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Music is, of course, much of the point of any opera, and Bates’s score was certainly the evening’s strongest aspect - particularly the extended orchestral passages, conducted with energy by Michael Christie, when the composer was able to free himself from the restrictions of “opera-ese.” It’s important for composers to be familiar with the forms and building blocks of opera, but I wish that opera didn’t so often feel like a uniform that a talented composer felt obliged to assume: Bates executed arias and recitatives and ensembles with facility, but not much illumination. Surely we could go a bit deeper, or fresher, than this. Jobs’s wife and widow, Laurene, after explaining that he finally learned to be human, reminds us to look up from our iPhones and appreciate the world around us. Jobs’s erstwhile partner, Steve Wozniak (“Woz”), accuses him of going establishment (“You’ve become one of the people we hated!”). Jobs struggles with facing his own mortality. What disappointed me was that the arc seemed so canned, as if it proceeded on the idea that opera is a parable with the task of delivering significant Truths - or cliches - about the human condition. Campbell, smartly, sliced and diced the events of Jobs’s life, frequently cutting back and forth from one year to another, to create a dramatic arc. Jobs’s life has already provided fodder for at least two feature films and several books, and if not everyone knows all the details, the opera’s creators could assume that the audience would know at least the basic stations of the story (which boil down to, “Apple products have been a big success”).
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