lightly staged by Ms. Young, they became the community, singing spirituals, arias and choruses that, for all their stylistic differences, treated similar themes. In one incisive pairing, tenor Noah Stewart’s harrowing rendition of “Total eclipse” from Handel’s “Samson,” depicting the blinded Samson plunged into darkness, was followed by bass-baritone Davóne Tines, soprano Latonia Moore and the chorus singing the rousing spiritual “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” in which the constellations in the night sky mark the path to freedom.

Music, Mr. McKnight suggested, belongs to everyone; he quoted Langston Hughes’s advice to black artists: “[We] express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.” That self-assertion was palpable as mezzo J’Nai Bridgesembodied youthful fury in “Come rouse yourselves to vengeance,” an English translation of Sesto’s aria from “Giulio Cesare”; even more so in Mr. Tines’s commanding rendition of “I, Too,” Margaret Bonds’s setting of Hughes’s famous poem, which includes the line, “Nobody’ll dare say to me ‘Eat in the kitchen’ then.” The celebration and juxtaposition of the riches of both the classical canon and black American song allowed the music to speak for itself.

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).