Jake Heggie has a whale of a hit in Dallas with his operatic adaptation of ‘Moby-Dick’

Jake Heggie has a whale of a hit with ‘Moby-Dick’

DALLAS — Ben Heppner limped around stage on his peg leg, blood dripping from his face. The great white whale was in his Captain Ahab’s sight.

The captain never kills the object of his unrelenting pursuit. Composer Jake Heggie, however, achieved his goal Friday night, with an achingly beautiful, magnificently sung and gorgeously staged world premiere of his “Moby-Dick,” the highlight of the Dallas Opera’s first season at the sparkling new Winspear Opera House. The audience responded with an eight-minute standing ovation.

Just 49, Heggie has become one of the pre-eminent contemporary opera composers. His “Dead Man Walking,” based on Sister Helen Prejean’s book, premiered at the San Francisco Opera in 2000 and is among the most successful operas premiered since the death of Benjamin Britten in 1976.

“Moby-Dick,” based on Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, is another triumph, a nautical voyage that brings to mind Britten’s “Billy Budd” (also based on a Melville work) and parts of the first hour of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” The 90-minute opening act zips along, and the 65-minute closing act is ruminative and moving.

Heggie is a rarity, an accessible composer whose melodic lines and sense of drama are aimed at audiences rather than academics. With librettist Gene Scheer, who took over after Terrence McNally became ill with lung cancer, he has transformed Melville’s sprawling novel into an active stage work. They dispense with the opening 100 or so pages set in New England, and the opera begins a week after the Pequod has set to sea.

Scheer simplified Melville’s lengthy language while keeping the poetry of an often metaphorical narrative. There is an ocean of shimmering sea music, a spraying wall of choral sound (prepared by Alexander Rom) and moving arias for Ahab, Greenhorn (tenor Stephen Costello) and Starbuck (baritone Morgan Smith). The tattooed Polynesian harpooner Queequeg (bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu) adds his own brand of exotic music and lyrics and the only woman in the cast, soprano Talise Trevigne in the trousers role of Pip, injects brightness and energy.

Heppner, of course, is the star. The music is written to fit his voice, largely avoiding sharply ascending scales that at times have caused him difficulty in other roles. He sneers, puffs and pontificates, his tenor riding over waves of sound. Limping on the peg leg that replaces the flesh torn away in an earlier clash with the great whale, his Ahab is every bit tragic as Lohengrin, Tristan, Otello and Ghermann, some of the roles that made him famous.

Leonard Foglia’s sharp direction and huge nautical sets by Robert Brill were as much a star as the cast. Elaine McCarthy’s projections, which cleverly shifted angles, combined with Donald Holder’s vivid lighting to show how technology can assist rather than detract. Jane Greenwood’s costumes could outfit a real vessel. Choreographer Keturah Stickann and fight choreographer Bill Lengfelder created a breezy night.

Patrick Summers, music director of the Houston Grand Opera, conducted with such insight into the ebbs and flows it seemed he had been studying this score for far longer than it has existed.

There are five more performances through May 16. ‘Moby-Dick’ is a co-commission with the State Opera of South Australia, where it is to open in September 2011, and three theaters where it is to appear the following year: the Calgary Opera (winter 2012), San Diego Opera (February 2012) and San Francisco Opera (with Heppner and Summers in autumn 2012). These companies have themselves a whale of hit, a leaner but faithful reinterpretation of an American classic.

On the Net:

www.dallasopera.org