This House

“This House is the closest thing to a Great American Opera that I’ve been privileged to see—a work that should take a canonical position in American drama and music. Going beyond their collaboration in adapting her play Intimate Apparel, Nottage and Gordon’s partnership here resembles no other in American opera, but rather that of the composer Leos Janácek with his dramatist sources. Gordon composes on the word, on the syllable, on the stress and unstress, and —most of all—on the dramatic moment. He creates a soundworld of lustrous, layered, long-lined harmonies that unexpectedly turn the corner onto new aural possibilities. With a scenario spanning the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, blues, ragtime and hip-hop, one might have expected Gordon to rely on quoting musical genres. Instead, he composes from the inside out to create a unity between his notes and the librettists’ words. Gordon’s style has aural allure that almost compels us to follow his harmonies wherever they go. In metropolitan settings where critics equate beauty with shallowness, his operas are all too rare. Without going into the long, corrosive journalistic history that led us here-dating back to the 1950s and ‘60s and the critical repudiation of Menotti and Barber-one can only hope that with This House the pattern will be broken.”