Awakening a Global Spirituality: The Opera Moby-Dick as a Meditative Quest

Awakening a Global Spirituality: The Opera Moby-Dick as a Meditative Quest T. WALTER HERBERT Southwestern University T he opera Moby-Dick—by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer—evokes the colliding cultural worlds through which Melville engages ultimate mysteries, and thus offers a powerful new reading of Melville’s novel. The worldview of the Christian West was carried worldwide aboard merchant vessels, warships, and whale ships, and Melville himself witnessed its confrontation with the native spiritualities of Polynesia. His masterwork broods over the interplay of those disparate visions. In our own time of emerging global awareness, the novel of the white whale speaks in a cogent new voice, which the Heggie-Scheer opera translates into a musical and literary masterpiece. Readers who know Melville’s novel will be fascinated to see how intimately the opera conveys the novel’s deeper forces. But the opera stands apart as a distinctive endeavor. Heggie and Scheer did not set Melville’s novel to music: they incorporated his work into music and a vision of their own. Establishing a Creative Center W e wanted to get deep into the text of Moby-Dick,” the composer Jake Heggie explained, “and then set it aside and take the experience somewhere else” (Panel). Making an opera of Melville’s Moby-Dick required generating a creative center, where words and music would be composed to make something that is not a novel. Opera is a collaborative enterprise, coordinating massive resources. The Heggie-Scheer opera deploys sets, action, and videography that depicts whaleboats on the water and their destruction by the white whale. The work commands musical forces that include eight principal singers and a 40-voice male chorus. A full orchestra accompanies the vocal passages but also portrays vast oceanic calm and tumult and wrenching transformations of the soul. When Moby Dick sinks the whale ship, a whole world is musically destroyed. At the center is the collaboration of Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer, which reaches out to include the indispensable dramaturg Leonard Foglia and the conductor Patrick Summers as well as an expanding creative c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 91 T . W A L T E R H E R B E R T team of musicians, stage designers, costume designers, sound engineers, the director, and the videographers, all working together. Instead of a solitary Herman Melville laboring for months over his writing desk, a multitude of such figures worked over a span of five years. To inaugurate and sustain this enterprise, Heggie noted, “it was first necessary to get into the novel, and then get out of it” (Panel). For Gene Scheer, this meant reading Moby-Dick eleven times until his imagination echoed with Melville’s language. Better than half of the lines in the libretto come from the novel, some altered and transferred to new settings.1 “Like a snow hill in the air” (Norton MD 16), the expression with which Ishmael concludes the opening chapter, becomes “a hump like a snow hill” and is given to Ahab when he sees the white whale (Libretto 55). In the novel, Pip “saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom” (Norton MD 347), when he is lost and adrift; in the opera, the statement becomes a question—“Who sees God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom?” spoken, not by Pip and not by Ishmael, over the coffin made for Queequeg (52). The music of Melville’s language pervades the opera, but it is massively reduced in scale. The libretto is roughly 9000 spoken words; the novel 450,000. The opera consumes three hours of playing time; to set even a quarter of Melville’s text would demand a production more than 35 hours long. Scheer and Heggie chose not to replicate the novel’s digressive form but organized key events along a forceful and direct story-line. “Before the music and before the words,” Scheer observed, “there is the scene: a concatenation...