One of the high points of this year’s San Francisco International Arts Festival is a revival of Erling Wold’s chamber opera Queer, based on the novel by William S. Burroughs of the same name. The opera was composed in 2000 and has received several revivals since then, but this year is the 25th anniversary of the first publication of the novel by Penguin. The cast calls for five voices, all but two of which assume multiple roles; and the instrumentation consists of trumpet, violin, guitar, keyboards, and bass. Bryan Nies conducted, and the staging was directed by Jim Cave.
Those interested in Burroughs work have the advantage of several recordings of his reading his own texts. Perhaps the most salient quality of his voice is a deliberate matter-of-fact delivery, which seems to intentionally detach itself from the steady stream of outrageous declarations that constitute the text being read. Many photographs of Burroughs appear to depict him as an “old school” newspaper reporter; and his vocal approach is almost a parody of the style of radio newscasters during the middle of the twentieth century.
The voice itself is thus almost antithetical to opera. The text, on the other hand, takes all the darkness of compulsive addiction to drugs and homosexual acts and escalates it from mere indulgence to a dramatism that would not be out of place in nineteenth-century bel canto operas. One might say that, among the Beats, Burroughs was the most “outlaw;” but he could skillfully conceal that “outlaw” nature beneath a veneer of ordinariness.
What makes Queer an appealing opera is the skill Wold has brought to honoring that dual nature of the outlaw and the ordinary. He does this by keeping the outlaw side where in belongs, in the text and in the enactment of that text on the stage. Among the five voices, only that of William Lee (Burroughs alter ego) is consistently “vocal,” not in any bel canto style but decidedly elevated above that mundane speech we hear on Burroughs recordings. Burroughs own voice, as it were, has been consigned to the instrumental ensemble. Wold seems to have taken Philip Glass’ approach to “music with repetitive structures” (the description that Glass himself prefers to “minimalism”) as a point of departure for his own rhetoric; but he uses it as an agency for the realization of the ordinariness of Burroughs approach to vocal delivery. Thus, in its own subtle way, the opera captures the dialectical confrontation between the narrative itself and the tone of voice with which Burroughs himself would have narrated it, providing yet another example of how the expressiveness of music can transcend that of mere words.
All of last night’s performers contributed to that transcendence, particularly Joe Wicht (Trauma Flintstone), who created the role of Lee, with the supporting cast of James Graham, Ken Berry, Diana Consuelo Hopping Rais, and Jorge Rodolfo de Hoyos, Jr. The instrumental ensemble consisted on JAB on trumpet, Michele Walther on violin, Marja Mutru on keyboards, David Sullivan on bass, and Wold himself on electric guitar. The good news is that Queer will receive five more performances during the Festival, beginning tonight (May 21) at 9 PM and tomorrow (May 22) at 7 PM. The following weekend, the Friday (May 27) and Saturday (May 28) performances will be at 8 PM; and the Sunday (May 29) performance will again take place at 7 PM. All performances will be at the Southside Theater in Fort Mason. Tickets cost from $20 to $12 and may be purchased through a Brown Paper Tickets event page.
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