Rossa Crean: The Priestess of Morphine
Navona Records

Intoxicating might be the best word to describe composer Rossa Crean and librettist Aiden K. Feltkamp's chamber opera The Priestess of Morphine. The title alone is enough to pull the listener in, but so do, among other things, the words accompanying the title, “A Forensic Study of Marie-Madeleine in the Time of the Nazis,” and the unusual ensemble of two sopranos (Jessie Lyons, Katherine Bruton), violin (Alex Giger), cello (Stephen Hudson), vibraphone (Ben Zucker), and waterphone (the latter, which appears on one track only, is played by Crean). Conducted by the composer, The Priestess of Morphine was recorded in Chicago on August 10, 2019.

Economical in both length and arrangement, the nearly fifty-minute work, consisting of a prelude and six movements, both is and isn't a monodrama: whereas a single singer appears in a monodrama, Crean's includes two; however, in representing different sides of a single subject—the mature narrator versus the young actor in the drama—The Priestess of Morphine qualifies as a monodrama of a special kind. Lyons portrays baroness Gertrud Günther, who shares details about morphine and her encounters with the Nazis during World War II; Bruton plays Marie-Madeleine, the persona of Gertrud who recounts personal experiences with morphine addiction and sexual desire. Complicating the narrative, Günther is also a Jewish lesbian poet who in being so is forced to live clandestinely.

While she might sound like a fictional creation, Günther was a real person whose second marriage to a Nazi official enabled her to avoid the concentration camps; she found herself, however, committed to a sanatorium in 1943, supposedly for treatment of her morphine addiction, where she died mysteriously a year later while under the care of Nazis doctors. Both the character of the music and the instruments deployed reinforce the dreamlike quality associated with opium, the score sensual, lyrical, and lulling and the textures generated by vibraphone and waterphone key in amplifying its ethereal dimension and air of mystery. The Priestess of Morphine is material one less attends to analytically than absorbs through the senses.

Strings and vibraphone entice the listener into the work's opium-scented world in the “Prelude,” the lulling setting rich in shimmering sonorities and polyphony. With Lyons' melismatic and Bruton's expressive voices gracing “The Awakening,” the first vocal movement resonates even more powerfully, especially when buoyed by the insistent rhythms produced by the instrumentalists. In some movements the sopranos both appear, in others one only. In a setting that evokes the desperation of nocturnal desire, Bruton memorably channels Marie-Madeleine's lustful cravings during “In Salvation and In Sin” (“The madness-making moonlight with its sickly pallor splayed death over your face as I pressed you to me”). Pulling back from that emotional outpouring, Lyons introduces “Morphine” with clinical details about the opium poppy before Bruton recounts the origins of her addiction and specifically how doctors used it to ease her distress when her first husband died. She again appears as the sole singer on “Tumbling,” this time her performance even more expressive in its declarations of despair and suffocation. The impact of the singers' voices is felt keenly in the penultimate movement “The Harvest Song” when they're unaccompanied by instrumentalists. The way their voices intertwine, harmonize, converge, and diverge is mesmerizing. At album's, “The Flower of Oblivion” provides a satisfying formal and dramatic resolution to the work and Günther's eventful story.

Crean's treatment brings this bold figure to vivid life seventy-seven years after her passing and certainly fulfills his desire to honour her and, in the composer's own words, “bring awareness to the words of a woman who did everything she could to live an authentic life.” It's easy to imagine The Priestess of Morphine forming one-half of an evening's programme, with a monodrama such as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire or Erwartung a natural partner to Crean and Feltkamp's creation. At the same time, the work's powerful enough that it hardly needs another to lend support to it.

June 2021