Marital strife is not exactly unheard of in opera, but in Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti we’re pitched straight in with bickering over the cornflakes. Sam and Dinah are an unhappily married couple in a seemingly utopian little white house in suburbia. “Pass the salt”/”You might at least say ‘please’” is about as civilised as it gets.
Sam escapes to the workplace and gym, while bored housewife Dinah fetches up in a cinema watching a dispiritingly awful film called Trouble in Tahiti. Confiding in her therapist, she sings one of the score’s highlights, There is a Garden, evoking a happier time in an aria that anticipates Bernstein’s own Somewhere in West Side Story (There’s a Place).
