![]() ![]() Almost everything in this sober, hagiographic spectacle is borrowed: from Britten, from Richard Strauss, from Maurice Jarre, from Shostakovich. Humor, which was so essential to Wilde, not least as a way of disguising his subversive agenda, is a musical inconvenience for Morrison, who seems comfortable only when indulging an occasional paroxysm of melody in the grand manner of Hollywood. But Oscar, which premiered at the Santa Fe Opera this summer, is an exercise in leaden seriousness, and despite the libretto’s efforts to build up Wilde’s character with some lighthearted chatter the musical palette is consistently gray. Gilbert, might have found an idiomatic way to manage this kind of parlor talk. Arthur Sullivan, who managed to bring clarity and pellucid sparkle to the rat-a-tat libretti of his collaborator W. S. Rossini might have made something of these early scenes in an otherwise dark and earnest opera. Wilde’s banter, his flippancy and love of illusory and insubstantial paradox-which is to say, all that remains vital about him more than a century after his death-falls flat. But Morrison’s musical language, a mélange of slightly dissonant chords that circle around each other without forward motion or resolution, does not allow for purling streams of text. The composer Theodore Morrison spends much of the first act of his new opera Oscar, based on the life of Oscar Wilde, trying to capture the wit and rapid-fire bon mots of his title character.
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