‘People do in the dark what they wouldn’t allow themselves to do when the light is on,” we are told in Mamzer Bastard by Na’ama Zisser, the Israeli-born doctoral composer in residence at the Royal Opera House and Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
The antithesis between darkness and light is integral to the opera, which is set in New York during the 1977 blackout, and deals with the way in which the past continually impinges on the present in its gradual exposure of the secrets that haunt a family from the city’s Hasidic community.
The blackout strikes when the 21-year-old Yoel (countertenor Collin Shay) is taking a ritual bath on the eve of the arranged marriage that terrifies him. Struggling to get home, he is rescued from muggers by a mysterious stranger (Steven Page), who knows both his identity and his past, and who insists the marriage should go ahead. It gradually becomes apparent that the stranger is the first husband of Yoel’s mother Esther (Gundula Hintz), from whom he was separated during the war. Believing him to have died in the Holocaust, Esther married Yoel’s father Menashe (Robert Burt). Their marriage is bigamous, and Yoel is therefore a mamzer, a word usually translated as “bastard,” though it more accurately designates someone born from a relationship forbidden by Jewish religious law. As such, Yoel is also forbidden to marry. If he does so, however, the union must be accepted as valid, and he faces stark choices about his future.
Samantha Newton and Rachel C Zisser’s tautly constructed libretto is innately musical in its use of linguistic repetitions that function like balladic refrains. The score, however, arouses mixed feelings. Zisser embeds the narrative in a constantly shifting soundscape of darkening harmonies and subtle textural gradations that create continuously evolving patterns of tension and release. Cantorial music, introduced into opera for the first time, punctuates the narrative with moments of communal reflection in ways not unlike Tippett’s use of spirituals in A Child of Our Time, while electronic sound suggests the distant rumble of the city in which the work is set. The overall effect is one of quiet, contained sadness, but ultimately the music accompanies the drama rather illuminates it, and the characterisation could be considerably sharper than it is.
It’s effectively done, though. Jay Scheib’s production evokes the threatening atmosphere of the darkened city. Even in the blackout, there is nowhere for anyone to hide, and in ways reminiscent of Katie Mitchell’s work, the performers are filmed during the opera’s course, and their facial expressions projected in remorseless close-up on to the walls of Madeline Boyd’s austere set. Jessica Cottis conducts the Aurora Orchestra with some intensity, and the singing is consistently fine. Shay conveys Yoel’s growing bewilderment with touching veracity. Burt’s truculence contrasts with Hintz’s introversion as we come to realise that despite her fierce loyalty to Menashe, she still secretly loves her first husband. Page admirably suggests the anguish of a man who can only intervene from the sidelines in the life of the family he might have had if circumstances had been different. Most striking of all, perhaps, is cantor Netanel Hershtik, from New York’s Hampton Synagogue, superb in his vocal control, and mesmerising whenever he sings.
- Until 17 June. Box office: 020-8985 2424.
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