Let there be no misunderstanding: I have mentioned Thomas Adès' opera "Powder Her Face" a number of times, mainly because it made such a splash a couple of years ago, and when I bought the CD, it took me another three years to listen to it all the way through. I've usually referred to it as something so far out there that it represented the Ultima Thule for operatic works. I haven't much changed my opinion on that conclusion, but for different reasons. The catalyst for me understanding the work better is that I have finally found the score, and have carefully listened to it edge to edge, wrapt in the most awed jaw-dropping sense of 'what *is* this?' 

The story is mothwing thin, the libretto is at times cute, brittle, and spotty. It can be witty but generally isn't all that enjoyable (it couldn't be performed as a play: all right, neither could many operas for that matter). It concerns Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, whose sexual escapAdès in the 1930s involving most of her servants and hotel bellboys landed her in divorce court and ignominy in the 1990s. It is told in brief scenes that are more emblematic than anything else, presided over by a sort of commere and compere who mercurially play a dozen characters. Intriguing as this may sound (and, in a different way, is), the treatment is so dazzlingly off the wall as to obscure what the librettist/composer team is trying to do. 

There are two characters who serve as kind of a Greek chorus, and their comments are usually ascerbic and sarcastic toward the protagonist. The setting is an ornate bedroom (whose locale changes in each scene), and the two chori jump on the bed playfully, and make all sorts of ado like two manic monkeys. They sing in a parodistic manner, in huge vocal leaps that stab through the texture like broken glass, at times.

First of all, unless you've seen Adès' score, you can't comprehend what kinds of complexity it takes to perform; and since so much of the complexity resolves into a rather simple sounding texture when performed, you wonder why it was so complex in the first place. (It reminds me of a piece of Erik Satie's which is written all in accidentals in the key of B-sharp Major, full of double-sharps and the like. When you play it, of course, it's in C Major, and you're the goat for worrying so much when you first looked at it.) Adès similarly takes 15 players, a chamber ensemble with a huge percussion section played by a very busy percussionist (playing God knows what instruments, everything from a cabaço, vibraslap, lion's roar, swanee whistle and a popgun...), and writes a bizarrely textured piece that takes every ounce of concentration to figure out what he's getting at.  

He is obviously enamored of Berg, as there are definite echoes of Lulu in the score (the end of Act One is nearly a paraphrase of the Am/F chords used there), but the shapes of the phrases seem to be serials (I have not delved deeply enough into it to analyze whether it is serially conceived or not). I do not notice too many patterns that repeat.

He is in love with the tuplet: hardly a measure is set down without the meter being broken by some triplet,  quintuplet, septuplet, dodecatuplet, triplets under triplets, triplets under quintuplets, etc.  Sometimes he takes the discrete time relation between notes in such tuplets and has them be the base of the next measure! This means that if there is a measure in 4/4, with two triplet figures, and those individual triplet-quarters continue in the next measure for four more triplet-quarters, that measure is labled as being in 4/6 time. Similarly, there are places in which a measure divided into quintuplets continues, and the next measure is set in 2/5 time.  On the one hand, intellectually it makes sense, but when you hear it played, it sounds as though there were a much simpler way of getting it all across. The epitome of his ornamental time signatures and dissatisfaction with whatever beat he has set out occurs in Act Two, when the Duchess is given a measure of 3/4, then a measure of 4/6 containing two half notes, bracketed to reflect that those two notes are to be played in a ratio of 2:3! For all the world it sounds like a measure of 2/4; maybe I am a Philistine for thinking it, but it goes so fast that the subtlety, if that is what it is, is totally lost. If this were part of a figure that was bound together as a pattern, and was recognizeable as such, it might be very effective, and even take on meaning if it were associated with part of the story; but it is a one-off and passes so quickly that I suspect Adès of diving headlong into self-indulgence all over the place. Many notes have three layers of articulation on them: staccato, marcato, accented, and all that under a phrase mark. Sometimes looking at this score is rather like reading an Egyptian monument.

Of course, the whole reason for having tuplets is to shift the relationship between the notes being played and the notes played before them. There could be several ways of notating that, and no one way is correct. For example, if there is a measure of 4/4, simultaneously played with a measure of 6/4, obviously it's the same as if the 6/4 measure were still in 4, but as quarter note triplets. We're used to seeing it either way. A 4/4 measure with a triplet on each beat is identical to a measure of 12/8. As I noted earlier, in Mascagni, there is a scene in Cavalleria in which the orchestra is playing in 4/4, the chorus is singing in 6/8, except for a group singing in 6/4.  I know this is tedious, but it's done for a reason, and Mascagni's reason is different from that of Adès.

I recently read a book by Ezra Pound, of all people, called ANTHEIL and the TREATISE ON HARMONY, in which Ezra tried his best to expound on music, using George Antheil as a whip to beat everyone in Europe in the 20s. His thesis is that no one is paying attention to the space between the notes; that the relationship between the notes is the most important thing, and no one but Antheil cares about it. (In Antheil's book, The Bad Boy of Music, he admits to being as throughly bewildered as we about Pound's exegesis.) Pound has such unbelievably loud and pontificating ideas for the reader to receive, such as when he reveals that the composer really intends a piece to go at a certain speed--why, he has a copy of The Nozze that says "Adagio, with black quarters at 40, and again halves at 75."  I think the proper response is "Huh??" I think M. Maelzel would be delighted to think of his metronome being transported back in time to Mozart. 

Other than the fact that Ezra should have been kept from exposing his undeniably silly ideas in public, the germ of the idea that the relationship between notes is crucial to rhythm is something Adès finds also crucial. As such, we have to take it seriously. But think of it --if you write a whole piece in 4/4, and every measure is divided up into two sets of quarter note triplets--is the  piece really in 4/4? You are placing a comparison before the listener: but if there is nothing set to compare it to, what is the point? 

Back to Powder Her Face, I can't but feel sorry for the instrumentalists, and yet I am in awe of their abilities to keep the ensemble together, literally playing virtuistic material for two hours, enormously difficult leaps and chromatic runs, endless time shifts and oddly played embouchures (I don't pity the conductor because on the recording, it's the composer, and whatever he did, he did perfectly, and I suppose whatever trouble he had in doing so, it served him right).

The vocalists, too, are abused on every page, with two and a half octave leaps being a matter-of -fact interval for this piece; the soprano is asked to practially live from a to f# above the staff, swooshing up and diving down again and again. It is unnerving, but I know that is what the composer intended. I'd be surprised if the audience didn't automatically begin tearing out each other's throats at the end of the piece simply because of the fatal combination of overtones.

Yet, to give him his due, the piece can be fiercely imaginitive. The scene in which the Duchess totally breaks down is handled by having a number of the players in the ensemble turn fishing reels at different speeds, while microphones are quietly dragged across the tympani heads. It is a great effect. Also, for the rubbernecking populace at the trial, he has the reeds remove their mouthpieces and quack like ducks, while percussion provides a manic beat.

Thematically, I find it difficult to parse out much of stable interest. The opera begins with a many-times repeated two-note falling figure, accented on the first beat: part of a tango, but also a motto for the Duchess (BTW, her real-life motto was, apparently, 'go to bed early and often.'), and the musical motto is used in a number of contexts, one of which is perfectly scandalous. It serves the purpose of a yearning theme, when sung softly, a razzing theme when harsh, but it also is a sinister theme of lechery when the Duchess gets hot for a new victim. If you are easily offended, don't read this paragraph further, (he said going on): In Act One we are treated to a scene with the Duchess seducing a waiter from the hotel's room service, culminating in her performing a rather desperate oral sex act on him set to this same pulsating theme in music that would be appropriate to (and would doubtlessly improve) a Gerard Damiano film with Linda Lovelace. It is a scene that might work well on radio. I don't think Franco Zeffirelli will tackle the staging of this one. 

I am sure I will listen to it again; but it isn't something that would attract me to sit through in one sitting again, easily. There are many scenes that are so enormously slow and drawn out, that may be effective on stage (although there is no real direction given in the libretto), such as the judgment scene in which a basso profundo Judge sings an aria that is so inexpressibly difficult he must have to gargle for weeks afterward. It has whole pages of holding one low note on one syllable, coupled with manic two octave leaps from e below the staff up to f-sharp above it; then holding a high note for many measures. So difficult to listen to; yes, that was my initial impression, and although I am enormously impressed with the score's dazzling technical agility, and that from a 23-year old man, I think I prefer a work that is organically created and has some heart to it. This is ice. This is shattered glass.