So, when exactly did Roger Waters turn into Andrew Lloyd Webber?
Make no mistake, the above comment is being nice. If I accepted Waters' claim that CA IRA is an opera, I'd have to be a lot more savage about it. For a start I'd have to point out that in musical terms it's about 100 years behind the times: the operatic genre kept pace with the modernist innovations of the just pre-World War 1 era and has continued to do so, leaving the more melodic pre-modernist operatic style to mutate into operetta and then into the American musical (a key crossover point being Romberg's "White Horse Inn", a 1920s operetta in the more pop-oriented Anerican style)... and Waters' composition follows the same track.
Then I'd have to suggest that calling CA IRA an opera serves no useful purpose other than to attempt to align it with "fine" art rather than with the more populist types of music which, after all, are what made Waters famous - in any other sense, to give it operatic status is to set it up for comparison with a huge body of compositions besides which it sounds, frankly, banal and amateurish.
Unfortunately, it also sounds pretty much like that when compared with the best of modern musicals - for a much more powerful, incisive and imaginative treatment of political subject matter, for instance, check out Stephen Sondheim's "Pacific Overtures". Nope, we're in Andrew Lloyd Webber territory here, but without the catchy melodies and hit qualities. Instead we have what this inescapably is - a stab at musical composition by a well-meaning amateur who manages to make most of the mistakes beginners usually make. Couldn't somenone - maybe his musical collaborator, proudly billed in the booklet notes as a Royal Academy of Music graduate - have mentioned to him that parallel octaves are a no-no in this idiom, and that having the orchestra shadow the singers' melody lines constantly is also inappropriate?
Anyway, so the music is wishy-washy orchestral. Perhaps an even bigger problem, though, is the libretto. There's no way of guessing what Etienne Roda-Gil's original libretto was like, but Waters' English language rewriting of it has some rather central faults. To be fair, one of them is the subject matter. The booklet notes ponder on why the early years oif the French Revolution have so rarely been used as an operatic subject, but CA IRA makes the answer blindingly obvious: there were no characters involved, other than the two who, from Waters' point of view, are supposed to be unsympathetic (Louis XVIII and marie Antoinette), and opera is, above all, about the dramatic interplay of characters. Faced with that conundrum, Waters duly characterises the two royals a bit, and reduces the rest of the cast to symbolic figures who more or less chant slogans throughout. The result is all a bit stentorian.
Then there's a problem which, IMHO, CA IRA has in common with earlier Waters projects, notable THE PROS AND CONS OF HITCHHIKING and RADIO K.A.O.S - unless you're reading both the booklet synopsis and the libretto while you're listening, the overall narrative idea makes very little sense. Given that the libretto isn't provided in print but as an Acrobat file on disc 2, this means listening at the computer, unless you really want to print out lots of pages and juggle them around while listening on a proper hi-fi setup (I didn't. Owners of the SACD copy may, I'd guess, get a better deal here, though, since the Acrobat pages are formatted in CD booklet dimensions, suggesting that print copies may exist.). Even so, Waters clearly envisaged this as a stage production, set in something like a circus ring where the different performers switch between doing their "acts" and merging with the audience to watch others... not a bad idea, but not one which comes across as an audio experience, since nothing in the composition really seems to make allowances for, or correspondences with, the staging.
Overall, I just can't find anything good to say about this. I can't fault Waters for attempting to stretch his creative scope, but it's all too clear that CA IRA has stretched it beyond its limits. Perhaps Debby's approach is the best one to take - put it on more or less in the background while doing something else, then it'll come across as perfectly listenable. I don't doubt, though, that that isn't what Waters had in mind... so I sincerely hope that for his next venture he puts an electric outfit together and strives to top the excellent AMUSED TO DEATH.
T
