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scene with Patrick White. When our hero
gets a few bad reviews it’s treated like a
maddening persecution, although for most
of the time his notices in the press were
admiring to the point of sycophancy.
Wilson reminded me that when Whiteley
accuses a critic of being ‘a visual cretin’
he was talking about Yours Truly. This is
as close as I’ll ever come to appearing in
an opera, but it was a lot more close and
personal for the artist’s widow, Wendy,
who played a major role as muse and love
of Brett’s life. It must have been strange
for Wendy Whiteley to sit in the audience
on opening night, watching Julie Lea
Goodwin re-enact the events of her life,
including her affair with the poet Michael
Driscoll (Nicholas Jones).
On the other hand, the private life of the
Whiteleys has been exposed to public view
on so many occasions there’s nothing left
that might shock an audience. If there is, it
wasn’t to be found in this opera, with gives
only the most schematic and fiercely edited
version of the artist’s career. There wouldn’t
have been an opera without Wendy’s co-
operation, and she is rewarded with an
ending in which her garden at Lavender
Bay becomes a symbol of a lost paradise.
Brett, on the other hand, who was
played by celebrated English baritone,
Leigh Melrose, is never a sympathetic
character. His lines are no more coherent
than Whiteley’s own roundabout way of
speaking – forever striving for profundity
while making grand pronouncements
that look cringeworthy when written
down. Fleming’s tongue may have been
in his cheek when he penned scenes such
as the one in which Whiteley shows his
monsterpiece, The American Dream
(1968–69) to Frank Lloyd of Marlborough
Galleries, New York. Lloyd, as the story
goes, told Brett he wouldn’t show the
painting because it was ‘too big, political
and aggressive’. In the opera we’re tacitly
encouraged to believe the dealer was too
politically conservative to understand this
visionary work. A more likely interpretation
is that Lloyd found it to be a garbled,
megalomaniac statement that he stood no
chance of selling. Fifty years later it looks
even more ghastly and pretentious, but
this is not the kind of thing that could be
said in an opera about the artist’s life. The
failure of this painting might be seen as a
catalyst that fuelled Whiteley’s rejection of
the international art scene – or should that
be the art scene’s rejection of him? Once
again we’re left guessing.
By the end of Act One, in New York and
then in Fiji, Whiteley is already acting like
a man out of control, drunk on his own ego,
spouting cosmic nonsense. The second Act
finds him back in Australia, settled into a
comfortable life in Lavender Bay, in which
the only big moments are his dinner parties,
his success in the local art prizes, Wendy’s
affair wth Michael Driscoll, and the illness
of his sculptor friend, Joel Ellenberg.
If Wendy comes out of this opera looking
vaguely noble, it’s an apotheosis for
Ellenberg (played by Richard Anderson)
whose death from cancer is a tragic event
that allows Brett a rare opportunity to
show a more human dimension. Ellenberg,
who was a talented but minor sculptor, is
the only other Australian artist who gets a
walk-on role. There’s no room for Michael
Johnson, Brett’s boon companion in the
London days, or for anybody else who
came within his orbit. There is, however,
a brief scene with Francis Bacon, whom
Whiteley hero-worshipped and emulated.
There’s also a small, embarrassing cameo
of Robert Hughes (Alexander Hargreaves)
in a cowboy hat, at the Venice Biennale.
The death of Ellenberg doesn’t play like the
death of Violetta in La Traviata, or Mimi
in La Boheme. In the opera, Ellenberg
is scarcely developed as a character. The
death of Whiteley himself is handled in a
remarkably oblique manner, but by this
stage I doubt that anyone in the audience
was sorry to be rid of him.
After Kats-Chernin’s music, the most
impressive aspect of this peculiar night
at the opera was Dan Potra’s set design
that made brilliant use of multiple screen
projections to send Whiteley’s works
flashing past our eyes past in scene after
scene. They looked much better in motion
than they do in stationary form. I’ll
remember Whiteley as a blur of colour, two
hours of good music and bad art history.
I was surprised at how engaging the
final product proved, although this was
partly due to the voyeuristic nature of the
exercise. The greatest strength of Whiteley
was Kats-Chernin’s music which was
unfailingly innovative, lively and intelligent
- as we’ve come to expect from this
composer. I remember talking to her once
about the late Michel Legrande, who wrote
the score for movies such as The Umbrellas
of Cherbourg (1964), and there was a touch
of Legrande in the opening sequences
when the young artist was beginning
to make his way in the world. Upon
Whiteley’s arrival in New York, I thought
I detected the faintest trace of West Side
Story. Throughout, Kats-Chernin adapted
the music to Justin Fleming’s libretto with
a facility that flattered the words.
Fleming, who had a lot of bizarre material
to work with, tried to squeeze everything
into a libretto that switches between the
vernacular (the first Act ends with Whiteley
shouting ‘Bugger!’) and the self-consciously
poetic. Neither register felt convincing.
Any artist’s biography is an awkward
subject for an opera. Puccini’s artists
such as Marcello and Cavaradossi are
purely fictional. Benvenuto Cellini lived a
more dynamic life than most, but Hector
Berlioz’s bio-opera is rarely performed.
Even the greatest artists seem to have
spent most of their lives alone in a room
making art. There were famous drunks
such as Jackson Pollock, Bohemians like
Toulouse-Lautrec, and hell-raisers such as
Caravaggio, but there’s not much operatic
potential in the spectacle of your hero
getting drunk in a bar.
There may be even fewer thrills in the sight
of the protagonist shooting up and lying
around in a stupor. This is probably why
we wait until the end of the opera to see
Whiteley pick up a hypodermic, although it
also passes for dramatic understatement.
For those who know the Whiteley story
well, or even readers of Ashleigh Wilson’s
2016 biography, there are many touches of
déjà vu. Every old anecdote about the artist
gets trotted out, such as the time he was
pulled over to be breathalysed, and told
the policeman he’d been ‘drinking in the
universe’. It’s hardly more than a one-liner
but it’s made the focus of a dinner party