The road to at least one notorious locale is paved with good intentions, though on occasion that path forks its way elsewhere as LA Opera’s recent performance of “Thumbprint” bore dubious witness to.

An approximately 90-minute work by Kamala Sankaram with a libretto by Susan Yankowitz, the work depicts the real-life horrors suffered by Mukhtār Mā’ī, a woman who was raped as a form of rural retribution by the members of a powerful tribal clan in Central Pakistan. With the composer herself singing the lead role, the opera depicts Mukhtār overcoming her fears and sense of guilt, eventually finding redemption through a legal triumph against her assailants. I will return to how crucial elements in her legal battle were inexplicably (some would argue insensitively) glossed over in a moment, but will deviate for a moment to a matter that appeared to be incidental to the opera’s creators: the music.

The eclectic idiom of “Thumbprint” owes much to the example of Osvaldo Golijov and, more distantly, Leonard Bernstein. It is steeped in the influences of pop and modern Broadway, flecked with occasional “exotic” musical coloring to remind the audience that the action takes place in the Middle East, and is altogether pleasantly and unfailingly euphonious, if not quite melodious, as the opera’s earthbound, recitative-like vocal lines attested.

“Only with a pure, substantial score can an opera outlast its brief existence on the stage and attain the rank of an artistic monument in the future. Even operas that seemed absolutely defunct have been resurrected by virtue of a superior score,” Luigi Dallapiccola – himself an expert modern practitioner of the genre – wrote back in 1962. Sankaram’s opera, for all its good intentions and well-meaning political ideology, falls considerably short of being a “substantial score.” Her music exists only as a prop to project the words, a curious outcome in an opera (though one all too common in contemporary essays in the genre) akin to ignoring a painting in order to admire the frame. Primacy was given to the prolix, and at times hectoring, libretto. The music, which ought to have taken the lead and shaped the drama, remained frustratingly aloof.

It was as if the composer could only react to the farrago of injustices endured by the opera’s protagonist with an invariably sweet, if somewhat impassive, smile. Consider the scene depicting Mukhtār’s rape. Understandably, the stage production – which the opera’s promoters were careful to stress was still a work in progress at the preview I attended on June 13 – presented it in a highly stylized manner, preferring evocation rather than bald statement; fair enough. But Sankaram’s accompanying music was toothsome unto treacly. The audience was able to continue enjoying the work with nary a discomfort, which laid bare a troubling aspect of this opera.

Armond White famously referred to the film “12 Years a Slave” as “torture porn” that “merely [makes] it possible for some viewers to feel good about feeling bad.” Much the same could be argued for “Thumbprint.”

Towards the end of the work, the protagonist intones: “I thought the rape was the worst thing/That ever happened to me/Now I see it is also the best/Before the rape I was a dumb animal/I knew nothing, nothing.” In case the point was not made clear to the audience, the libretto also has Mukhtār sing that her brutalization “gave [her] life meaning.” Are we to believe that her existence would have been meaningless had she lived peacefully and found fulfillment with more quotidian concerns?
And what does the meaning she purportedly finds at the opera’s close mean for her audience? A search for her name online revealed a disquieting answer.

A detail that the opera’s creators only grazed rather than face head-on was the fact that Mukhtār Mā’ī’s initial legal victory was only a pyrrhic one. Despite her garnering the attention of socially conscious dignitaries and members of the media in the West, the Pakistani courts reversed her victory time and again. By 2011, nearly a decade after her gang rape occurred, the Supreme Court of Pakistan acquitted all six of her attackers. And what of Mukhtār Mā’ī herself? It has been reported that she, her family, and her associates are living in fear of reprisal from the Pakistani government as well as from local tribal leaders.

Not that the music would allow the well-heeled audience to give her fate much thought. One local critic already breathlessly eulogized the work as “a vibrant call for women’s rights.” In “Thumbprint” violence is a safe and beautiful spectacle, a latter-day gladiator fight for bien pensants to project their expressions of ideological affiliation onto, for whom Mukhtār Mā’ī, the human being, is mere fodder in the interminable culture wars. But the attentive listener will find in the work only a chilling and inadvertently misogynistic message that reduces human life to a heap of detritus when it fails to be of use for ideological sloganeering.