With little room for Sacks’s panorama of patients, Stollman combined some into composite characters. But Leonard L., who gets a long, loving chapter in the book, remains largely intact and even intensifies. And while Sacks details the cases with an invested removal, the opera treats him as the protagonist, drawing for details from his 2015 autobiography “On the Move: A Life” — including his long-standing private homosexuality.
“We wanted to put that in,” Stollman said, “instead of making a fake heterosexual woman love interest like in the movie.”
In the score, Picker Sacks provides a musical analogy: the note A, which opens the opera in octaves, before being propelled by an ostinato. The movement subtly establishes the Doctor’s presence before he arrives, while the chorus tells the story of Sleeping Beauty with a lilting melody. It is one of many leitmotifs associated with specific characters – and the disease itself.
Roberto Kalb, the production’s conductor, said the music also draws from different styles: “Some sections are reminiscent of Janacek, others of Ravel. The passage in the botanical garden sounds like a mix of Couperin and Ravel.” Using a pedal tone, he added, pays off when the treatment starts to fail and plummet. “It’s so destabilizing,” Kalb said. “It sounds like you’re going through a tunnel.”
That failure is the tragedy of ‘Awakenings’, its most operatic quality. The wonder of L-dopa fades, along with the promise of renewed life. At the same time, Sacks has a brush with his true self in a subplot with a medic, but retreats into the closet.
“He had his own journey,” Picker said. “And eventually his ‘awakening’ only came in autobiography, which was very liberating for him.”
Sacks was intensely reserved, even in the safe company of someone like Picker. So the opera’s glimpse of his gay life is an invention—a double-edged idea that recognizes what could have been and what would eventually come. After what Stollman describes in the libretto as a sad smile, the character Sacks sings:
I’m not the man I used to be
but i’m not really awake yet.
This time is not the time for me.
Maybe one day I’ve lived long enough,
love will happen.
Not with drugs, but with such a simple kiss.
