San Francisco

David Gockley, San Francisco opera’s newish general director, has defined his career with the commissioning of new works. Over three decades at Houston Grand Opera, he acted as midwife to countless operas, so there was always going to be considerable interest surrounding his first West Coast premiere (October 5): Philip Glass’s Appomattox, an opera exploring not only the final days of the American Civil War but also its meaning in modern-day America. Appomattox was indeed originally commissioned for Houston, and Gockley brought it—his fifth project with the composer—with him to San Francisco. It is hard to imagine Texan audiences being quite so receptive to its liberal, anti-war message as the Californians were; some of those at the performance I attended on October 14 were audibly moved.

Named after the Virginia village where the Confederate slaveholders surrendered in April 1865, Appomattox addresses war via the defining moment of 19th-century American history. ‘War is always sorrowful’, the lament that runs through Christopher Hampton’s lyrical and beautifully constructed libretto, is obviously true, but the work fails to ask deep questions, still less to answer them. Perhaps it tries to pack too much into a compact (by Glass’s standards) two-hour structure. The flash-forward cameos in Act 2, showing how racial tensions endured into the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and continue to this day (there is a particularly chilling part for Edgar Ray Killen, a Klansman convicted only in 2005 for his part in killings 40 years ago), skate the surface of a painful subject.

But even for those who don’t warm to Glass’s trademark minimalist doodlings, his operas have always been impressive for their big subject matter, and Appomattox is no exception. Previous subjects include, of course, Akhnaten, Gandhi, Einstein and Columbus, and he has already tackled this particular bit of American history in his CIVIL warS project with Robert Wilson. As before, Glass’s strengths in Appomattox are narrative and reflection, not drama. But by his own admission, Glass has moved away from the uncluttered optimism of his earlier works. The composer, who turned 70 this year, writes in the programme that ‘the world is a more threatening place than it used to be’. Accordingly, the score of Appomattox is sparer, darker and much less minimalist—less a case of history repeating itself again (and again, and again). Even the orchestral colours, with an emphasis on the middle and lower strings, are more introspective. Colloquial tunes, such as hymns and marches, are woven into the musical fabric that was seamlessly conducted here by a longtime Glass collaborator, Dennis Russell Davies.

Robert Woodruff’s staging was crisp and clear, thanks to the timeless platforms, walls and ramps of Riccardo Hernandez’s design. In intimate scenes the stage was frequently divided, showing the Union’s General Ulysses S. Grant and the Confederate’s Robert E. Lee simultaneously. The biggest scene, the fall…

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