At the 1986 Adelaide Festival, during a forum which followed the premiere of Richard Meale’s opera, Voss, David Malouf (the librettist) was asked, ‘Will it travel?’ He gave a profound answer, not simply about that opera but for all art. ‘You write for the tribe’, he said. ‘If others overhear and like what they’ve heard, that’s great.’ But the tribe is the real audience and that insight provoked my first and persistent question about John Haddock’s new opera, Madeline Lee.
War and its political penumbra are common elements of opera. The suppression of memory and its consequences are, perhaps surprisingly, less common themes since we are all affected by traumatic memories, especially those involved in wartime horror, and there is no evading the truth that our fickleness in the face of serious challenge and how we subsequently account for it, are enduring aspects of the human story. So I have to be willing to concede that this new opera—despite the fact that it is almost overwhelmed by American cultural references—has something to say to Australia that is independent of our cultural symbiosis with the USA. Yet my scepticism persists: do the composer and his co-librettist (Michael Campbell, who also directed the recent premiere at the Sydney Opera House) have an eye just too obviously on an American market, to an extent that it compromises their work?
The setting is the Libyan Desert in 1962 where we strikingly see a portion of a crashed Flying Fortress, its vast starboard wing angling upward towards us. Four men are playing a dream-like game of baseball and we quickly recognise (rather faster, indeed, than the composer and librettist realise that we will) that they are the restless ghosts of that plane’s crew—or almost all of them. Eventually (to be frank, about 30 minutes too late), the drama tightens with the arrival of a quartet of contemporary US military officers to examine this wreckage which, apparently, has just been discovered. All art tends to rely on coincidence, but here plausibility is over-stretched as we discover that the senior member of this group, the Major, was the captain of this very aircraft when it was shot down by German fighters in 1943. He had then instructed his crew to stay with the plane but had, himself, bailed out and ever since has been deluding himself that they also survived to return to serene, quotidian lives in suburban America.
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