Daron Hagen's collaboration with the poet Paul Muldoon-one of the most fascinating operatic partnerships in American music-has brought forth a group of works which, not unlike the Thomson-Stein operas, have a provocative mix of European sophistication and American know-how that undercuts traditional artistic notions of simplicity and complexity. Veraof Las Vegas, a 'nightmare cabaret opera in one act,' is their second work for the stage, a relationship that began with Shining Brow (1993), a two-act work based on a tragic episode in the life of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Hagen is nothing if not a man of the theatre (as John von Rhein said in the Chicago Tribune, he is 'born to write operas'), but he first built his reputation on an impressive series of orchestral works (commissioned by such ensembles as the Brooklyn and New York Philharmonics) and on a copious catalog of art songs respected for their natural, conversational prosody and astute literary taste. His memorably melodic music, schooled in the Francophone elegance of Copland and Rorem, glows with sincerity, clarity, and hands-on expertise; in contrast, Muldoon-an Irish-born poet who has transplanted himself to Princeton-writes verse which is renowned for its virtuosic, ironic, and morally ambiguous sense of wordplay. When joined, each artist's singular complexity complements the other's. If Muldoon's tone can seem cool, then Hagen's music can turn up the heat; if Muldoon's words sometimes distract us with their dazzle, Hagen's passionate sounds magnify the human element. While the librettist finds multiple meanings for a favorite, well-worn group of words (such as, in the present work, 'lemon,' 'horn,' 'strip,' or 'bar'), the composer uses a multiplicity of styles-classical tonal, atonal, Broadway, 'Ocean's Eleven'-style swing, 70's folk-rock, and more-to weld those words to a single purpose. The result, as Hagen maintains, is a 'postmodern meditation on the death of love.'
The story is such an accurate illustration of their human concerns, and their multifaceted aesthetics, that it seems not so much manufactured as a reflection of fact-that they belonged to Vegas before Vegas belonged to them. According to the composer, the piece 'ostensibly relate(s) how two on-the-lam IRA volunteers, Dumdum and Taco, en route to Los Angeles to be on 'Wheel of Fortune,' are set up by a rogue INS-agent-turned-stewardess named Doll and her friend, an African-American transvestite lap-dancer named Vera during a layover in Las Vegas.' But Las Vegas is so deep a part of America's heart-of-darkness that we have been confronting its truths all our adult lives: it is there that the country's spirit of freedom-of relentless change, of tremendous risk, of material and sexual indulgence, of malleable identity-reaches its nadir, 0r apogee.
All in Vera is transformation, of which Vera's physical duality is merely the focal point; it is also a showcase for Hagen's prodigious gift for writing arias. There is the chorus of Girls, who morph from stewardesses to showgirls, to dealers, to strippers, and to a 'canned' church choir-Britten's Death in Venice changeling, the Elderly Fop, cloned en masse. 
(After they sing that Vera 'embodies the truth at the heart of Vegas,' they divide to sing three different things.) There are the similarities between Doll's and Vera's songs, each in a strictly set style and ending with a pious half-chorale; and there is the delirious Dumdum, 'breaking through' to realize that he may have been responsible for a hotel bombing in Belfast, accompanied by music of a strangely uncomfortable nobility. The angry yet nostalgic musings of the tripped-up Taco lie mostly in quasi-parlando recitative, where they can help the action move swiftly.
Vera may be fun to listen to, but it is not a particularly consoling piece. Its savage ironies extend to the close: Taco slips into a chair in an interrogation room, undercutting the action of the entire opera we've just heard, while Vera pines for her (imagined) lover with a scrap of text reminiscent of a fast-food commercial. At the end of Shining Brow, a distraught Frank Lloyd Wright, surveying the burnt remains of the house in which his lover and her children lie dead, asks, 'Is there no balm in Gilead'' Vegas has a reply: the house always wins.
Russell Platt is a noted American composer and music writer for The New Yorker Magazine and numerous other publications.
Both photographs are copyright © 2003 by Mel Rosenthal from the New York production of Vera of Las Vegas by the Center for Contemporary Opera and are used by permission. The top photograph is of the Catchalls, as Strippers, at the Delphine; the bottom photograph is of Dillon McCartney, as Taco.