Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick first appeared in 1851 and is universally regarded as one of the ‘great’ American novels. As the New Grove Dictionary of Opera points out, the Heggie-Scheer opera is not the first attempt to set the novel operatically: a composer by the name of J. Low premiered a work based on the novel in 1955 (this author can only find reference to composer and poet Jackson Mac Low, but the opera in question is not listed anywhere among his musical works). Other Melville works set operatically are Bartleby the Scrivener (Walter Aschaffenburg, 1964), The Bell Tower (Ernst Krenek, 1957), The Confidence Man (George Rochberg, 1982) and, of course, Billy Budd (Benjamin Britten, 1951).
Melville spent time in the navy as well as on the 1841-1842 whaling expedition of the Acushnet. But he took his inspiration from the real-life ramming and ultimate wrecking of the Essex in 1820, a Nantucket whaling ship that was destroyed, seemingly deliberately, by a sperm whale off the western coast of South America. The first mate of the Essex published a memoir of the event in 1821. Melville read it and was greatly influenced by it just prior to his writing of Moby-Dick in 1850. He was also influenced by a story published in The Knickerbocker in 1839 concerning the dispatch of a large bull sperm whale, albino, known as ‘Mocha Dick’ for its presence around the Chilean island of the same name.
Melville was also inspired by the dark, shadowy side of the works of author Nathaniel Hawthorne whom he met at a picnic in the spring of 1850. He ended up dedicating his novel to Hawthorne, as much for his respect for him as a writer as for his friendship and support. Melville’s work essentially disappeared from the American canon after the publication of Moby-Dick because of its scathing reception by critics and readers who could not grasp or understand its sprawling structure. The writer died forgotten by all except a subterranean collection of New York aficionados until the author Carl Van Doren began to preach Melville’s importance at Columbia University shortly before World War I and in his important monograph, The American Novel which was published in 1921. This marked a resurgence of interest in Melville and in Moby-Dick as a pillar of American writing. In England, D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love) did much the same for the British audience.
Moby-Dick is an allegory, a scientific treatise, a biblical tract, a memoir, a drama and a novel all in one. In this remarkable book Melville creates an entire world, held in the crucible of a whaling ship under the orders of a fanatical ‘monomaniac’ (as Melville calls him) whose only focus is to take revenge on the great albino whale who tore his leg from his body. All else…the financial interests of the Pequod’s owners, the time it would take to track down the elusive animal and even the lives of his crew…is subject to his singular obsession. Given all this, it was certainly audacious (some would’ve said ‘foolhardy’ at the time) for librettist Gene Scheer to attempt an operatic concentration of the book for composer Jake Heggie. However, the opera Moby-Dick is an extremely effective and successful dramatization of the story. Its three creators (Heggie, Scheer, and Leonard Foglia who acted as dramaturge and stage director of the project) did an incredible job capturing the flavor, spirit and intent of the novel even if many important events in the book had to be jettisoned.
Speaking plainly, it isn’t easy to write a libretto based on any book, much less a book as complicated and as lengthy as Moby-Dick. But a contemporary opera project is made much easier through free collaboration between composer and poet/dramatist, often today with the active participation of a staging partner like a director or dramaturge. Heggie and Scheer (who himself is a composer and has collaborated with other composers such as Tobias Picker, Stephen Paulus and Wynton Marsalis) have given each other permission to comment on their developing work for a project, subjugating ego for the greater good and dramatic effectiveness of the work at hand. (On a personal note, this author is aware of a recently produced opera of national importance in which the librettist refused to budge on requests from the composer and producers to edit or re-work any of the original libretto. The result was a less than effective stage piece.) This collaborative attitude has resulted in a string of successful pieces including three operas and four song cycles. In an interesting contemporary twist, they work intensely via e-mail and text attachments, not something that Strauss/Von Hofmannsthal or Mozart/Da Ponte would ever have dreamed of!