Mysteries of Love

Kate Soper’s "The Romance of the Rose,” and Wagner's "Lohengrin” at the Met.

- By Alex Ross

No one has ever been able to explain exactly why Richard Wagner had such a shuddering impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, to the point where he became the subject of a somewhat unhinged international cult. Perhaps the most plausible reason has to do with the cascading power triggered by his command of music and words alike. The value of his literary output remains a matter of debate; nonetheless, his dramatic texts, which include the librettos of all thirteen of his operas, have a style indisputably their own, combining extravagant rhetoric with fail-safe narrative structures. Many composers after Wagner wrote their own librettos; few could match his furious double focus. Stephen Sondheim is the most conspicuous modern example, though he almost certainly would have hated the comparison.

Kate Soper, whose opera “The Romance of the Rose” had its première on February 18th, at Long Beach Opera, is also an unlikely candidate for the post of a latter-day Wagner. Agile, playful, quizzically erudite, she has made her name with such philosophically inclined music-theatre projects as “Here Be Sirens” and “Ipsa Dixit”—both of them self-referential meditations on the meaning of music and art. Romantic grandiosity and mythic gloom are foreign to Soper’s world. In some ways, she harks back to the medieval troubadour tradition, in which poet, composer, and singer were one. Still, she belongs to a Wagnerian lineage, however circuitous the genealogy.