After 15 years of sailing from house to house, the Pequod has finally floated into the Met, its splintering wood, freezing iron, and sodden ropes transfigured into digital drawing. Moby-Dick, an opera by librettist Gene Scheer and composer Jake Heggie, has been performed widely enough (in Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington) since its 2010 premiere that it qualifies as a semi-classic, and Leonard Foglia’s production, too, arrives well-used. And so the belated company premiere has the feeling of a fully honed show: clever, pleasing, and low on roughness or risk. The opera tells a straightforward story in which the boy never gets the whale and everybody dies, but why we need to be told it isn’t quite as clear. On opening night, the confident cast — Brandon Jovanovich as Ahab, Steven Costello as Greenhorn (you can call him Ishmael), and Thomas Glass stepping in for Peter Mattei as Starbuck — made a round-the-world voyage on a leaky hunk of carpentry sound a bit too easy. In this opera about monomania and desperation, the stakes somehow seem low.
Much of the excitement comes not from the characters or the pit orchestra (despite Karen Kamensek’s vigorous conducting) but from the stage business. The vessel’s rigging rises far above the deck, forming a cat’s cradle of masts, ropes, and sails. In Robert Brill’s set, the stage is shaped like a half-pipe with rungs, so that cast members scramble, pitch, tumble, and row flimsy whaleboats over massive waves. The one-legged protagonist (sung by a two-legged tenor) is a man of limited mobility who tends to clump on deck and deliver his arias, so the frantic movement that takes place around him becomes essential.
Melville’s Moby-Dick is a profoundly physical book, and his sentences haul parlor-bound readers into a world of swinging spars, slippery decks, bone-deep terror, the musky smell of whales, and the vertigo of obsession. That’s all rich stuff for a composer, since music is a tool for translating one sensation into another. Sunshine, pain, waves, cracking hulls — a well-carpentered orchestral score can convey it all.
Heggie attempts all this. He knows the canon of seafaring music, including Britten’s Billy Budd, Debussy’s La Mer, and Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. Some of the churning current of chords might have flowed into the score from John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, which takes places aboard a hijacked cruise ship. And Heggie is familiar with how to summon an orchestral storm and paint the portrait of a proud hunter. He’s studied operatic conflicts between leaders and the led. He was right to make the boy Pip a soprano pants role (sung here by the lone female cast member, Janai Brugger), and to emphasize Ahab’s spiritual quest instead of his authoritarianism by making him a tenor rather than a baritone. Scheer was smart to whittle down the novel’s winding sentences into short, sharp exclamations and curt instructions — and also to be faithful to Melville’s rendition of the captain’s irritable diction. When Starbuck suggests finding a port to repair barrels that are leaking whale oil, Ahab replies incredulously, and with alliterative force: “Heave-to here for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?” And Heggie knows how to set such a rich set of syllables so that they don’t get lost in a whoosh of open vowels. Yet, for all that professionalism, there’s a scrim of civilized politeness between his music and the events it describes. Swells surge then abate, storms get grumpy but never plausibly murderous. There may be few phrases in the English language more suggestive of a musical mood than Melville’s “wild, watery loneliness.” The opera is too domesticated, earthbound, and companionable to convey that extreme bleakness.
Moby-Dick is at the Metropolitan Opera through March 29.