Call me a schlemiel

The opera "Moby-Dick" has had its premiere performance in Dallas. The composer was Jake Heggie, who does not shrink from tough subjects (his last opera before this was "Dead Man Walking") and the librettist was Gene Scheer, who, we presume, cut all the parts about blubber and ambergris.   

Playing the role of Captain Ahab, with his usual authority, was Ben Heppner of, originally, Murrayville in the Fraser Valley.  Heppner is routinely described (especially on CBC Radio 2--"All Promos All the Time") as a heldentenor.  But, in an interview with Douglas Hughes, he disowned this categorization.  "I fit the category, to be sure.  But I don't think of myself as a heldentenor.  I am a tenor, a tenor, a tenor.  To think of myself as a heldentenor would be to limit myself severely."  (CBC, please copy.)

"Moby-Dick" is one of two books routinely presented as "the great American novel."  The other, of course (Hemingway's choice) is "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which also has been adapted as an opera, by Hall Overton.   

Herman Melville, who wrote "Moby-Dick," never knew its success.  He just packed up his books and went back to his dreary duties as a New York customs inspector (like poor Bizet, gone to uneasy rest not knowing that "Carmen," initially disdained, would become the world's most performed opera). By the time "Moby-Dick" finally was acclaimed, Melville had departed for the Great Whaling Station in the Sky.  Nor could he have known that "Billy Budd" would be turned into an opera (and a film--Terence Stamp, Robert Ryan, Peter Ustinov) or that John Huston would film "Moby-Dick." Best scene:  Orson Welles as Father Mapple, delivering a fiery sermon on Jonah and the whale.

And so we close, with this well-known remark of Harold Ross, founder of The New Yorker:  "Is Moby-Dick the man or the whale""