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DAUGHERTY: Jackie O

McAndrew, Sourouzian; Alberghini, P. C. Jones; Ensemble del Teatro Rossini di Lugo, Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Franklin. Production: Michieletto. Dynamic 33605, 93 mins., subtitled

Michael Daugherty's opera Jackie O was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera in 1995 and received its premiere there in 1997. It has subsequently received numerous performances, including the 2008 production at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna documented in this DVD release. Misleadingly referred to as the "world premiere on DVD," this Dynamic release is in fact the first commercial DVD recording of the opera, but it is not a recording of the world premiere. In 1997, Decca released a CD recording of the original Houston cast.

At the time of the commission, Daugherty approached Wayne Koestenbaum, author of the controversial 1995 book Jackie Under My Skin, to write the libretto. Koestenbaum's libretto shares his book's general quality of being more an odd meditation on Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis than a factual representation of her life. Indeed, Jackie O can be regarded as a sneering look back at the late 1960s and the glitzy Pop Art, jet-set mentality of those times, times which also were the most decisive years in the former First Lady's life.

The music captures many of the clichés of commercial pop music of the '60s, including folk, go-go, television styles and lounge music. Simple motifs - some of them really more riffs that motifs - predominate. With its number-based structure, Jackie O has more in common with a Broadway musical than with a standard opera. But it has pretensions to being an opera, which robs it of the more simplistic and obvious plotline so common to the musical. Thus, the work sits uncomfortably between the two genres, not really fulfilling the expectations of either.

The libretto frequently relies on the recitation of lists, numbers and letters of the alphabet, or else on recurring phrases. While these fill time, they don't really advance the drama. The assumption seems to be that the listener already is acquainted with the facts of Jackie's life and the lives of the other principal characters. Thus, most of the conversations, monologues and dialogues are fragmentary. In a sense, this is exactly the correct approach to the subject as the authors wish to represent it. The results are a lot like Pop Art itself - an attention-getting surface but no real depth of perspective.

The members of the DVD cast turn in fine vocal performances. Fiona McAndrew portrays Jackie as an introverted, thoughtful woman of heart, much more a victim than a beneficiary of her fame. The high point of the opera comes in an imagined dialogue with Maria Callas - dazzlingly captured in the depiction by Nora Sourouzian - in which the two women come to peace with each other. Here, both singers use all they have to bring the scene to life. It is one of the few truly engaging moments in the opera, one in which music, text, stage direction and cast combine to make artistic magic. Another surprise comes from Simone Alberghini's portrayal of Aristotle Onassis. In life, at least as depicted in the popular press, Onassis came across as a rapaciously acquisitive, arrogant and shallow tycoon. Curiously, Alberghini presents an Onassis who has interior depth and even nobility, whose mendacity is offset by a longing for personal connection. Paul Carey Jones seems spot-on accurate in his depiction of Andy Warhol - creative, appealing but essentially impenetrable.

For most of the opera, Damiano Michieletto's stage direction is dynamic and effective. He makes imaginative use of the enormous, Warholian Campbell's Soup can that dominates the set. In Act I, the can serves as a symbol of the Pop Art sensibility and as the entrance for Jackie to the Hades of marriage to Onassis. In Act II, the can serves as the bar on board The Christina (Onassis's yacht). During the "Flame Duet" - the hallucinatory scene described above, in which Jackie and Callas discuss their losses - the can takes on the appearance of a gun barrel, as film clips of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., are displayed.

Unfortunately, Michieletto ruins the ending of the opera. As Jackie and the cast sing a folk song based on a quote from JFK's inaugural address ("Ask not …"), which celebrates the arrival of the New Frontier, we are shown film footage of the 2001 World Trade Center attack. The intent of the number seems to be to show that the New Frontier dream and the hopes it generated ultimately were lost. How much more effective, accurate and nuanced it would have been to show footage of the inaugural celebration of Ronald Reagan, whose presidency is now widely regarded as the death of the dream. Instead, Michieletto seems to have gone for the crassness of showing a moment of deep but unrelated tragedy long after the Zeitgeist had passed, long after Jackie herself had died, long after the opera was created. It is an egregious example of an over-privileged director going for the cheap and easy depiction of horror in an opera that just barely stands on its own merits.