Bliss is the first opera by Brett Dean, Australia's preeminent composer today. Dean claims he was strongly impressed by Peter Carey's novel of the same name since his school days and, being taken by its colorful characters, considers it full of operatic potential. Misjuging the operatic effectivness of a text or a story is very common among composers; one may name John Adams's
The Death of Klinghoffer, or Hugo Wolf's
Der Corregidor as examples, yet it is rare that a composer should bestow his expertise on such a banal and essentially odious story.
Henry Joy, the protagonist of the story, is the top exec of a big Australian advertising firm. While holding a party in celebration of his career, Henry suffers a heart attack. He recovered from open-heart surgery, but is convinced he is in Hell. The hospital chaplain offers endless dirty jokes -- the opera is often as vulgar as Ligeti's
Le Grand Macabre -- but no consolation. Henry behaves erratically: he drunk-drives and is convinced that a circus elephant has sat on his car. He becomes estranged to his career-minded wife Betty (who wants Henry to help her to break into the advertising-design business), accuses his daughter of being a commie and junkie, and his son of being a money-mad predator and drug dealer (because he chooses Business rather than Med School). Yet Henry also considers himself a do-gooder. He cancels the contract with the firm's biggest client, much to the chagrin of his friend and colleague Alex, because he no longer wants to work with a company whose products cause cancer. Here, Henry and Alex sings a duet (marked Duettino Barocco in the libretto, but it sounds more like a madcap cabaret): Henry is convinced -- and Alex and the audience are led to believe -- that he is capable of steering between Scylla and Charybdis, when in fact he is crashing the lives of those around him.
One night, Henry snoops on his family, and all he suspected turn out to be true and worse. So he leaves and take up residence in a luxury suite in the local Hilton Hotel. Out of loneliness he dials for company, and there comes Honey B. The two bond instantly. Honey claims she "doesn't comes from anywhere" but lives among the bushes. She recognizes Henry as an incarnation of Krishna (cue flute solo), shows him the miraculous effects of Leatherwood Honey, and advises him on clean living. Observant reader will recognize Honey as the three archetypes of womanhood combined: she is the Whore, but only in the sense that she is accessible without pesky sweet-talks and mind games. She is the Virgin who comes from a la-la land without a name, a land as unspoilt as herself. She is the Mother who takes good care of her man. When she leaves, Honey implores Henry to promise he will find her.
Meanwhile, worried about his sanity and the mounting hotel bills, Henry's family decide that he must be committed to the asylum (called the Free Enterprise Hospital). The hospital staff caught the wrong person (don't ask). To cut the short story even shorter: Henry's wife Betty gets the career success she has strived for, but the story punishes her with terminal lung cancer. She immolates herself during a meeting with the execs (no Wagner references; that "ambitious bitch", as she calls herself, doesn't die for love). Henry cannot forget Honey and his promise to her, so he leaves his newly-bereaved children and let them suffer another loss.
Such a vile, narcissistic take on midlife crisis, so filled with unsympathetic cardboard characters, is
Bliss that I cannot see the opera as anything more than a curiosity. Dean's music is overactive, attention-deficit, just like TV ads. And while his handling of the orchestral palette is adroit, he also cheats by using oodles of recorded sounds. On the plus side,
Bliss is very much a singer's opera with a melodic impetus; there is little or no screeching or other types of bizarre vocalise that plagues so much modern opera. And despite the story insisting that we shouldn't identify with Betty, the cheating "ambitious bitch" who chronically "poisons" her family with microwave dinner, the solo she sings before her cancer diagnosis nevertheless tugs my heart -- she is brought up by her single father, who ran a gas station, and the petrol she inhaled since she was a baby eventually kills her.
Moments after, she laments her dreams and ambition are in vain:
By comparison, the solo-duet (Henry, then with Honey) that ends the opera is as bland as water-boiled rabbit food. It may be Richard Strauss with all the color drained and bleached.
