Another lovely production by Seattle Opera. Their work is always well worth the trip to this West Coast city. In this case, they have brought the US West Coast première of Lucidity by Laura Kaminsky (composer) and David Cote (librettist) to the intimate space of the Tagney Jones Hall at Seattle Opera. The main space is much, much larger than this concert / chamber performance space, but there is also the room for chamber works. In this case, the cast consists of six musicians, all on stage.
There are four singers: in order of vocal appearance, there are Blythe Gaissert (Dr. Claire Klugman), Cristina Maria Castro (Sunny), Eric McKeever (Dante) and Lucy Shelton (Lili, both a singer and a composer). The two instrumentalists are characters in this musical drama as well: they are Yasmina Spiegelberg, clarinet, and Kyle P. Walker, piano. Sunny is a graduate student of the clarinet, and Dante, who is both Lili’s son and her caretaker, are at very different stages of their careers. Sunny is at the beginning of hers, and Dante has given his up to be a caretaker for his mother. Further, Dr. Klugman is Lili’s ex-student, who has long given up music to be a researcher working on the connections between music and memory.
That last phrase could be the title of this opera. Its actual title, Lucidity, means light, but the subject of the opera is about the ways in which music and memory are connected and interlink. Specifically, Dr. Klugman is looking for, as she puts it in this smart and lovely libretto by David Cote, “a place in the brain...where music lives, where music hides.” We know in the real world that music is one of the very last places where memory survives in the case of some dementias—this opera explores why and how this might be so. The occasion of the opera is simple: Lili is part of a research project in which Dr. Klugman is looking at ways music can be used to treat dementia. (This is a raw subject, I would imagine, for both of the opera’s creators. Kaminsky and Cote have both been caretakers of people they know who have lived with memory loss and they are familiar with its particular pains, as is anyone who has been in such a position.)
Lucidity is a beautiful opera, as Dante (McKeever) and Walker perform the joint role, as it were, of a pianist and Sunny (Castro) and Spiegelberg perform their joint role of the clarinetist. I should note that Sunny is a beginner, relatively speaking, and Dante has failed: neither Spiegelberg or Walker are anything other than professional musicians, though in their roles as performing musicians, they both are scored by Kaminsky to make terrible mistakes as part of the score.
This is one of the great chamber operas, a form with which I am both familiar and fond, but its depth both of score and of libretto is simply amazing as dramatic movement flows between the stage musicians and their orchestral counterparts, between Dr. Klugman as she is now—a doctor—and as she was when a singer and Lili’s student, in Dante’s constant flow between Walker and Dante’s role as caretaker. Beautiful work, especially as conducted by Geoffrey McDonald, which holds up Kaminsky’s score as a model of intimate form.
But most important of all is the transition between Lili’s past as a singer and prolific composer, a history that is now almost lost, and her present as part of this study that might help with further treatments for dementia. At the moment that Kaminsky and Cote have captured in Lucidity, Lili can barely sing anymore and can’t remember her notes, but as she works with the student clarinetist (the instrumentation for Schubert’s last song, “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen” (“The Shepherd on the Rock”) is for soprano, clarinet and piano, the musical forces of this opera as well as of Schubert's song), Shelton moves into her own and moves back to the moments in which Lili could produce beauty with an almost complete performance of “Der Hirt” embedded in the present score. We hear such loss, such beauty and such a meditation on both. There’s no false hope here, just a final moment of lucidity to offer to us as other humans on our common journey through age to death.