CERRITOS, Calif. — The biblical Great Flood, the Fountain of Youth, the Just King — these and other cultural archetypes find roots in the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Since its rediscovery in the mid-19th century, the tale of an arrogant, death-defying king who finds acceptance and purpose has inspired artists across genres, from novelist Philip Roth to poet Charles Olson.
In music alone, this saga from the late second millennium B.C. has animated at least seven operas, including Dane Per Nørgård’s Gilgamesh (1972), and Bohuslav Martinu’s 1955 oratorio The Epic of Gilgamesh. A confident, musically innovative addition to this creative lineage, Derrick Skye’s Gilgamesh: The Opera received its world premiere March 28 by Lyric Opera of Orange County in the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos with support from California’s Assyrian Arts Institute (AAI) and the Los Angeles-based transcultural music ensemble Bridge to Everywhere.
That Skye’s score, his first full-length opera, impressed as much as it did is partly due to the distinctive voice and language he has honed. A rare composer trained in Persian and Balkan music theory, Indian classical music’s tala rhythms, and West African music and dance, the 43-year-old has written 21 large-scale vocal or orchestral works for such ensembles as the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Chosen from 82 international applicants, Skye immediately began researching the unique sounds of Assyrian music. His remarkable Gilgamesh balances, often simultaneously, Western classical modes with maqam, a modal melodic system found in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian classical music. The result is a fully integrated sound world in which the traditional Western orchestra and Middle Eastern instruments resonate.
The 45-member Bridge to Everywhere orchestra, of which Skye is artistic director, marries traditional orchestral instrumentation with the coloristic possibilities of electronic and folkloric instruments like the plucked-string tamboura, the flute-like nay, and the zither-like qanun. Rather than find a zurna player for the overture (no easy task), Skye created a digital version of the double-reed woodwind controlled by a digital mouthpiece and synthesizer.
The Raweh-style of Assyrian sung melody he invented to open the opera set an idiomatic mood sustained across the work, from syncopated drum writing to the use of chant and zaghrouta (ululation). But Skye balanced his transcultural compositional chops with evocative writing for conventional Western instruments, such as the Straussian brass peals that announce the descent of Gilgamesh’s regal mother, Ninsun, in the wedding scene, the dissonant brass writing that capture Ishtar’s wrath, and the ethereal strings in Act II, Scene 3 (“Plant of Rejuvenation”).
Skye’s assured writing for the opera’s 12 solo voices enabled each to shine. As Ishtar, the goddess of love, soprano Anne Elise Teeling managed to make credible her character’s contradictory impulses as both the fount of the emotion — love — that enables Gilgamesh’s transformation and the spurned goddess whose vindictiveness causes the death of Gilgamesh’s brother-in-arms, Enkidu. Buoyed by Skye’s vocal writing, especially in his fine extended aria for her in Act I, Scene 2, mezzo-soprano Shannon Delijani held the stage as Ninsun. Countertenor Christian Abbo, costumed androgynously in otherworldly blue, was compelling as the Mesopotamian moon-god Sîn, while tenor Jacob Stucki, as the sun-god Shamash, floated a riveting extended solo in the powerful “Isn’t it enough?” aria.
Though without a spoken or sung role, Syrian-born dancer Ahmad Joudeh dominated as the young Gilgamesh through the sheer charisma of his physical presence and movement. But the production’s animating intelligence was Assyrian-American actor Laurence Varda as the older Gilgamesh, who in the eloquent libretto by Diana Farrell, artistic director of Lyric Opera of Orange County, recounts his younger self’s evolution from arrogant, brutal despot to beloved king. Neither a singer nor a dancer, Varda fully humanized this key role with personality, edge, and grainy oratorical flair.
The larger triumph of Gilgamesh: The Opera was Farrell’s multimedia conception and the synergy of talents she marshaled with Nora Betyousef Lacey, executive producer of AAI and commissioner of the opera. They and their team seamlessly integrated Skye’s score with modern and folkloric dance (superbly choreographed by Stephen Martin Allan and integrated by Ashtar Ashurseen), arresting visuals (from projections and animations to lighting and costumes), and Farrell’s kinetic dramaturgy.
Riddled as it is with repetitions and lacunae, the historical Gilgamesh epic needed adapting to work as music drama and human story. Farrell delivers these while still respecting its source in theme, characterization, rough plot, and structure (12 scenes, a nod to the number of original stone tablets).
How to keep an opera with so many characters and so much remote historical-cultural context from stultifying audiences or sinking under its own weight? By not only handing the project to an innovative, culturally versatile composer but also by infusing it at every level with a sense of variety and forward motion. Kristin Serena’s scenic design, for example, balanced the sets to include multiple points of visual interest without overbaked busyness.
Lighting enhanced the mise-en-scène’s dynamism (the billowing white banners extended stage wide in Act 2, Scene 3; the use of multiple descending curtains or shard-shaped screens, upon which visuals such as animation or images were projected). Gabrielle McMillan’s vivid handmade props (the 12-foot high, orange-eyed body puppet representing Humbaba, the guardian of the Cedar Forest; the Bull of Heaven’s outsized neon face; the tendril-shaped neon-green handhelds representing the Plant of Rejuvenation) added whimsical touches.
Above all, the production’s 16-member dance ensemble injected an essential energy and lithe physicality. Highlights included the strutting, rocking dance Allan created for the scene in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay the Bull of Heaven and Ereshkigal and her hell demons carry Enkidu down into the Underworld (groping for Gilgamesh as they go). Assyrian folkloric elements such as Khigga communal circle dances gave the opera a distinctive, authentic foundation. With so much varied movement and visual appeal baked into the production, it surged along with insistent dynamism.
No opera is perfect. Aside from minor inconsistencies between the English surtitles and the vocalists’ sung words and a microphone issue in Act II, Scene 5, Farrell’s thoughtful, aware libretto was sometimes too much of a good thing, over-explaining the meta import of the opera’s action instead of finding solutions in the dramaturgy.
But the operatic gods seemed behind this production. Though initiated in 2022, Gilgamesh’s world premiere coincided with a real-world, real-time manifestation of one of the opera’s central themes: that the necessity for good rulers is only obvious when bad kings make it urgent. If this Gilgamesh production — begun to honor Assyrian culture — was concerned that audiences might regard an Assyrian king dead for 47 centuries as unrelatable, their decision to premiere it during Akitu, the Mesopotamian New Year festival, yielded unforeseen benefits: It fell on a weekend when Southern California hosted 40-odd No Kings protests. Frequently, the libretto seemed to spookily speak to the moment (“blinded by arrogance, believing all power was mine”). Art imitates life; sometimes it anticipates it. An opera for our time, Gilgamesh possesses the quality and power to transcend it.
