Gordon Getty, as usual, acts as his own librettist here, and it has to be said that he sticks pretty closely to Wilde’s original even when this results in some over-melodramatic language....
Otherwise Getty has made a very good redaction of Wilde’s text, condensing it into twenty scenes with some additional material added at the beginning and the end. But some of the scenes are very short indeed, three dispensing with sung text altogether; and each one is separated out into a self-contained unit. That was probably inevitable, especially in realistic scenery as appears to have been the basis for the production at Leipzig opera on which this studio recording was based. But it must have made for a very stop-and-start effect in the theatre. I see that there are proposals to give the opera in Los Angeles and New York as a double-bill with Getty’s earlier Usher House (of which I reviewed the world première production in Cardiff for Seen and Heard three years ago, with considerable enthusiasm), and it seems to me that some revisions to provide a more continuous flow of music might be beneficial. As it is, far too many of the scenes seem to stop and start abruptly, often with only a couple of chords to begin or conclude the action.
The sheer wordiness of Wilde’s text too seems to be the source of problems. Even in the extended scene between the Ghost and Victoria, where the words cry out for some emotional and lyrical expansion, much of the action proceeds in recitative-like setting over atmospheric but fundamentally static chords. Only in the final scene (where Getty provides his own lyrics) is there any sustained melodic writing, which in the event comes rather too late after the principal action is over. Nor does Getty seem to provide enough music to accommodate some of the stage action called for in the libretto, a failing which I had previously noted in his earlier opera Plump Jack....
In the past I have thoroughly enjoyed much of Getty’s music, especially when he allows himself to give his singers lyrical lines to sing; but, as I have observed, these seem to be in dangerously short supply here. Perhaps revision, including some expansion of the orchestral score to provide interludes between scenes, might give a more appealing impression.