American Record Guide September/October 2001

New York: Richard Wilson: Aethelred the Unready [premiere]

While much new music to emerge from the halls of academe today seems serious and dubiously earnest, Richard Wilson, who teaches music at Vassar College and is composer-in-residence with the American Symphony Orchestra, is a serious composer with a glint of humor in his eyes. His chamber opera Aethelred the Unready, performed at Merkin Hall on May 13, offers both a scenario (a Monty Pythonesque lampoon of medieval society) and score (an atonal yet stylistically rich idiom) that proved engaging and often highly entertaining.

The story opens as the title character has decided to petition Clio, the powerful Muse of History, in hopes of improving his reputation upon the 1,000th anniversary of his death. Though his nagging wife Emma would like him to have a grander epithet he would be content with Aethelred the Adequate. The meddling Emma enlists a number of consultants, including a slick spin-doctor (The Publicist), and influential historian (William of Malmesbury), and a shifty Hypnotist, who attempts to embolden Aethelred before he approaches Clio's Tribunal of Historical Revision.

Though the hypnosis plan works initially, Clio's assistant soon interrupts the proceedings and causes the blundering Aethelred to thwart the trance's effects. The plan is ruined, and Aethelred is dismissed as a fraud. Only when he sends the Greek Chorus of publicist, hypnotist, and nagging wife packing, and recognizes the redemptive power of music, does he acieve inner peace.

Wilson's whimsical libretto—full of verbal volleys and tart one-liners—forms the basis for a thorny harmonic idiom, yet he frequently softens it with lyrical, arching vocal lines and ingenious stylistic allusions. The crafty publicist, for example, is met with jazzy, atonal piano rag, while the elaborate machincations of Emma are mirrored by a sarcastic march rhythm. The opera's climax is tinged with references to medieval modality, Lutheran hymnody, and the theater works of Peter Maxwell Davies.

The largely strong cast was led by tenor Robert Osborne (Aethelred), whose strong, robust voice never belied the haplessness of his character. Soprano Elizabeth Weigle underlined Emma's manipulations with an impressive range and agility. Countertenor Drew Minter sounded a little strained but was an otherwise effective Clio. Andrew Childs was the haughty William of Malmesbury; Jonathan Goodman sang with a rich tenor as The Publicist; bass Curtis Streetman did his best to overcome the unforgivably low register of The Hypnotist, and Thea Tulman was a charming Assistant.

With Wilson conducting a cast and chamber ensemble that included many long-time colleagues, this clearly added an extra dimension to the strong performances.

Brian Wise

The Wall Street Journal: Thursday, May 24, 2001

Opera: Reassessing a Royal Failure

You have to feel a little sorry for the medieval English king Aethelred II. During his reign (ca., 979-1016) Britain's armies were repeatedly trounced by Scandinavian invaders. Aethelred tried to effect peace by buying off the Danes with a series of tribues that eventually totalled nearly 140,000 pounds of sliver (and that's weight, not bank notes). The ruinous sum—angrily called the Danegeld by Aethelred's subjects—was raised by the first general tax in England.

Throughout this time, Aethelred had been offered plenty of advice by his nobles. But his refusal to take it led to his appellation "Unrede," or "without counsel." "Unrede," which was probably pronounced "oon-REE-deh" by Aethelred's contemporaries, eventually became "Unready," quite another thing.

"Yes, he was even unlucky in his epithet," observes Richard Wilson, whose opera, "Aethelred the Unready," received its world premiere at New York's Merkin Hall on May 13. Mr. Wilson holds the Mary Conover Mellon Chair in Music at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and his gentle, often self-deprecating humor belies his many honors from the Guggenheim and Koussevitzky Foundations, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, not to mention commissions and performances by the San Francisco Symphony, London Philharmonic and American Symphony Orchestra (of which he is composer-in-residence).

Prior to the great day, I asked Mr. Wilson why he chose to write his first opera about such an undistinguished historical figure -- indeed, less a figure than a footnote. He replied that he, too, is somewhat puzzled by the attraction. "A very good friend was constantly supplying me with suggestions for operas, but I never really thought that any of them would work for me. So, in self-defense, I decided to come up with something of my own. At the time, the Yankees were in a very serious losing streak. And I got to thinking about losers, failures, washouts."

In this rosy frame of mind, Mr. Wilson recalled the happy hours he spent during his own varsity years reading the Chronicles of William of Malmesbury, in which the Unrede king figures to some degree. He embarked on his own libretto, despite his understanding of the pitfalls. "When you write
your own libretto, people immediately conclude that you think you're Wagner. And the downside is that if the opera doesn't go over well, there's nobody else to blame." On the positive side, however, Mr. Wilson finds that "to be able to start with the words and then follow the musical impulse to change them or the verbal rhythm without having to argue with a librettist makes progress much easier."

In the course of writing his own book, Mr. Wilson discovered the bizarre fact that the luckless Aethelred was even cursed at his baptism by the Archbishop of Canterbury. "I thought that an opera needs a good curse. It's a great tradition." That curse is recounted in the opera by abashed Aethelred himself, who sings that it was due to "a moment of infant confusion: Without intending sacrilege, I defiled the font in a shocking way."

Mr. Wilson's plot, set in an unspecified time, revolves around a periodic tribunal at which Clio, the classical Muse of History, reappraises the reputations of historical figures. Aethelred, who has slept contented in his mediocrity for a thousand years, is jolted awake by his ambitious consort, Emma, and ordered to do whatever he can to improve his standing in the eyes of posterity. Apart from his own reluctance to undertake the task, Aethelred has to deal with Clio's shockingly poor memory -- she forgets names. Even William of Malmesbury, who plays a major role in the opera, is too busy rattling off the exploits of his favorite Saxon kings to pay Aethelred much attention. In the end, after a Publicist and a Hypnotist fail to galvanize the king by transforming him into an orator with a series of charmed words -- artichoke, synecdoche and tabernacle -- Aethelred finds contentment in playing a wistful solo on Clio's trumpet, which the Muse has absent-mindedly left behind.

"I had conceived of the whole thing on the frivolous side," Mr. Wilson admits. "But then I realized how the character could be rather sympathetic." Indeed, he has frivolously scored that final trumpet solo for the more sympathetic sounding bass clarinet.

The semistaged performance at Merkin, ably conducted by the composer, was given before an audience that included American music's current Grand Old Man, Elliott Carter, whose smile at Aethelred's final soliloquy, "I've spared the world so much travail," was particularly sweet. Among the singers, the young soprano Thea Tullman was outstanding, with a crystalline voice as well as natural stage presence, which overcame the rather tentative semistaging of director Michael Pisani.

Mr. Wilson's music, splendidly scored for clarinet, violin, cello, piano and two very busy percussionists, is sly rather than toe-tapping. As a humorous touch, Clio is sung by a countertenor -- in this case the distinguished Drew Minter -- which creates a sort of reverse trouser-role.

In the climactic ensemble praising bold and bloody actions over sloth and indolence, trained ears can revel in Mr. Wilson's cagey use of Bach's chorale "Erkenne mich mein Huter" (acknowledge me, my keeper), as well as "A mighty Fortress" deftly woven through the counterpoint. At one point, Aethelred, sung by baritone Robert Osborne, sings a lovely old-English folk song for which Mr. Wilson devised an accompaniment whose medieval-flavored harmony is presented as a halo of sustained vibraphone chords. And certainly the final elegiac bass-clarinet-cum-trumpet solo (eloquently played by clarinettist Allan Blustine) could easily take on its own life as an independent concert piece.

Barrymore Laurence Sherer