eL/Aficionado (Opera)

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    Review: An Espionage Opera Remains Enigmatic and Urgent

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    Robert Ashley’s “eL/Aficionado” is receiving a rare revival that is a testament to its vitality.You can’t help but feel some sympathy for the protagonist of Robert Ashley’s opera “eL/Aficionado” when she says, “The meaning of the scene is impossible to describe, if one looks for meaning in the ordinary sense.”It’s an evergreen sentiment when it comes to Ashley’s idiosyncratic and innovative works, atmospheric enigmas that stretch everyday spoken language to its extremes by elongating it and emphasizing its contours — elevating the ordinary to something, well, operatic.An avant-gardist who worked closely with a recurring set of collaborators to realize his vision — which generally involved a deceptively simple harmonic foundation under deceptively simple vocal technique — his work is difficult to revive, especially following his death in 2014.But in recent years his operas have begun to pass to a new generation, through the invaluable efforts of Mimi Johnson, his widow, and Tom Hamilton, a longtime colleague. The latest revival — of “eL/Aficionado,” from the early 1990s — opened Thursday at Roulette in Brooklyn; it joins its fellow presentations since his death in offering a testament to the work’s enduring vitality. (A new “eL/Aficionado” recording is also out from Johnson’s label, Lovely Music.)Ostensibly an espionage thriller told through the fragmented biography of an operative known only as the Agent, “eL/Aficionado” is the second installment in the tetralogy “Now Eleanor’s Idea.” But it stands alone as a subtle evocation of 20th-century politics and the paranoia of the Cold War. Like much of Ashley’s work, however, it defies simple description, with Dada-esque digressions and casual turns toward the cosmic.In the most explicit departure from the opera’s initial run and recording, the Agent, a role written for the baritone Thomas Buckner, is in this revival recast as a mezzo-soprano. Kayleigh Butcher, a contemporary music veteran making her Ashley debut, performs the part with technical assurance and commanding interpretive depth.Kayleigh Butcher (front, with McCorkle) plays the Agent, the opera’s protagonist and a role originally written for a baritone.Wolf DanielAs the Agent, she — a pronoun change that now extends through the libretto — recounts her career to a trio of interrogators (all of whom wear suits and sunglasses, with one, the most senior of the bunch, seated apart and elevated on a platform upstage). Butcher performs the closest thing to traditional singing, full-voiced and vibrato-rich — though crucially unassuming, never rising to true grandeur but nonetheless building tension through language: an emphasized syllable or a single letter deployed to dramatic effect.Over the opera’s 72 minutes, the interrogation becomes increasingly unreliable. It could be real; it might not be. There are clues, perhaps, in the surreally minimalistic set — by David Moodey, after Jacqueline Humbert’s designs from 1994 — which consists of just the Agent’s and interrogators’ desks, along with two Ionic columns and a free-standing window whose curtains blow gently and mysteriously. There are also suggestions in the libretto of dreams and analysis, and the slippery nature of memory. Nothing, it seems, is certain.The Agent’s tale moves with alluring and hypnotic momentum — at 72 beats per minute, to be exact, a common pace in Ashley’s music. The electronic score (designed and mixed live by Hamilton, the production’s music director) might seem a bit dated, its dreamy synths consistent with the era of “Twin Peaks” or “The X-Files.” But consider how Ashley’s influence, long pervasive in the work of artists like Laurie Anderson, reaches operas of today, such as “Sun & Sea,” which with a similar soundscape won the top prize at the Venice Biennale and is currently selling out on tour.The minimalistic set by David Moodey (after Jacqueline Humbert’s designs from 1994) consists of the Agent’s and her interrogators’ desks, along with two Ionic columns and a free-standing window whose curtains blow gently.Wolf DanielAnd like “Sun & Sea,” a disarmingly relaxed collection of dispatches from a world in climate crisis, “eL/Aficionado” operates on different registers. Personal ads, recited throughout, are peppered with comedy; the cast comes together as a chorus for manic real estate advertisements. These asides might mean everything, or nothing at all.Personals, with their economical writing, are by their nature poetic, and rise to the operatic in the rhythmic and lyrical speech of the junior interrogators. As one of them, Bonnie Lander relishes the percussiveness of “Passion for Piero, Palladio, Puccini, pasta”; the other, Paul Pinto, gets his turn with the staccato phrasing of “Successful. Super-smart. Sensuous. Sensitive. Cuddly. Affectionate.”The senior interrogator (Brian McCorkle) also blurs the line between speaking and singing, prolonging phrases and, later, pre-empting the Agent’s lines with identical ones, whispered as if fed to her. He provides a preamble for each scene, beginning with “My Brother Called.” (“He is not my brother in the ordinary sense,” the Agent explains. “It is a word we use in the department. It means someone you can count on.”) Subsequent set pieces recount tests and assignments, with interjections of the bizarre and unbelievable — things that the Agent is told to take to her grave.For patient listeners, there are revelations. Those ads, it turns out, are code. “The person described as ‘sought’ is the same person in a different code,” we are told. “I believe it is a kind of confirmation, both for the listener — whoever that was — and for the speaker. A double-check against the memory.”But it’s possible that this code was just another test for the Agent, who, disenchanted, left “the department” at some point before the interrogation. “Most of what happened makes no sense to me,” she admits in the penultimate scene.Jaded and distrustful, she gave up on looking for meaning long ago and suggests the interrogators do the same. That is what pervasive uncertainty does to the mind — a life of never knowing what is a test and what an assignment, what is code and what is simply language.This deeply unsettled feeling might have been endemic during the Cold War. But it has never really left us. Confusion to the point of exasperated resignation, we’ve seen, can be weaponized to influence elections. It can turn a public health crisis into a deadly mess. With “eL/Aficionado,” Ashley achieved what opera — or all art, for that matter — is at its most vital: urgent and, for better and worse, timeless.eL/AficionadoThrough Saturday at Roulette, Brooklyn; roulette.org. More

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      A Spy Opera (or Is It?) Returns to the Stage

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      Robert Ashley’s enigmatic “eL/Aficionado” is being revived to prove it can live on beyond his close collaborators.It was February 2020, and Mimi Johnson was pouring afternoon tea in the TriBeCa loft she once shared with her husband, the composer Robert Ashley.Johnson was reflecting on what was then the recent revival of “Improvement (Don Leaves Linda),” by Ashley, who died in 2014 and whose innovative operas generally involved the blurry boundary of speech and singing, smooth electronic accompaniment, and enigmatic, witty storytelling.Another revival, of Ashley’s early 1990s work “eL/Aficionado,” was supposed to follow shortly after. But because of the pandemic, Johnson was forced to shelf the nearly completed project, until Roulette in Brooklyn, on whose board she sits, approached her this year about reviving the revival; “eL/Aficionado” will run for three performances at Roulette, Thursday through Saturday.Mimi Johnson, left, and Tom Hamilton have been integral in recent revival of Ashley’s innovative, enigmatic operas.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThese Ashley productions are designed not only to allow New Yorkers to see these rarely presented works again, but also to ensure they can live on once their composer’s close circle of collaborators has passed. For “Improvement,” Johnson and Tom Hamilton, a longtime creative partner of Ashley, painstakingly combed through Ashley’s archives to produce a new electronic score for the work, which was conceived as a recording and whose existing version thus contained vocals inextricable from the accompaniment.“If we don’t get these scores organized and the tapes updated and available, Tom or I might die,” Johnson said. “And it would be a whole lot harder for someone else to do these operas.”A simple way to convey their belief that the works can and should be performed more widely is to put them on with new talent. The original “eL/Aficionado” featured the baritone Thomas Buckner, a veteran Ashley performer, in the central role of the Agent. But Hamilton, the revival’s music director, was curious to hear the role sung by a mezzo-soprano.He and Johnson sought out Kayleigh Butcher, who has performed in opera companies and with new-music ensembles but has never before done Ashley. She is joined by another newcomer, Bonnie Lander, as well as Paul Pinto and Brian McCorkle, who have both performed in numerous Ashley works, including “Improvement,” “Perfect Lives” and “Crash.”Johnson still lives in the TriBeCa loft she once shared with Ashley, her husband, who died in 2014.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesHamilton, who collaborated often with Ashley, is the revival’s music director.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAs with that 2019 production of “Improvement,” the revival of “eL/Aficionado” accompanies a new recording, to be released on Friday by Lovely Music, the influential new-music label that Johnson has run since the late 1970s. Hamilton, who also produced the album, believes that having two recorded versions available will serve both to guide future performers and to illustrate the potential for expressive freedom.“I think Kayleigh’s performance speaks to the viability of the work itself, and how it can change and grow in someone else’s hands,” he said. “And I suspect that in the future, groups will rely more on the recorded material than on the score to catch the style of the piece.”The opera features a spy, named simply the Agent, who has done a career’s worth of work for an unnamed organization and is now on trial facing three interrogators, one superior and two more junior. Through a series of obscure responses to them, sometimes resembling personal or real estate advertisements and sometimes psychoanalytic sessions, the Agent relates four stages of her biography in reverse chronological order, seemingly revealing what led her to a life of espionage.The taut braiding of speech and singing in “eL/Aficionado,” often performed in double time over the 72-beats-per-minute pulse of the accompaniment, would seem to allow for little creative variation. But while Thomas Buckner portrayed the Agent as a sullen figure expressing an almost ghostly contrition for his deeds, Butcher’s interpretation adds a defiant tone, as if the Agent is as confused as the audience as to why her work should be subject to scrutiny. A line like “Can you blame me for being skeptical? A mere boy. I don’t think he was 10 years old” turns from Buckner’s desperate appeal into a confident avowal.From left, Robert Ashley, Humbert, Sam Ashley and Buckner performing “eL/Aficionado” in Berlin in 1992.Giacomo OteriAshley was a fan of spy novels, particularly those of John le Carré, but he notes in the libretto that “eL/Aficionado” is “not a spy story” and that the audience should be aware that, as the Agent’s story unfolds, the events acquire an increasing air of unreality.Even so, the espionage trappings are significant in a work that makes up a quarter of Ashley’s tetralogy “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” which in its entirety is an allegory for American westward expansion. Johnson recalled that when she first came to know him, in the mid-1970s, Ashley was fascinated and troubled by the C.I.A.-orchestrated Chilean coup of 1973, which brought about the installation of Augusto Pinochet. She believes that the Spanish title of “eL/Aficionado,” which translates to “amateur” or “hobbyist,” is a nod to those events.One of the work’s four sections, “My Brother Called” — “brother” is a tradecraft term for a dependable operative — is an extension of an installation piece that Ashley had produced for a 1977 show at New York University. It consisted of stacks of Spanish-language newspapers arranged in a grid resembling city blocks, with a spot-lit telephone in the center. Ashley periodically called the phone, which filled the room with a mixture of his own indecipherable speech, Latin American music and sounds from a television.In “eL/Aficionado,” the Agent describes that piece and claims that “the meaning of the scene is impossible to describe” — as if to suggest that Ashley himself was unsure exactly what role he and other artists played in the country’s broader Cold War project.That ambiguity is one of many; the enveloping aura of mystery is the opera’s real achievement. Devoid of chase scenes, dead drops, tidy resolutions and most other familiar tropes of espionage narrative, the Agent’s swirling relation of images and memories — whose relevance even she is unable to gauge — creates an atmosphere of pure paranoia. In our age of fractured reality, mass surveillance and shocking regime changes, that quintessential 20th-century feeling, and the opera that makes use of it, are ripe for reappraisal. More