Paola Prestini: The Old Man and The Sea
VIA Records

While Paola Prestini's daring treatment of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea (the first-ever approved operatic adaptation of the novel, incidentally) is best experienced live, the digital album release goes a long way towards capturing the opera's audacious character. Scored for voices, percussion, electronics, and cello, the work impresses as a bold phantasmagoric tapestry. Royce Vavrek's libretto mirrors Prestini's music in being a fever dream of its own, specifically a multi-layered one presenting the author in his final days reflecting on his life and ruminating on experiences, past-times, and famous figures such as Joe DiMaggio and Marlene Dietrich. A fluid, dream-like flow of episodes characterizes the design, which is punctuated by interstitial 'songs' that draw on passages from the 1952 novel and Hemingway's life.

Even without the visual spectacle of its stage component, Prestini's material captivates for the full measure of its 100 minutes when its singers are soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee (La Mar), baritone Armando Contreras (Hemingway, Santagio), countertenor Rodolfo Girón (Manolin), soprano Yvette Keong (La Virgen del Cobre), and the Phoenix Chorale, which, like a Greek chorus, bears witness to the drama. The adaptation isn't a page-by-page transcription of the novel (though it does include its main characters) but instead expands upon it with the incorporation of the bar owner La Mar (in Spanish, the feminine name for the sea) and La Virgen del Cobre, a goddess in the Afro-Caribbean faith Santería. Key to the work's instrumental dimension are Ji Hye Jung's percussion and the cello played with characteristic dynamism by Prestini's husband, Jeffrey Zeigler.

The opera is a major accomplishment for Prestini but only one of many. The Juilliard School graduate is the co-founder of both the Brooklyn-based arts institution National Sawdust and the NYC-based VisionIntoArt and has shepherded many a bold production into being. Clarifying why she chose Hemingway's novel for the opera, she stated that her interest was sparked by her father's love of the ocean and fishing and by her long-term engagement with Hemingway's material. Consistent with the novel, Santiago is old, yes, but also strong of will and determined to win the epic battle with the marlin that's recounted across many of the novel's pages. La Mar assumes the role of omniscient narrator whose details about illness, fishing, baseball, and drinking illuminate the narrative.

Against an electronics-sculpted backdrop of insect buzzing and drizzling rain, a spoken monologue by La Mar opens the opera to facilitate immersion into the work's humid, heat-drenched world. Having located us in Cuba, the presentation shifts from narrator to cello, marimba, and electronics and the libretto to Hemingway. Personifying the author, Contreras is a forceful, defiant presence whose voice is soon augmented by the feverish near-shriek of the choir and Keong's impassioned vocalizations. The focus adjusts again, now to Santiago (Contreras) and the young boy Manolin (Girón), who wants to go out with the old man on his boat despite his having gone eighty-four days without landing a fish. In the opera's most jarring transition, the anguished trio of Santiago, Manolin, and Zeigler is replaced by “Yankees,” a funky electro-pop episode listing Joe DiMaggio's stats during his thirteen-year tenure with the New York Yankees. After the old man muses “I would like to take DiMaggio fishing,” La Mar interjects with remarks about Santiago before the spotlight returns to the two novel characters. Another dramatic interjection occurs with the appearance of “Daiquiri” and its marimba-buoyed enumeration of the drink's components by the choir, La Mar, and eventually Hemingway.

As the opera enters its second half, the sea-sickly “What a Fish” places us on the boat with Santiago, struggling for hours with the fish on his line, distressed, near-hallucinating, and wishing he'd brought Manolin with him. Having speared the marlin, the old man must then watch as sharks, smelling blood in the water, arrive and force him to violently fend them off as best he can. Another startling left-turn occurs when “Remember …” backs a woozy series of declamations by La Mar and the choir with a pulsing tribal beat that plays like some trippy blend of trip-hop, gospel, and electronica. As the opera moves into its final stages, Hemingway's at the bar drunk and passing out before the work's final part, the twenty-minute “Welcome Home: The Fisherman / La Mula de Parenzo,” delivers one final adventure. Greeted by Manolin, Santiago returns to shore with hands bloodied and near death, but it's Hemingway who dominates the work's close. Sleep-deprived, given to emotional extremes, and suffering from bodily illnesses, the bearded, barrel-chested author takes his own life in the early morning hours using a twelve-gauge shotgun. In an inspired gesture, Prestini ends the work elegiacally with “La mula de Parenzo,” a two-hundred-year-old song the writer supposedly sang with his wife the night before he died.

As central to the opera as Contreras is, he's hardly the only vocalist who registers strongly, with Brueggergosman-Lee, Girón, Keong, and the Phoenix Chorale all critical to the work's impact and all stellar contributors. On the instrumental front, Zeigler is as vital to the impression the work makes. It's ultimately Prestini and Vavrek who are the opera's major stars, however, for having fashioned such an audacious and original treatment of Hemingway's novel.

October 2024