Inheritance
University of California, San Diego
October 26, 2018
On the Friday before Halloween, we went to see the second performance of a new chamber opera, Inheritance. It was timely for the season and the political debates of the day — the story revolves around Sarah Winchester, the widow of a scion of the Winchester Arms’ Winchesters, who MAY have been haunted in her life by the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles, or perhaps the spirit of the baby daughter whose death she mourned. The focal point of the piece, the “inheritance,” is the famous Winchester Mystery House, in San Jose, California. The house is an oddity, with a “door to nowhere,” useless staircases, and other weird spaces. Mrs. Winchester kept building for years, and the question arose as to what was she doing: seeking to atone, distracting herself, or trying her hand as an architect in a time that did not allow that of women? The opera explores a couple of these ideas.
Neither of us approaches modern art with a lot of enthusiasm; we love to quote Charles Ryder’s dictum that Modern Art is “great bosh.” We were pleasantly surprised that we enjoyed the music as much as we did. We had just seen a preview piece about the world premiere of the opera in the San Diego Union Tribune the Sunday before. We thought we would take a chance on it.
The composer is Lei Liang, a professor at the University of California, San Diego. The production was staged in the Experimental Theater space in the Conrad Prebys Music Center on the campus by ArtPower, an organization that promotes the arts at UCSD. The producer of the show also sang the lead role. Susan Narucki teaches at UCSD. She gave a fine performance in a role that called for strong singing and declaiming—the monologue at the end of the opera was movingly presented.
The other singers were also very good. They played roles that drifted back and forth from the real world to the ghostly, as modern day humans leading or taking tours of the house and as spirits confronting or communing with Sarah. The “tour guide” was strongly portrayed by Josué Cerón , who also did a nice job interpolating some cliché “guide humor” in his tour. The two supporting role female vocalists, Kirsten Ashley Wiest and Hillary Jean Young, who are both graduate students working with Narucki, were very good in their roles as well, as tourists, ghosts of the slain, or at one point the dead child of Sarah.
The rest of the production was also gripping and interesting. Visually, there was great reliance on scrims. Bob has not liked scrims very much when we have seen them used at San Diego Opera in the past, but here they were quite effective. The singers moved them from time to time, to frame the story or redefine the space. They were also used as backdrops for projected images. Almost all of the lyrics were projected on the scrims, which is helpful even in English language opera. Bob particularly liked the textile-like wallpapers that appeared on a couple of occasions. We also saw the Mystery House and lots of falling objects, particularly chairs. That aspect had an air of the Terry Gilliam Monty Python’s Flying Circus animation about it, but it emphasized Sarah’s potential motivation, of the piling up of guilt over the death of gun victims. Aurally, the musicians did a terrific job with a complicated and somewhat improvised piece. The percussionists under the stage were quite busy, shouting the numbers of the dead as well as playing the many instruments called for by the composer. The wind players alternated clarinets and bass clarinets, and the guitarist had opportunities to display his fine Spanish-style guitar skills. The artist on the bass violin seemed to be having lots of fun slapping and plucking and bowing and sawing his instrument, with a couple of virtuoso improvisations.
The opera was performed only three times; we hope it is revived so more people get a chance to see it.
A review of the world premiere performance from the Union-Tribune can be found here.
For those who are more interested in the building and its backstory than in the new opera, we recommend the coverage on 99 Percent Invisible. Roman Mars writes:
The widely accepted narrative about Sarah Winchester, and the one that the current owners of the house are selling, is that she was haunted by spirits. But not everyone is buying it. Historian Mary Jo Ignoffo explores alternative theories about Sarah Winchester in her book, Captive of the Labyrinth.
Ignoffo found no evidence supporting the idea that Sarah Winchester communed with spirits. She believes that what drove Sarah Winchester to build was her desire to be an architect.
Sarah Winchester lived at time when it was highly unusual for women to be architects. She wasn’t licensed, so her own home was the perfect place—and the only place—where she could practice architecture.
Whatever her motivations were, Sarah Winchester built a house with more than 150 rooms, 2000 doors, 47 fireplaces, 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms, six kitchens, three elevators, two basements, and one shower. She spent nearly all of her life being an architect.
