An Opera for the Man Whose Face Was Left Out of the Murals

Damien Geter's opera "American Apollo" opened in Oakland on Saturday, August 8, closing West Edge Opera's summer festival. Writing in San Francisco Classical Voice, Michael Zwiebach calls it one of the finest American operas being written today, and says this production, directed by Nataki Garrett, is beautifully sung and genuinely moving. The story, written for the stage by Lila Palmer, comes from a real episode. In 1916, John Singer Sargent, the celebrated Boston painter, found the model he needed for his murals of the Greek gods at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Thomas McKeller, a Black man who worked as an elevator attendant. Every one of those gods was painted from his body, yet in the murals their skin is white and not one of them has his face. The man all those figures were drawn from could not be seen in them. Sargent promises him a portrait that will show him as he is, and McKeller finds that painting only after the painter's death. The best passages of the opera, Zwiebach writes, are the scenes set in the studio, where the relationship between the two men takes shape. In one of them Sargent sits at the piano and sings "À Chloris" by Reynaldo Hahn, and that melody returns again and again through the rest of the work. Zwiebach finds Geter's music clear and light, and likens it to Ravel. Markel Reed plays McKeller and John Bellemer plays Sargent, and the critic found what passes between them on stage convincing. Marnie Breckenridge takes the role of Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Kedrick Armstrong, music director of the Oakland Symphony, conducts. Zwiebach concludes that the opera asks for the audience's attention and gives back several times as much. Listen: "À Chloris" by Reynaldo Hahn, sung by Philippe Jaroussky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb3I13kaYv4