GROUNDED
A risk-taking new opera ends up losing its nerve.
Jeanine Tesori’s contemporary opera GROUNDED had its Metropolitan Opera premiere last night at the opening of the 2024-25 season. The opera’s libretto is by George Brant and is based on Brant’s play of the same name.
GROUNDED is about Jess (Emily D’Angelo), a female F-16 fighter pilot serving in Iraq. Jess is an enthusiastic flygirl, devoted to her terrain of battle which she rapturously calls “The Blue”. She is also devoted to her military comrades and the fighter plane that she has lovingly nicknamed “Tiger”. At the core of Jess’ Valkyrie-like zealousness is a naive belief in military fairness that the fighter pilot always puts herself at risk in her flying missions which equalizes her with her targets who are always, solely, military-age combatants.
Jess’ naiveté is soon put to the test in two ways. First, she becomes pregnant and makes the choice to decommission herself to have her child. She makes this choice under a grueling pressure from her commanding officer which heaps a humiliating double-standard on women serving in the military. But then after Jess has had her child and yearns to return to The Blue she is greeted by a newcomer in military warfare since her five year absence: the remote flyer drone.
The drone makes its first appearance in the opera rising from a trap door like the statue of a conquering god. It is a chilling moment in Michael Mayer’s barebones but sharply focused production. And Jess’ identity is dangerously challenged by this new god, no longer named “Tiger” but now named “The Reaper”, death itself. Jess attempts to commit herself to this new form of warfare but even though the killing is now remote and can be done while living with her family in Las Vegas, the twelve hour shifts and the slippery ease of the killing begins to take a toll on Jess’ psyche and she begins to go slowly mad.
As Jess, Emily D’Angelo is giving a star performance on the stage of the Met. A strikingly handsome singer/actor with a clear and rich Mezzo-Soprano voice, D’Angelo brings Jess to life and communicates with the audience emotionally and musically everything the opera supplies her with. D’Angelo is on stage for most of the opera and her presence gives an electrical charge to the opera.
Tessori’s musical scaffolding is mid-century modern with gorgeous legato dissonances resolving into harmonics. It sounds at its base like Britten and Copeland. Overlaying this are nods to Western cowboy folk music and to other operas. The unseen “Kill Chain”, a group of disembodied voices that participate in Jess’ remote bombing operations, reminded me of the ghostly offstage chorus in Wagner’s “Dutchman”. And the pounding music that signals invincible military power reminded me of phrases in Verdi’s “Don Carlos”.
Last night, at the end of its first act the implications of the opera’s seriousness in looking directly at the horror American drone warfare had sunk in and for an exciting intermission it felt like I was present at something big, an opera where something was at stake politically and artistically. During the intermission, the opening night crowd of fashionistas looked a bit wobbly on their high heels as if they had been slapped around by the material. However, being the tough bunch they are, they quickly reverted to preening wholeheartedly in asymmetrical dresses; gender-fluid ensembles; and vivid hues of red.
Unfortunately, in the second act something went wrong, or the problems with the opera became undeniable. The narrative drive got lost. Its main character who seemed to be on a classic operatic trajectory towards madness suddenly swerved away from her fate to jump into a completely unmotivated act of heroic humanism. But it wasn’t just the libretto that pulled its punches, it was the score as well.
Tesori’s score appealingly moved back and forth between the tonal worlds of opera and the musical. It was also sumptuously orchestrated (and sumptuously conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and played by the Met Orchestra). But it largely moved from scene to scene illustrating its events without an accumulating power. If there was a musical deep structure in Tesori’s score I did not hear it. And rather than using cumulative musical and dramatic strategies, Tesori and Brant attempted to bring us into the head of their main character by splitting her in two. Thus “Jess” is joined on stage by her alter-ego “Also Jess” (Ellie Dehn). This device felt like another failure of nerve.
In the end we got neither the full import of the horror of American complicity in the remote massacres of women and children in Iraq, Afghanistan, or by timely implication Gaza nor an emotional release through that horror’s elevation to an operatic scale. And that leaves us with neither truth nor beauty. Still, my hat is off to Tesori and Brant and their sponsors of the opera for taking a risk and bringing the ritual and reality of American drone warfare onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in such exacting detail.
Controversy accompanied the opera’s premiere last year at the Washington National Opera when critics pointed out that a drone company, General Dynamics, was listed as the opera’s “presenting sponsor” on its website. After a number of news organizations jumped on the story including Russia Today, the Washington National Opera took pains to make clear that the drone company was a long term season donor and not a creative sponsor of the premiering opera. GROUNDED was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and the commissioning process began in 2014. The opera was also a beneficiary of the Neubauer Family Fund for New Works.