Orson Rehearsed: Naxos Explore Classical Music Interview

What inspired ‘Orson Rehearsed’?

About five years ago, I was in the final stages of finishing a literary memoir called Duet With the Past which had required me to summon the courage to publish an unflinching, often painful appraisal of my past. I was compelled to accept, once I had finished the book, that I was a professionally-accomplished polymath, but—unlike someone like Orson Welles, for example—that I hadn’t possessed the self-awareness (or faith in myself) to really run with it. Pushing sixty and diagnosed with degenerative heart disease, I realized that I had better get cracking before it was too late. 

I dreamt up Orson Rehearsed, a piece in which a polymath comes to terms with his past during the last moment of his life. Because I had the necessary skills, I could serve as composer, librettist, screenwriter, director, designer, filmmaker, audio and film editor, mastering engineer, and chief bottle washer. In short, because I was able to exercise complete artistic control as an auteur composer, I was able to carve out a highly personal, stubbornly new blending-together of opera, musical theater, and cinema.

Orson Rehearsed’ has an incredibly unique structure. Could you talk a bit about how you created this variable, multi-format production, and how it relates to Orson Welles?

A master magician, Welles was a devotee of deception in the service of sharing truths. Orson Rehearsed is really a sort of “memory palace” consisting of 52 moments (like dramatic “beats,” or cards in a deck) chosen from his life. Only 15 of them made it into the iteration of the magic trick / performance that occurred at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago in September 2018. The Naxos recording is the soundtrack for the operafilm for which my Chicago staging served (like Bergman’s staging of Magic Flute) as raw material into which other layers of footage were interwoven. Every new staging of Orson Rehearsed can be cast in any way and use any of the 52 “beats” in the memory palace. It will never be staged the same way twice. I think Welles would have loved the ephemeral, intuitive, stream of consciousness nature of the document—hence the title, which is of course a nod to Welles’ own play, Moby Dick Rehearsed.

Putting together a production like this would be quite complex – what was it like working with Fifth House Ensemble to make it happen?

Roger Zahab, the conductor, is really the hero of the Chicago production. With only a click track and the full score, he managed to keep the acoustic players of the Fifth House Ensemble together with 48 short onstage films, an extensive electro-acoustic track playing through speakers, and three opera singers. Incredible. His extraordinary work was made possible by Atlas Arts Audio, a team of gifted young engineers who wrangled tech in real time for the live audience while also getting me the shots and audio I needed to then spend the next two years editing and mixing. And all the cues were called by one of my composition students, Shelby Blalock, in her first outing as a stage manager! I am so proud of what everyone achieved together.

How did you first decide to pursue a career in music, and what have been some of your personal highlights along the way?

As a seven-year-old, I was taken, along with the rest of my class, to hear the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, led by Kenneth Schermerhorn, perform, among other things, the Largo from Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony. Stephen Colburn played, I felt “tugged out of myself,” and knew then and there that, no matter what, I intended to be music. As for pursuing a career, I don’t think that it dawned on me until I first stepped into the Curtis Institute in 1981 that a “career” was even a possibility. Now I understand that “careers” are simply what happened; it is the people that were important. Every single memory I treasure most about being a composer has involved other people—standing at the rail at the premiere of Shining Brow with stage director Stephen Wadsworth and realizing at the same moment that it was going to be a hit; or bursting into tears when I first heard Nathan Gunn and Kate Lindsey sing Amelia; or, for that matter, accompanying a hundred singers over the years and protecting them from the piano as they put it on the line…

Early in your musical career, you studied with some of the biggest names in classical music, including Ned Rorem, David Diamond, Lukas Foss, and Leonard Bernstein. How did these mentors and other early teachers influence your compositional style and overall approach to music? 

To me, the freest spirit of the four was Lukas. His influence remains most with me to this day—not musically, but in terms of the ever-youthful, spiritual joy, the determination not to judge others, and the intellectual curiosity he seemed always to emanate. Ned was the hard-charging professional, the social arbiter, public intellectual and brutal critic. To me, David was the tormented perfectionist, demanding employer, and self-styled Byronic hero. Bernstein was everything to the max, burning like a comet. I was old enough to hold my own when I knew them, but young enough to still be thought of as a kid, so I learned more than I can remember from them. They set the bar very high by being excellent at what they did at a time when excellence was the starting point. Style is irrelevant in the end—it’s like saying that someone was “some kind of man.” What does that even mean??

Read the interview in its original form here on Naxos’ blog.

Orson Rehearsed Interview: New York Arts and Cinema

Tell us about the inspiration behind the making of Orson Rehearsed.

My older brother and namesake Daron was literally born with a broken heart. Atresia claimed his life after only a few days. The fact that I was born barely a year later, and given his name, really shaped my conception of self. In fact, my mother admonished me to “live for two.” Several years ago, when I was diagnosed with the same hereditary condition, I reacted by throwing myself into creating Orson Rehearsed, a Filmopera about how a creative person dedicated to living an examined life might come to terms with their mortality.

For better or worse, I am devoted to lyric theater. My breakout opera, Shining Brow, which debuted in 1991 when I was 29, set me on a path that has led to the creation of three more large-scale “grand” operas and nine chamber operas, so creating an opera seemed the best course. Had Brow not led to so many creative opportunities in live theater and in the concert hall, I might have pursued a career as a film composer. Nevertheless, a film score is not an opera score, though some get breathtakingly close. There are different (and equally artistically vital) skill sets involved. The act of combining opera and cinema for Orson Rehearsed was not so much a decision on my part as an inevitability because I chose the independent auteur filmmaker Orson Welles as my avatar and dramaturgical MacGuffin.

Why were these themes in your film important to you to work on? Tell us about how the story started forming and developing for you.

In order to achieve what Verdi called “parola scenica,” I have always systematically hierarchized dramatic events in my libretti by searching for “the word that defines and clarifies the situation.” In other words, I look for the emotional and psychological events in whatever story I am trying to tell that serve as the dramatic nuclear reactors for the drama as a whole (this is what results in great theater) and underline and highlight them in a singular way.

In electing to vivisect the exact moment of a master dramatist’s death, I chose to create 52 such moments in Welles’ life. Over the course of a few months, I whittled them down to the dozen or so that together make up my Filmopera. The result on its surface seems to be scenes of equal dramatic value linked by a peculiar, entirely filmic recurring transitional bardo state—sort of a “collection of essays” about living the Examined Life. On a deeper level, though, there is an inexorable, sort of horrible progression towards death.

Talk to us about how the film went into production and the most challenging or interesting thing about the process of making the film.

First, I chose beats from Welles’ life, then I found words and images that I felt manifested them. (I storyboarded and shot three sixty-minute silent films that are coordinated with the onstage action in the live iteration of Orson.) Then I storyboarded what I needed to see in the staged version of the movie. Then I mixed the live soundtrack (which included live electro-acoustic sounds in the theater and living players). Once the staged version was in the can, I edited the film to the soundtrack using the three films as raw material for one layer of visual rhetoric (in color), the live performance footage (washed into documentarian black-and-white) as a second, and a third layer of semi-opaque images that were organically generated through the interaction of the first two layers. It took two years to edit the film—twice as long to edit the film than it did to compose it, and four times as long as it took to shoot and record it. Those two years were the most fascinating, because during that period I really learned how to edit film, and to take my thirty years’ worth of experience in the opera world and bring it to bear on that. Because, you see, I wasn’t at all interested in filming an opera; or making an opera film: I wanted to make something new that was truly a hybrid. Huge vistas of understanding that I didn’t understand a lot of things, growing through immersion, and the bliss of discovery opened up for me as a creative artist during those two years—the same doors that are probably beginning to open up now for a lot of other composers because of the pandemic having shuttered live performance venues.

What is the message of your film and who is your targeted audience?

This Filmopera is an Opera about Film about Film about Opera, just as living an Examined Life is about understanding that Art is Life, and that Life is Art and that in the end it was all simply a Process, not a finished deal. As Welles sings at the end, we’re pretty much bound to “go on singing” even though everything’s ultimately ash. It is by far the most personal piece I’ve ever created. It is a fine art piece with no aspiration to commercial viability. For what it is worth, over the past thirty years I’ve written a number of lyric-theater works that aggravate partisans by straddling opera and musical theater conventions. Here I go straddling the cinema and opera worlds to spin a yarn about a man during the moment he straddles life and death. Obviously, I hope that people will like it; but I have no idea whether they will.

Talk to us about your next film project.

I am storyboarding a Filmopera called 9/10 which takes place in an Italian restaurant in Little Italy the night before the Twin Towers fell. I will film it in a co-production by the Chicago College of Performing Arts and my own New Mercury Collective in spring 2022 in Chicago.

Tell us about the most fascinating thing about the language of cinema for you.

It is the ability to simultaneously convey multiple levels of visual imagery with language and several levels of musical rhetoric that enthralls me. This combination of cinematic and operatic techniques enables one to subvert expectations and assumptions, and to probe with even more emotional and psychological verifiability, the human condition in ways that each has the potential to do on its own but can combine to do astonishingly well together.

You can read this interview in its original context at the New York Arts and Cinema website here.

Orchestrating a Psychological Landscape -- Interview: Fullshot Cine Mag

FCM: Let us go back to the beginning. What made you fall in love with cinema? How did you start making films and where did you learn how to make films?

DH: I fell in love with cinema because of my father, with whom I used to watch old black and white movies—the Late Show, and then the Late, Late Show—on broadcast television in Wisconsin when I was a child during the early 70s. I still remember—having fallen asleep during the second feature—waking up to the hiss of white noise and the eerie bullseye of the wavering test pattern in the dark and being led to bed. This was before videotape recorders were commercially available. Father mounted a jack on the back of the television and recorded the soundtracks on to cassette tapes, which I’d listen to over and over again, like radio dramas. 

At 16, “learner’s permit” in hand, I began driving into Milwaukee from the suburbs with my friends to the magnificent old Oriental Theater. It was operated back then by the Pritchett brothers, who ran it as a calendar house. (This was before Parallax, and then the Landmark Chain took it over.) The programming was astonishingly eclectic. I practically lived there after classes in high school between 1977 and 1980, viewing (and, afterwards, over coffee or drinks at Von Trier’s across the street, reviewing critically with friends) hundreds of films. That was when my crush on cinema turned serious.

When I landed in Philadelphia and conservatory (where I dared steal little time for anything but composing and practicing the piano) at the Curtis Institute of Music, I began reading serious film criticism, devouring Truffaut, Bazin and the rest. Landing a few years later in Manhattan to complete my musical training at Juilliard, I was fortunate enough to have access to the Regency Theater, a fabulous calendar house at 67th and Broadway that showed old films, during its last few seasons. I even met Truffaut there at the end of a festival of his movies! Sometimes I think that leaving my composition lessons (which could be intensely stressful) and heading straight to the cool darkness of the Regency preserved my sanity. I was among the protesters out front when they closed it in ’87; the Thalia uptown closed the same year. 

That opera world opened to me with the 1993 premiere of my first major opera, Shining Brow (on a libretto by Paul Muldoon about the tragic murders at Taliesin and the early career of Frank Lloyd Wright). I spent a little time in Los Angeles during the early 90s, met with some people, and made some connections in the film world. Had I not been fortunate to enjoy such relative success as a young composer in New York at the time—a commission from the New York Philharmonic, prizes, other opera commissions, a teaching job at a liberal arts college called Bard—I would have probably pursued film work then.

Instead, over the next twenty years I composed a dozen operas, a slew of symphonies, reams of chamber music, and hundreds of art songs. I became immersed in the east coast concert music world and fully embraced my life as a Manhattanite. A few years ago, my wife and I moved to the country to raise our children. Gradually, I began accepting invitations to serve as stage director for my operas. During production by Kentucky Opera of A Woman in Morocco at the Actors Theater of Louisville, it was pointed out to me that my theatrical staging was clearly filmic and that it was too bad that we weren’t making a Playhouse 90 out of it. Frankly, it had never occurred to me not to stage it cinematically. In hindsight, moving into film directing—making films—was my logical next move.

FCM: Orson Welles once said, 'The enemy of art is the absence of limitations". In Orson Rehearsed, you limited yourself to the stage and music. What kind of freedom or creativity did it bring?

DH: Welles’ comment echoes a paradoxical observation that Stravinsky makes in Poetics of Music: “My freedom consists in my … moving ahead within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.” Generating a rhetoric is my way of making a “sandbox” or “narrow frame” in which to frame narrative. Orson Rehearsed takes place in Orson Welles’ mind as he crosses through the bardo between life and what comes after. My challenge was to come up with a rhetoric with which to coherently explore the inner workings of one genius’ mind.

Since Welles worshipped Shakespeare, who described the world as a stage in As You Like It, I chose to have the stage of the Studebaker Theater in Chicago stand in for the interior of Welles’ mind. Analyzing Welles’ films from a Freudian standpoint (they were born on the same day) is something of a cottage industry among film-buffs; it occurred to me that dividing up his self-image into three avatars would be a sensible story-telling strategy: one would be the residual self-image of his rollicking youthful self; another the fully engaged artist of his middle years; and the third his present self, dying. 

I needed a visual rhetorical language for expressing numerous layers of consciousness. Consequently, every one of the (repeated and recontextualized) images in Orson Rehearsed is synchronized to specific words, concepts, and musical ideas that are treated the same way. Consistent use of foreground, middle-ground, and background action in the frame allowed for having at least three things going on simultaneously much of the time.

I determined to express Welles’ ego by documenting the onstage action. I am indebted to filmmaker H. Paul Moon for suggesting that I wash out all the onstage footage—present it all in black and white. This really helped me to clarify the visual rhetoric of the film.

Stream-of-consciousness images generated by his id were displayed as three sixty-minute (full-color) movies projected above the heads of the three onstage avatars. These images would be treated as visual motives that would recur and develop over the course of the film—scraps of film leader, the wing of a jet flying through the night, playing cards, waves, hands at a manual typewriter or a piano keyboard, a boy’s hand tracing letters etched into a gravestone, candles on a birthday cake being blown out, a woman running her hands through her hair, waves transforming into clouds transforming into white static, an eye superimposed over the lens of a camera, a spastic puppet dancing, a red satin scarf that transformed into Rita Hayworth’s tossing hair, and so on. Depending on the focus of the narrative at any point, the images would come to the fore (as in the overture and several scenes), be intercut with other images, or confined in tightly framed boxes.

Welles’ “real-time” coming to terms with his imminent demise by way of his super-ego would be overlaid as semi-opaque images (screened either red, white, or blue and including an important bit of 30s stock footage of a boy walking away from the camera that stands in for Orson as a child) during the process of editing the id and ego narratives together for the filmic iteration of the work. 

The musical rhetoric was derived from (and strictly synchronized with) the visual rhetoric. The electro-acoustic component of the score represented Welles’ id. Acoustic orchestra and the singer avatars were his ego. The composite soundtrack, recorded live in the Studebaker in performance (as I feel that live performance before an audience is the lifeblood of music-drama) so that the electro-acoustic and acoustic (id and ego) mixed naturally, manifested his super-ego.

The libretto, or script was organized in a similar fashion. Welles’ super-ego was expressed as old-fashioned “explanatory” onscreen intertitles framing the following scene, as scrolling text (the interview with Merv Griffin), the heartbreaking cri de cœurfrom Henry IV (“the true and perfect image of life”), and as a crucial revelation presented almost as an after-thought: “I had forgotten to wish for something.” His ego is expressed by the text sung by the onstage avatars, who sing mainly repurposed pertinent snatches of Shakespeare, (mis)remembered fragments of his interviews, radio broadcasts, and dialogue from scripts. His id erupts in samples of his own voice mixed into the electro-acoustic soundscape—from anguished utterances like “they destroyed Ambersons; the film destroyed me” to tender lines from a 1946 radio broadcast in which he gallantly compares Rita Hayworth to Helen of Troy.

FCM: Beside the screenplay, your film also has music and arias, and they must have taken you a long time to compose. How did the idea for the film come to you? How long did it take for the screenplay to take its final shape?

DH: The screenplay began as a collection of dramatic beats (I eventually created 52 of them, like a deck of cards). The twelve scenes that comprise Orson Rehearsed the film I chose in an organic fashion based on the forces I had on hand in Chicago only months before shooting. This process of throwing spaghetti at the wall (shooting about thirty hours of film for the onstage films, reading, collecting bits of dialogue and creating musical, visual, and textual material) took a year or so. I didn’t start to storyboard until I knew which “beats” I was going to use. This took about four months. 

At this point, I still didn’t know exactly which order the scenes would happen. Once I had all the “id films” cut and a rough mockup of the score, I shaped them into a psychologically verifiable sequence. This of course prompted adjustments. Richard Strauss teaches opera composers that the drama happens mainly in the transitions: just so with Orson Rehearsed. The transitions were the anchoring points for the “super-ego” layer of rhetoric that binds together the narrative as a whole.

There are still forty more in various stages of completion on my hard drive that involve, among other characters, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Oja Kodar, John Houseman, John Huston, and Marc Blitzstein, among others. There are some loopy, surreal dream ensembles in them that would have made for a very different film.

From (l.to r.) Robert Frankenberry, Robert Orth, Omar Mulero, and music director Roger Zahab during discovery. (Neil Erickson photo)

FCM: Tell us about your experiences of working with your actors. How did you select them and what were the rehearsal sessions like? How long did you work with your actors before the filming began?

DH: I’d known for nearly a decade that I was going to write the role of the dying Welles for the legendary baritone Robert Orth. Bob was a fiercely capable, emotionally brave intellect and performer who could suavely straddle the American Music Theater and Opera traditions. The “go to” baritone for an entire generation of well-known American opera composers, Bob and I had first crossed paths when the terrific director Ken Cazan had cast him in a revival of Shining Brow with the Chicago Opera Theater in the 90s. As it happened, Bob was undergoing chemotherapy during the staging and filming of Orson Rehearsed. His performance was nothing less than heroic, and he passed away a few months after production. For the middle-aged Orson, I knew beforehand that I would write for Robert Frankenberry, a prodigious musical and theatrical polymath (conductor, tenor, stage director, composer, pianist) who I had cast as Louis Sullivan in the Buffalo Philharmonic’s recording of my Frank Lloyd Wright opera Shining Brow and who had gone on to conduct the orchestra in a revival of the opera in a site-specific staging at Wright’s Fallingwater a few years later. As a faculty member of the Chicago College of Performing Arts, which co-produced Orson Rehearsed, I was able to cast the young Orson with Omar Mulero, a gifted tenor and graduate student there, then just beginning his career.

Discovery for Orson began with the eleven live musicians—members of the Chicago-based Fifth House Ensemble—nearly a year before staging. As with the singers, I had no interest in crafting something avant-garde for its own sake, so I needed traditionally trained players who could stretch into new spaces. During several exploratory sessions, I learned how much creative risk each player could tolerate. One player, Eric Snoza, had acting training and slipped easily into the role of Jacaré’s ghost, playing his upright bass and interacting with Orth. In the end, I was able to ask the players to sing as a chorus of muses as well as play their instruments in a number of contexts; I asked for some minimal improvisation. In addition, they provided clouds of spoken dialogue that complimented and expanded upon phrases that they pre-recorded for me as a group and that I mixed into the electro-acoustic component of the score. I drew them as far out of their instrumentalist “comfort zones” as they were willing to go at the time. 

Discovery for the Orsons, our musical director and conductor Roger Zahab, and myself, began a week before staging rehearsals and resulted in what I can only describe as the most fulfilling and honorable work I’ve done as an artist. On the most superficial level, it was a treat to “talk Welles” with them. They had of course done their homework and ascertained the sources of the real-life situations being dramatized/examined. On a deeper level, the technical exchanges—the relative ages of the instruments themselves and the cues and tricks the men shared with one another about how to manage vocal challenges, as well as the acting challenges inherent in singing opera and acting at the same time. The mentorship in rehearsal that Frankenberry and Orth gave Mulero was deeply moving to witness and a pleasure to transform into stage/film interaction. Still deeper, the fierce mutual trust and support that actors develop in order to shoulder the emotional trauma of their characters’ journeys. It was a great honor, for instance, to facilitate (as composer, librettist, and director) a process in which Bob, just arrived at rehearsal from a chemotherapy session, described an epiphany he had just experienced about how the dying Welles he was portraying may have felt. 

FCM: Do you think there is enough space for experimental and independent films in the film industry today? How can these films reach a wider range of viewers? Are film festivals successful in introducing these films to the public?

DH: I don’t have an answer for that. I do sense that opera producers are all eager to make what they consider films now and to at least stream them. The “MET-Live in HD” success story is one thing: these are glorious documents of stage productions. With COVID having reshaped the entire idea of what constitutes live performance, opera companies in the States appears to now be seriously addressing the idea of creating productions staged expressly for the camera—as though we’d all been thrown back to 1951 and Amahl and the Night Visitors from Studio 8H, only on the Internet. Very exciting. The challenge for the opera folks is to do more than create more filmed stage performances. That is a new path forward that Orson Rehearsed is beating.

FCM: You have used many editing techniques in the film. The scenes get dissolved into the next ones, and double exposure seems to be used significantly. Did you shape the film into its current form during editing or did you have all of it in your mind in pre-production or during the shooting stage?

DH: The multiple exposures that run throughout the film were all storyboarded beforehand. The challenge was to find a way to wrestle the coverage I had on hand after the shoot into the hoped-for composite images. I was able to get about half of what I was after. The rest fell into place gradually, through exploration and gradual, deepening understanding of what the images were saying to one another. To me, the time spent editing film felt exactly the same as composing music does. That was a pleasurable revelation. Days before finalizing the project, I was still swapping out better shots in the “id” department as I stumbled on to them.

FCM: Was the music played live on the set or did you record it beforehand and singers sang over pre-recorded music?

DH: The singers sang over mockups during staging rehearsals. Once the live orchestra joined in (in the usual opera fashion, at the sitzprobe) the mockup was swapped out for the strictly electro-acoustic tracks crafted to combine with the live orchestra in performance. I have integrated pre-records for many years into my operatic scores, so I possess the specific skills required to craft something that didn’t require balancing and mixing in the theater. The singers did not wear lavalier microphones (this was important to me; I wanted to feel them fill the 1900-seat Studebaker Theater), and the orchestra was not close-miked. It was important to me that there be no recourse to ADR, and that there be no looping. What one hears on my final mix of the film soundtrack (and on the CD release forthcoming on Naxos Records in March) is very close to what the audience in the theater heard.

FCM: How long did it take to shoot the film? What were the problems or challenges you faced during the shooting stage?

DH: The films-within-the-film took about a year to shoot, assemble, and edit in tandem with the composition of the score. These were just a joy to create. Once we moved into the house, the onstage action was covered in four days: a dress rehearsal, a technical rehearsal, and two performances with stationary cameras moved around for various pre-planned shots, as well as two hand-held cameras getting close-ups and specialty shots. The principle practical challenge with getting the Studebaker Theater coverage was that I was serving as director of the staged production of Orson Rehearsed and had little time to manage the videographers. There was no DP, so I had to shape a lot of shots to as close to my original storyboard as possible after the fact in the editing bay on the fly from larger, lower-quality shots. There was simply no time to see what we had in the can and to reshoot, and there is only so much that one can fix in post. I will not make that mistake again.

FCM: In between the scenes on the stage, we see images of the space outside the stage area. The film marks a transition through these frames and yet it keeps its rhythm the whole time. How many of these frames were carefully constructed as a way of strengthening the overall ideas behind the film and how many of them were simply a mixture of abstract (or random) frames?

DH: The transitions between set pieces was where the super-ego and id narratives came to the fore, and were storyboarded only a month or so before shooting because I didn’t finalize the sequence of scenes until shortly before production began. I retained about half of what was preplanned when I finally edited the final cut together; sometimes a better way of moving things forwarded presented itself, so I swapped in that visual material instead. The rhythm of the film remained stable because I edited the images to the score, which was frozen in time first. So, yes, they were carefully constructed: just as in composing opera, transitions perform the most dramaturgical heavy-lifting and their rhythm is the hardest part to get right. They’ve got to seem improvisatory and inevitable, and one has to learn how to craft them so that they seem so whether they are or not.

FCM: Tell us about the reaction of those who saw the film. What did they think about it?

DH: Not very many people have seen it yet. I’ve been intensely grateful for the appreciative response I’ve had from admired colleagues like John Corigliano, and from film composer colleagues I’ve long admired and whose work I’ve closely followed. Aficionados of Welles’ work are invariably supportive. I’ve received invaluable advice from film editor Rabab Haj Yahya, director David Gideon, and others, and remain very grateful and moved for the staunch support of the Chicago College of the Performing Arts, on whose Artist Faculty I am proud to serve.  I am thinking of this film the way that a poet thinks of a poem and a serious opera composer builds an opera: it is dense, highly allusive in its methods, and it benefits from repeated viewings; Orson Rehearsed delves with subversive lightness into some pretty dark and scary places. I am not expecting it to be “popular” in any sense of the word; it is an “art film,” that will land with people who bring an open mind and heart to it.

FCM: Are you currently working on another project? What will be your next film?

DH: I’ve got several projects already in pre-production that carry forward the methods (combining music and image, film and live theater) I’ve been steadily digging into over the past 20 years. I’m slated to direct a filmed version of my opera Shining Brow at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Westcott House with the Springfield Symphony and Think TV (the Dayton PBS affiliate) next year. I’m also filming my next film/opera 9/10, set in an Italian restaurant in Little Italy the night before the Twin Towers fell, in Chicago, in spring 2022 in another Chicago College of the Performing Arts-New Mercury Collective co-production. I’m taking things as they come and scaling things in order to match vision and budget sensibly. My ultimate goal is to gain complete fluency in the idiom and to work at the highest levels with collaborators from whom I can learn the most.

Please visit Fullshot Cine Mag to read the interview in its original context here.

An Affair of the Heart -- Interview: Toronto Film Magazine

 TFM:  How did you start making films and what was the first film project you worked on?

 DH: Several years ago, I was diagnosed with a congenital, degenerative heart defect. I began looking for a story to tell in which I could explore reconciling my own mortality: what issues run through the mind of a fully expressed artist conversant with the relationship between art and life seriously facing the prospect of death? I chose Welles as my subject because he was an artistic polymath—writer, visual artist, actor, director, filmmaker—and a deeply-committed social activist who also strove to live a complete and fulfilling personal life. I have always believed as a theater person that (as architect Louis Sullivan posited) “form follows function.” 

 Consequently, it seemed obvious to me that Welles’ ebullient creative generosity and aesthetic range, intellect, and art required a many-layered dramatic treatment—one that fused images and sound on a deeper than usual level, wedded electro-acoustic and live music, live performance and film, opera and music theater, and jubilantly mashed-up musical and visual languages. I determined to build a multi-media piece that used the “bardo odyssey” of the great filmmaker Orson Welles (the film takes place as he lay dying of a heart attack) to do this.

 I knew that this deep dive was going to require more than a love of movies, an acquaintance with the writings of André Bazin, and access to some video equipment. The editing process is so important to any life, but it is central to a writer, composer, or filmmaker. I had scored some films, so I was conversant with that end of things; but my subject in Orson demanded that I not just imagine but feelhow it feels to edit film month after month. I had directed my operas professionally, conducted them, written their libretti, knew the ropes of live theater; but I had never directed a film, or managed a film production team. It turns out that the opera and film worlds are astonishingly similar. That’s how I came to start making films, beginning with Orson Rehearsed.

 TFM: Which musical genre and which genre of filmmaking fascinates you as an artist and why? 

 DH: I feel most comprehensively expressed as a composer of music interwoven with some sort of dramaturgical narrative. I’ve written eleven operas, yes, but I’ve written an awful lot of music for the concert hall—five symphonies, a dozen concerti, reams of chamber music and hundreds of art songs. Although I am a passionate collaborative artist, I admit to really liking the highly centralized and subjective control of the auteur model as defined by François Truffaut in his essays because it comes closest to the way that composers used to function in the opera world.

 TFM:  How does it feel to write, direct and then compose music for a personal style of indie film?

 DH: Absolutely wonderful. I have savored every second of the Process of making Orson Rehearsed: from discovery with the actors during the rehearsal and staging of the live component of the film, to learning how to live the life rhythm of a film editor; from the familiar process of scoring to film, to the unfamiliar process of shooting film myself to music already scored and seamlessly switching alternating between the two. My goal was not to document a live performance, make a music video, or an Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but to create a pathway toward a new genre which is not a hybrid but something more personal, more resistant to categorization—a film about opera, an opera about film.

 TFM:  What is the most challenging aspect of being an independent filmmaker in the film industry?

 DH: I don’t have an answer for that yet. My process as an artist is driven forward by continual reinvention and discovery, and I am just now learning the challenges of being an independent filmmaker. 

 TFM: How difficult is it to fund indie films?

 DH: To the extent that the world of an opera composer is similar to that of an independent filmmaker, I am familiar with the process of bringing producers and presenters to the table, hearing their vision, collaborating, making art with the artists and resources in the room instead of the ones in my head, and letting projects either unfold or evaporate, depending on things I can’t control. Funding is always a problem, of course. On the other hand, technology has made it cheaper to make films; so long as you have access to the tools and the skills to wear a bunch of different hats, you can arrive at the end with something that looks and sounds pretty good.

 In the case of Orson Rehearsed, the Chicago College of the Performing Arts served as a production partner in exchange for their students shadowing me as composer, director, and independent artist, as well as being cast in productions that combined both seasoned professionals and emerging artists. They shared costs with my New Mercury Collective, which is basically my sandbox, or, as Welles would say, train set, in which I build little sandcastles and operatic locomotives. I have more creative control than I do when I work with an opera company, but less money. 

“These films would, in effect, show us what was going on in the minds of the avatars in Welles’ mind—films within an opera that would become a film.” Daron’s editing notes detailing the synchronization of images in the three simultaneously-projected films-within-the-opera-within-the film for the “Everybody’s Shakespeare” sequence. At this stage, these took the place of storyboards.

TFM:  Tell us about the process of the production for Orson Rehearsed? 

 DH: First, I threw spaghetti at the wall for six months in Logic Pro. I created about twenty 3-6 minute long “think pieces” about specific events and elements in Welles’ life that he might think about while dying. These dramatic beats combined manipulated snatches of recordings of my own acoustic works stretching back to the 80s, sound effects, brief snatches of Welles interviews, loops, and newly-composed vocal lines—most performed by my wife, vocalist/composer Gilda Lyons, and some by me—and mockups of what would become acoustic instrumental lines.

 I chose to divide the character of Welles into three avatars: one young, one middle-aged, one dying. This allowed for ensembles and multiple points of view. They sang a libretto that combined newly-written material by me with words drawn from public domain sources and repurposed—Shakespeare, Welles himself, Emma Lazarus, and others. Gradually, these spaghetti-throwing sessions generated a core of about a dozen musical ideas that held the entire piece together.

 Simultaneously, I filmed dozens of high-def video scenelets that would serve as visual equivalents to the musical motives being tossed up during the work in Logic—a man’s hands typing on a manual keyboard in New Haven; a woman’s hands gliding over piano keys in New York City; a child blowing out candles on a birthday cake, or tracing the letters carved into tombstones in a graveyard; hail falling in Paris; waves breaking and the sun setting in Nicaragua; an elevated train passing by overhead in Chicago; the desert outside of Albuquerque, and on and on. These images ended up unifying the films projected onstage during the live production component of production, and also served as raw material to be edited into the final film.

 During the next six months, since the film was taking place in someone’s mind and would unspool in real time in the theater, I gradually arranged the essays into a sequence, dropping some, adding others, in order to create a psychological and emotional narrative that would take the place of physical action. I edited together all the footage into three sixty-minute films that would accompany the three Orsons in live performance. These films would, in effect, show us what was going on in the minds of the avatars in Welles’ mind—films within an opera that would become a film. I edited into this mix some licensed stock footage of a red silk scarf, film leader, the Statue of Liberty at sunset, some protestors, and a poignant skein of footage culled from a 40s newsreel of a boy walking away from the camera on a country road. This boy ultimately became a rather important “ghost character.”

 Once I had synchronized the electro-acoustic soundtrack to these films, I composed the acoustic chamber orchestra component that would be performed live by the Fifth House Ensemble at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago in conjunction with the electro-acoustic score, conducted by Roger Zahab. A trusted and admired colleague who generously (and bravely) agreed to my request that we eschew the standard “film to image” gear that is used for screenings of Hollywood films when orchestras show them, Roger (who had access only to a click track) marvelously coordinated live singers, an orchestra, and pre-recorded sounds in a theater entirely by ear. I asked him to do this because I wanted the risk, the excitement, and the flexibility of live execution that I have grown to feel as a conductor myself is the secret ingredient to great opera performance.

 Next, I stage directed the show with the immensely gifted and creative cast. Their performances were captured visually over two shows and a dress rehearsal by three stationary cameras and one roving closeup camera—sort of one step up from the usual archival video. The soundtrack audio was recorded in the house. I wanted the soundtrack to sound captured live in order to advance the dialectic of “live” versus “canned” and the combination of the two. Post-production, and live concert mixing can make everything sound so homogenous that nothing sounds “real” anymore.

 I left Chicago with about ten hours of audio and video and let it sit for nearly a year before diving back in. First, I ever-so-gently massaged the soundtrack and had it mastered. Then, I cut the performance film to the soundtrack. Next, I intercut the pre-shot films and the live performance footage (which I washed out into black and white to differentiate it from the pre-shot films) before adding a third layer of semi-opaque “ghost” images screened in red and blue that carried forward elements of both. I received important feedback from colleagues at this stage about what was and was not “landing”—Rabab Haj Yahya, H. Paul Moon, John Corigliano, and Todd Vunderink, among others. This last stage of the process slowly brought the film’s messages into clearer relief and allowed me to discover what the rhythm of the recurring images and music were trying to express. 

 TFM: What inspires you to work as an artist in society and what kind of impact would you like to have on your audience as a filmmaker and composer? 

 DH: Artists of conscience can speak truth to power and make a difference (for the better) by reminding people of their humanity and interconnectedness, the responsibility we have to one another. I try to do that. I am proud to serve on the faculty of the Chicago College of the Performing Arts of Roosevelt University because the institution’s values match my own. That generous, staunch support helps me to amplify my citizenship and hone my craft while sharing it with students.

 TFM: What is your next artistic project? 

 DH: I am directing a staged production of my opera New York Stories for Florida Grand Opera in the spring, and then directing a filmed version of my opera Shining Brow in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Westcott House with the Springfield Symphony and Think TV (the Dayton PBS affiliate).

 TFM: What do you think about the distribution of indie films and what do you recommend to emerging artists? 

 DH: I don’t know enough about distribution to make any recommendations. At present I am submitting Orson Rehearsed to festivals and learning about distributors. It is an art film for which there is a minuscule market; I never expected it to be commercially viable or “popular.” Still, it is garnering laurels (for which I am grateful and honored), and it might get some legs, however humble. After it has been shown at festivals, who knows?

TFM: Why do you make films? 

 DH: Really, it circles back to process for me. I’m just feeling my way forward as an artist and as a human, learning, going deeper into truths, and working to connect, and to make the bit of difference I can, as I am able. I’m very lucky to have landed in a place where I can discover and reinvent while collaborating with extraordinary artists.  

 This interview originally appeared in Toronto Film Magazine on 23 November 2020 when Orson Rehearsed was awarded the “Best Composer” laurel at the Montreal Independent Film Festival. You can read it there by clicking here.

Orson in the Bardo -- Interview: Wellesnet.com

Mike Teal of Wellesnet: Despite the fact that the pandemic has taken a heavy toll on the entertainment industry, Daron Hagen’s filmed opera, Orson Rehearsed, has been playing at movie festivals around the world and has won laurels in the Los Angeles Film Awards, Chicago Indie Film Festival, Cinefest India, and the After Hour Festival in Brazil, among others.

The film is based on a stage performance of the work, held in Chicago two years ago, which itself had incorporated filmed material into the show (much as Welles had done several times throughout his theater career).

Now the tables are turned and the new film has incorporated a lot material from that stage performance.

Hagen is a highly respected composer who has written twelve operas, and whose orchestral works have been performed by major orchestras around the world.

MT: The word “bardo” is used to describe Welles’s state at the moment he lies dying. Is this a Buddhist interpretation of Welles’s life and death?

DH: Orson Rehearsed takes place during Welles’ transition between life and death. He is, in effect, both the scorpion atop the frog’s back and the frog in mid-river. What we call it is a matter of convenience. In truth, I have been fascinated by this transitional zone for decades—inspired, probably, by the fact that my mother died of cancer in my arms when I was a young man. I have been treating this subject for decades. For example, in 1998, I recast Shakespeare’s Othello as a large two act opera on a libretto by Irish poet Paul Muldoon called Bandanna, set it on the Texas-Mexico border (yes, it dealt with the issue of immigration, among other things) on the Day of the Dead in 1968, and treated the Rio Grande as a River Styx. The debt to and homage to Welles and his Touch of Evil was overt—the corrupt labor organizer in Bandanna was named Kane. He, along with all of the characters in that story, straddled the liminal zone between life and death, love and hate, innocence and corruption, good and evil, and so forth.

Now Welles serves as both Orpheus and Eurydice in Orson Rehearsed. During the film, he crosses from life into whatever it is that comes after. In other words, no, the film is not a Buddhism-inspired speculation about what Welles might have been thinking, but rather a secular humanist yarn that conveys the narrative not through external stage action but through internal action as his thoughts proceed through a sequence of emotional, psychological, and philosophical states. What Welles thinks we audience members see on three movie screens; we also see his thoughts given physical form in the staged actions of three figments of his imagination—opera-singing avatars who interact with one another. And in the final film we see a melding of the three films, a live performance, and another semi-opaque set of ghostly avatars who interact with both the films and the avatars.

MT: With the instrumentalists onstage with the singers, it struck me that it might be more accurate to consider this a kind of oratorio or cantata instead of an opera. How would you describe it?

DH: From the start, Orson Rehearsed was intended to be sui generis. As such, one can interpret it any way one pleases — it’s an opera or a cantata, a musical or a play with words, a set of critical essays or a song cycle, an art film or a music video. There is but a single step between Max Steiner and Richard Strauss, who believed — as I do — that a great work of art should entertain the neophyte, intrigue the well-informed, and enthrall the expert. That sleight of hand, from what I’ve read, delighted Welles as an artist and man. As a technical and artistic goal, it certainly delights me. So, if Orson Rehearsed must be called anything, I’d choose “prestidigitation,” as it captures both the high, medium, and low of it all.

MT: The word “Edit” is repeated by the singers frequently, almost like a mantra. What is the significance of that?

DH: The recurring line is a cri de cœur. As a man with a congenital, degenerative heart defect, I consciously monitor my heart more than most folks probably do. In Orson Rehearsed, Welles is dying of a heart attack. The recurring, juddering cries of “Edit. Edit. Edit,” are not just the sound of his own heart coming through to him through his imagination, but they are the essence of an artist’s life—as Meister Eckhart said, “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.” Welles spent a lot of time editing scripts, film; we know also that he was repeatedly devastated when other people recut his films—when people edited him. That is why I edited the film myself: I wanted to feel (granted, using Premiere Pro software, not a moviola) what Welles did. Orson Rehearsed is my twelfth major operatic work, so I’m no stranger to the tender mercies of the editing bay.

MT: There are more than a few references to political matters, with Welles at one point saying that the only good acting is political. I was also struck by your quoting of Roy Cohn, the infamous right-wing lawyer who helped Donald Trump rise to power in the 1970s. Do you see any kind of parallel between Welles’s death in 1985 and the rise of the kind of far-right politics currently described as Trumpism?

DH: Welles wrote speeches for FDR, took a year off to campaign for him, and is widely revered as a man who stood up for what he believed in. All of the biographies I’ve read of Welles—including Simon Callow’s sprawling, epic treatment—show him to have been a man of fine character. It is too on the nose to posit that the diabetic Welles died of a broken heart, but how could he have missed—as someone who had lived through HUAC and McCarthyism—the effects of Reaganism and the already rising tide of the fascism we’re facing today? Who of us in our darkest moments has not been beset by devils? I chose both fixer Cohn and his tweeting protégé—reverse anachronisms yanked out of chronological time—to serve as Welles’ devils.

MT: I remember the video screens during the live performance all showing a sunset at the end. The ending on the video is different, with everyone gradually leaving the stage, as in Welles’s Moby Dick Rehearsed. Was there a change, or am I not remembering correctly?

DH: The screens do show a sunset throughout the last scene of the staged iteration as the orchestra gradually drifts off; but then they give way to black and white film leader and the word “Fin” as the Youngest Welles places his beloved Hamburg hat on the pianist’s head and exits. The film is true to this. As you point out, the reference is to Welles’ Moby Dick Rehearsed.

MT: When will this video version be available to the public?

DH: This is my first film, so it was a surprise to me that, after one is done, the entire thing gets mastered the way audio recordings do. So it is in Digital Cinema Package format and meant for theatrical projection. At present I am submitting it to festivals and learning about distributors. It is an art film for which there is a minuscule market; I never expected it to be commercially viable or “popular.” Still, it is garnering laurels (for which I am grateful and honored), and it might get some legs, however humble. After it has been shown at festivals, I imagine it will be broadcast. After that, who knows?

This interview originally appeared on the Wellesnet.com website on 4 November and may be accessed here.

"Orson Rehearsed" Interview: Chicago Movie Magazine

Daron Hagen is an American composer, filmmaker, director, and author. He made his debut as a director mounting his own works at the Kentucky Opera in Louisville; he has also directed his works at the Skylight Music Theater in Milwaukee, the Chicago Opera Theater, and others. He is currently directing a film version of his opera Shining Brow for Ohio Public Television.

It was truly our pleasure to interview Daron Hagen for Chicago Movie Magazine.

1. What draws you to filmmaking, cinematic language and composing music for film?

I started watching films critically in my late teens at the Oriental Landmark Theater in Milwaukee at exactly the same time I started digging into music composition and its attendant commentary. The Oriental was a glorious, ramshackle calendar house that showed all sorts of films—from Fellini to Scorsese, Welles to Wenders, Chaplin to Kieślowski, Ford to Ford Coppola, Kurosawa to Lucas. Around the same time, I began reading film criticism and theory—beginning with Truffaut’s incendiary screeds. I am drawn to film because, setting aside the crucial component of live performance, it does everything that opera does and in much the same way.

Operatic scores and filmic documents convey narrative and control dramaturgy through manipulating time and fundamentally altering our perception of its passing. Film’s visual and sonic rhetoric creates the reality in which the narrative unfolds, exactly as opera sets forth an assemblage of gestures, timbers, moods, and sticks to them. As a composer cutting film, I feel the way that I do when I am composing and orchestrating music: one’s choices are guided always by the desire to clarify and illuminate the dramatic and emotional nuclear reactor firing the scene; rhythm is paramount, transitions are where the emotions shift. 

Opera composers have traditionally been treated, like auteur filmmakers, as the genre’s visionaries. The opera house is a vast mechanism filled with profoundly gifted technicians, directors, and craftspersons, all of whom are happy to spray Febreze on mediocre operatic product if they must, just as the artisans in a film production company do. 

In the US at least the opera world seems to have shifted away from the traditional idea of the composer leading a team of collaborators gathering together to illuminate and enhance the composer’s intent. In addition to the much-needed heavy-lifting being done by opera producers in terms of fostering a collaborative environment that reflects current ideas of racial and gender equity, there has been a systematic reevaluation of the composer’s role in the collaborative process: just twenty years ago, treating opera composers like commercial music theater composers still seemed to be at least a short-term path towards dismantling the 19th century “great man” model. For many of my colleagues, the opera composer’s role now is that of a member of a creative team led by the director or the producer.

As a lifelong learner and personal reinventor, I decided to move laterally into directing my own operas about ten years ago because I wanted to explore the similarities between stage and cinematic languages and directing. Although absolutely delighted as a composer to provide music for a film perfectly pitched to serve the director’s and music editor’s vision if required, I realized that I could only explore the territory between the two disciplines if I not only created the score, but also wrote, directed, and edited the film to the score, adjusting each to the other to form a more perfect dialogue between them. In order to maintain the frisson of live opera’s visceral appeal (and palpable risk), I needed to create a production process that allowed for there to be a live production as part of the progression towards the screen.

I formed The New Mercury Collective, a loose association of actors, singers, writers, and designers with whom I had made crossover projects over the previous thirty years utilizing both Music Theater, Opera, and Filmic staging techniques. This would be my sandbox, and the place where I would create Orson Rehearsed, which I knew from the very start would end up as a film and an open-ended music-theater piece that would constantly change shape depending on the circumstances.

2. Do you believe in film schools or does making a film teach you more than film school?

I did not go to film school, so I don’t know. Since I learned how to write operas by accompanying them, singing in them, writing them, conducting them, and directing them, it seemed sensible to me to learn filmmaking the same way—by taking on the genre’s constituent tasks and learning by doing. I did go to Juilliard and to Curtis to study music, so I have some pretty strong ideas about what I learned at those places, and what I didn’t. For example, I am astonished that student composers are not simply required to attend the rehearsals of their local orchestras. Critical listening (to actual performers in situ performing one’s own and others’ music) teaches more about composing than does any class because you can hear what works and what doesn’t—and when it doesn’t what the performers have to do to make it work. Perhaps I am projecting, but I imagine that nascent filmmakers encounter pretty much the same terrain in film school.

3. What makes cinema stand out more than the arts for you?

I could never relinquish live theater—making it with others and watching it has given me the most fulfilling personal and aesthetic experiences in my life. During my lifetime, technology has made it easier, faster, and cheaper to write film operas than staged operas. 

4. Did you choose a certain directing style for making this film based on the script? 

I have cool adoration for the subversiveness of Truffaut’s Doinel films and an appetite for the ethical earnestness of Rod Serling’s morality screenplays. My mother was a visual artist and took pains to explain Welles’ techniques to me when together we watched Kane when I was a kid. But my roots are in opera, so I warm to Fellini’s aesthetic of intensity: I like to create environments that are so fake that they create their own reality. Film is great at this sort of subterfuge—even better than live theater, but not better than a live magic show.

It was pretty early in my career as a composer of large-scale works for orchestras and opera companies when I really came to terms with the concept of strictly terracing simultaneously presented ideas. Composer Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov in his Principles of Orchestration lays out elegantly the idea that complex compositions should strictly hierarchize foreground, middle-ground, and background events for the listener through orchestration. Arnold Schoenberg’s string quartets are masterly in their painterly use of relief, chiaroscuro, and “deep action.” The violas in Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier tell us clearly what the Marschallin is really feeling: either we hear them or we intuit them. Either way, we win. These precepts are no different from Welles’ framing of the father in the foreground, mother and banker in the middle ground, and Charlie and his sled in the background.

For Orson Rehearsed I shot about thirty hours of full-color video to create three 60-minute films that portrayed the internal thoughts of three onstage singers who portrayed Orson Welles inside his own mind. Into this I mixed about ten minutes of licensed and public domain archival footage. The films constituted the background images (all tied to musical ideas in the score, of course). The foreground images in the film are all in black and white and consist of the reality played by the avatars themselves as they sing. Between the two (like the violas in Strauss) flows a layer of ghostlike, semi-opaque single-color images drawn from the upper and lower layers of rhetoric that superimpose themselves like fleeting thoughts and then disperse. The Process was: shoot the background films, stage the foreground action, then, formulate the middle layer while editing together the top and bottom layers.

Omar Mulero

Robert Orth

Robert Frankenberry

5. How did you choose the cast and the crew of your film?

I had already created my Collective and intended to draw from them the team needed for this project. But I needed not one but three Orson Welles avatars: a youthful, middle-aged, and dying Orson. As a faculty member of the Chicago College of Performing Arts, I was able to cast the young Orson with Omar Mulero, a gifted tenor and graduate student there, then just beginning his career. 

For the middle-aged Orson, I knew beforehand that I would write for Robert Frankenberry, a prodigious musical and theatrical polymath (conductor, tenor, stage director, composer, pianist) who I had cast as Louis Sullivan in the Buffalo Philharmonic’s recording of my Frank Lloyd Wright opera Shining Brow and who had gone on to conduct the orchestra in a revival of the opera in a site-specific staging at Wright’s Fallingwater a few years later. 

I’d known for nearly a decade that I was going to write the role of the dying Welles for the legendary baritone Robert Orth. Bob was a fiercely capable, emotionally brave intellect and performer who could suavely straddle the American Music Theater and Opera traditions. The “go to” baritone for an entire generation of well-known American opera composers, Bob and I had first crossed paths when the terrific director Ken Cazan had cast him in a revival of Shining Brow with the Chicago Opera Theater in the 90s. As it happened, Bob was receiving chemotherapy during the staging and filming of Orson Rehearsed. His performance was nothing less than heroic, and he passed away a few months after production. 

Having these three men go through the discovery and staging process together, and serving as their composer and director, was really, really moving—the most fulfilling experience of my career in the theater. The give-and-take between them—Bob’s wisdom and experience, Frankenberry’s brave questing, Omar’s open, honesty—soaking it all up, glowing and growing in the process—amazing. It’s why I committed to the theater as a teenager and why I’ve remained so.

While staging my opera A Woman in Morocco for Kentucky Opera I had the good fortune to collaborate with lighting designer Victoria Bain, with whom I explored a lot of the Jean Rosenthal-inspired effects I wanted for that production. For Orson, she graciously jumped in to the Kieślowski-esque Red-White-Blue aesthetic I had in mind for Orson Rehearsed  (I first fell in love with this when composing the opera Bandana back in the late 90s—the vocal score is chock-o-block with lighting cues that most theatrical lighting designers ignore) and she nimbly avoided most of the pitfalls inherent in lighting a stage show that was going to be folded into a movie but still had to look good in the theater. There was an able young team in Chicago called Atlas Arts Media that were then just getting on their feet that was able to adroitly handle both the camera emplacements I needed for coverage and the live mix of sound for the soundtrack and CD-release of the score. 

Conductor Roger Zahab and Hagen during production at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago. (Elliott Mandel photo)

6. How did you fund your film and what were some of the challenges of making this film?

The Chicago College of the Performing Arts served as a production partner in exchange for their students shadowing me as composer, director, and independent artist, as well as being cast in productions that combined both seasoned professionals and emerging artists. They shared costs with my New Mercury Collective. It is basically a sandbox, or, as Welles would say, a train set, in which I build my little sandcastles and operatic locomotives. I have more creative control than I do when I work with an opera company, but less money. On the other hand, technology has made it cheaper to make films; so long as you have the skills to wear a bunch of different hats, you can arrive at the end with something that looks and sounds pretty good.

The major challenge of production was the real-time coordination of my elaborately-crafted electro-acoustic tracks, the live onstage ensemble of eleven instrumentalists (the Chicago-based Fifth House Ensemble), the three live singers in performance with the three sixty-minute films, and the three onstage sixty-minute films on a low budget. The credit goes to composer / violinist / conductor Roger Zahab, who held it all together from the podium. The team at Chicago’s Atlas Arts Media mixed the show in real time while also giving me basic camera coverage so that I could embark upon the next leg of production with hard drives full of soundtrack ready to be mixed, and shots ready to be edited together.

7. Do you consider yourself an indie filmmaker and what would most be the most difficult thing about being an independent artist?

I have been an independent artist all my professional life, so moving sideways into the creation of indie film has been a deeply pleasurable learning experience; one that feels like donning a familiar and much-beloved old sweater. Though I’ve served on the faculties of Bard College, Princeton, and Curtis, among others, they were always adjunct positions—however long-term, that helped to pay the bills so that I could make more art. I’ve been lucky, but I’ve always been a very hard worker, and I’ve been supported by a lot of really generous people, been given a lot of opportunities to learn my craft and to grow up in my chosen fields. The indie film world of makers, presenters, and festivals is on first take a more mutually supportive scene than the concert music world.

8. What is the distribution plan for your film?

Since I am learning as I go along, I am simply entering the film into festivals and finding out who actually watches it carefully enough to find value in it. If it lands with enough people it will get legs, just as operas and concert pieces do. I realize that “legs” in this case means a distributor. If it doesn’t, then, well, nobody got hurt: in the process of making it I lived my best life, and I made a piece of art about which I care passionately.

9. What is your cinematic goal in life and what would you like to achieve as a filmmaker?

I’ve got several projects already in pre-production that carry forward the methods (combining music and image, film and live theater) I’ve been steadily digging into over the past 20 years. I’m slated to direct a filmed version of my opera Shining Brow at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Westcott House with the Springfield Symphony and Think TV (the Dayton PBS affiliate) next year. I’m also filming my next film/opera 9/10, set in an Italian restaurant in Little Italy the night before the Twin Towers fell, in Chicago, in spring 2022 in another CCPA-New Mercury Collective co-production. I’m taking things as they come and scaling things in order to match vision and budget sensibly. My ultimate goal is to gain complete fluency in the idiom and to work at the highest levels with collaborators from whom I can learn the most.

10. What kind of impact would your film have in the world and who is your audience?

Chris Lyons Illustration

I am thinking of this film the way that a poet thinks of a poem and a serious opera composer builds an opera: it is dense, highly allusive in its methods, and it benefits from repeated viewings; Orson Rehearsed delves with subversive lightness into some pretty dark and scary places. I am not expecting it to be “popular” in any sense of the word; it is an “art film,” that will land with people who bring an open mind and heart to it.

11. Please tell us more about the Chicago College of Performing Arts and your involvement with the institution. 

Rudy Marcozzi, rock-solid Dean of the Chicago College of Performing Arts, and Linda Berna, Associate Dean and Director of the Music Conservatory, understand that my values as a citizen and as an artist are in synch with Roosevelt University’s as an institution. The school maintains Opera and Music Theater programs side-by-side. I am grateful to have been encouraged by the faculties of both divisions to work freely with their professionally bound singers on my compositions, which consciously combine the technical and aesthetic methods of both disciplines in our uniquely American way. With their guidance, I cast CCPA’s young artists in projects that also feature mid-career professionals that I draw from my Collective, from whom (as Omar did in Orson) they learn through collaborating and observing during production. In addition, I invite the composition students—who study under the strong, mindful leadership of composer / visual artist Dr. Kyong Mee Choi—to serve as members of my production teams, to assist me as director, and so forth, to be immersed as composers in the production of opera and film in a way that they cannot elsewhere. I can’t tell you how supportive the faculty at CCPA has been of this atelier / sandbox / train set nestled within the various conservatories that make up the school.

Official Trailer.

This interview originally appeared in the October 2020 issue of Chicago Movie Magazine and may be accessed there online here.

Duet with the Future

Some are born with the gift of measuring out their lives with coffee spoons; others must develop—or reconnect with—the ability to appreciate and find inspiration in the (un)predictability of middle-class domesticity. In 1981, when I tore out of the Midwest as a teenager like a bat out of hell, bound for the east coast and god-knows-what, I somehow got it into my head—as so many artists (it doesn’t matter what sort—nascent, deluded, or manqué) do, that I should renounce many of the more traditional values taught me by parents and teachers during my privileged, Lutheran, middle-class suburban childhood. My memoir, Duet with the Past, is a written account of the thirty-five-years it took me to reconnect with my childhood values. 

In an ironic twist for one named after a brother who died in infancy of heart disease, I was diagnosed in January with a congenital heart condition. Around the same time, I learned that my memoir—on which I had been working for about twelve years—had been accepted for publication.

There are lots of different kinds of writing. Most don’t require any bravery—criticism least of all. Publishing a memoir is scary; it is one of the kinds of writing that requires courage. I found mine. My book wasn’t confessional—there were no surprises in it for people who knew me—but it was intended to be a work of art that would, in Cesar A. Cruz’s words, “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” I spent the first three months of 2019 finalizing the manuscript, and then correcting proofs, making an index, gathering permissions, choosing photos, and so forth. Sending off the final galleys to the publisher, I thought of the story of the annoyed senior composer who, having just played a recording of her work for an impertinent student in a masterclass, responded to his glib vitriol with a mild, “Next time, you write it.”

Duet with the Past was published in April, around the same time that Swan Song, a frankly autobiographical septet for shakuhachi, shamisen, koto, and string quartet was premiered at the Tenri Cultural Institute in New York City. Thanks to the staunch support of Kyo-Shin-An Arts I had written a koto concerto, and developed a close relationship with Duo Yumeno which yielded The Heike Quarto, a four-part, sixty-minute long suite over the course of five years based on the great Japanese tale of Heike for koto and cello—panels of which they performed across the US, in Japan, and, that month, at Carnegie Recital Hall. 

During May I composed a seventh piano trio—this one celebrating three inspiring colleagues and friends—Sharan Gale Levanthal, Sarah Kapps, and Peter Marshall—and the Wintergreen Music Festival, where we have all been privileged to serve as guest artists for a number of years. The trio premiered it in July. A beautiful new release on Albany by duo au courant (Stephanie Weiss and Christine Wright-Ivanova) called Sacred and Profane featured world premiere recordings of three song cycles: jaik’s songs, A Handful of Days, and Vegetable Verselets.

In June I joyously gave my first reading as an author at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck—the small village in Upstate New York in which I live. (I’ve since given readings in Virginia, Philadelphia, and Chicago, with more scheduled.) I was touched to learn that my childhood classmate Roberto Diaz (now director of the Curtis Institute) was touring in Central America a trio called Book of Days that had been commissioned by our alma mater. I began revising and reorchestraing my early opera Shining Brow for a new production by Arizona Opera, but stopped halfway through in order to compose The Passion of Jekyll and Hyde, an 84-minute long “opera without voices” for chamber orchestra to be premiered live with the great 1920 public domain John Barrymore film at the Wintergreen Festival in July, suavely conducted by Erin Freeman. H. Paul Moon’s elegant documentary of the event was released in August to acclaim.

I returned for a few weeks to Yaddo in Saratoga Springs during August to compose a 60 minute song cycle for six solo voices and piano four hands co-commissioned by Lyric Fest in Philadelphia and the Brooklyn Art Song Society called The Art of Song. Upon returning home, I revised and reorchestrated the second act of Shining Brow for Arizona Opera.

A few weeks later, in September, Chas Rader-Shieber’s intelligent, insightful, and bracing new directorial take on Shining Brow went up in Phoenix. I orchestrated the Blake Songs for tenor and orchestra for November premiere by Robert Frankenberry, Roger Zahab, and the University of Pittsburgh Symphony during downtime at the hotel, and was astonished and moved by an unannounced check-in one night at the theater by my co-author—whom I had not seen in years—Paul Muldoon. Holding hands with him, and with the brilliant young emerging conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, who had just deftly navigated the score, during the company bow closed a loop for me, as did the world premiere, at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia on 4 November, of The Art of Song. The concert was followed by a lavish 58th birthday party—with Prosecco and cake(!)—at the Academy of Vocal Arts which brought together many friends old and new and for which I remain intensely grateful.

Through it all, I sketched the outlines of the new operas 9/10 and The Deputy, and continued editing film for the movie version of Orson Rehearsed—marking the passing of one of its stars, my very dear friend Robert Orth, for whom it was written. I gave a lot of private lessons, and I enjoyed taking the sleeper train to Chicago to fulfill my duties as an artist faculty member of the Chicago College of the Performing Arts. 

All these activities were my coffee spoons. The real action took place every morning over breakfast with my sons, at the end of the day talking shop and family with my partner Gilda; the real action consisted of trips to the doctor, births, soccer games, birthdays, funerals and farewells.

And, in crafting this short essay, I began writing a sequel today to Duet with the Past called Duet with the Future.

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With Duo Yumeno — Yoko Reikano Kimura, koto & shamisen player, and Hikaru Tamaki, cellist — at Tenri in New York City (Meg Fagan photo).

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Daron reads at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY (Karen Pearson photo).

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Peter Marshall, Sarah Kapps, Daron, and Sharan Gale at Dunlop Pavillion at the Wintergreen Performing Arts Festival (Atticus Hagen photo).

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Soloist, composer, and maestro—fellow members of the New Mercury Collective on a new adventure together premiering Blake Songs with the University of Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in Pittsburgh (Aaron Wyanski photo).

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Recording with duo au courant — mezzo-soprano Stephanie Weiss and collaborative pianist Christina Wright-Ivanova — in Las Vegas (Chuck Foley photo).

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A surprise reunion with co-author Paul Muldoon at a performance of Shining Brow in Phoenix (Joseph Spector photo).

Wintergreen Music, Zen Violence Films, Burning Sled Music, and the New Mercury Collective present a feature-length cinematic presentation of music composed by Daron Hagen at its world premiere, in combination with the original 1920 public domain film "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde," and concert footage filmed and edited by H. Paul Moon.

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Pomodoro: Singing a Librettist's Praises

So moved was I by it that I posted a picture of a dazzling late November tomato from my garden on my Facebook feed in November 2018. Within moments, Christopher Rouse (Godspeed, Chris!) posted, “Better eat it soon!” To which I immediately replied, “Oh, it was et mere seconds after I snapped the pic!” A few beats later, Mark Campbell posted, “There is a song in this, Daron,” to which I replied, “If you pen the lyric, I will set it!” “I just might,” Mark responded, “But it’s not a comic song, as much as tomato is usually a comic word.” “Agreed,” I typed, and forgot about it.

A few days later, Mark sent me one of the finest, most “settable” lyrics I’ve ever read. Thanking him, I resolved to put it aside until I had a project in hand that was worthy of its excellence. A year later, Lyric Fest of Philadelphia and the Brooklyn Art Song Society co-commissioned me to create a sixty-minute song cycle for six solo voices and piano four-hands. On my birthday this past November, the resulting valedictory cycle, which I titled The Art of Song, was premiered by its commissioners at the Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square. Mark’s poem joined a big garland of poems, and figured prominently as one of the emotional and musical anchors of the piece as a whole.

I realized, as I walked into the church for the concert, that I had last been there during an era now almost entirely lost: November 1982. With me was my then teacher Ned Rorem—the Curtis Institute of Music being just across Rittenhouse Square—and my benefactor at the time, curator and chairman of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Henry McIlhenny—whose townhouse stood also on the square, next door to the Ethical Culture Society and its pretty little performance hall. (Although the romantic in me would have preferred that Henry’s fortune derived from tabasco sauce, it in fact grew out of his grandfather’s invention and development of gas meters.) Ned had invited Henry to the recital in order that he might hear some of the music that had derived from his financial generosity. Several classmates were about to premiere on a concert series sponsored by the church a sonata for cello and piano that I had penned for the occasion. (The music is in a box unopened since the 80s now somewhere in my in-laws’ attic—proof that, while I rarely withdraw something I’ve written, pieces tend to withdraw themselves.) On the same program, my fellow art song swashbuckler, soprano Karen Hale (then Noteboom) and I were set to perform a slew of brand new songs—all of which ended up in the first song cycles of mine that E.C. Schirmer published—Echo’s Songs and Love Songs.

If my last visit to the church had taken place during my life’s April, then surely my return celebrated it’s November. Here I was, myself now, like the “funny word” tomato in my garden—the pomodoro in Mark’s lyric— “a flashing ember in the ashen garden;” here to celebrate my 58th birthday with the premiere of a new work after the “end of summer had long passed, / to shine the last,” and—as he cannily repeated the line, “to shine the last and brightest.”

Harmony drives emotion in the instrumental component of vocal music the way that lyrics drive the tune. I’ve long composed autobiographical songs in G major. “Pomodoro’s” harmonic “reality” is C major; but it harmonically aspires to be in G major. A stubborn tritone (or raised fourth scale degree; the third of C’s secondary dominant—which injects a great deal of harmonic “lift” into a chord progression) F# keeps edging the music into the key of G (the dominant) when the emotion intensifies.

Mark’s poem begins, as a character sketch number should, conversationally.

When I first saw the thing,

I thought it was a hoax.

The cruelest of jokes.

Had to be store-bought, I thought,

Tied to the vine with a string.

Split neatly up into short digestible bits that the composer can deal out like cards in a light parlando style—think old-time recitative but a little more elevated, like contemporary popera—not actually tuneful, but agreeable, bougeoir, and disarming—his tone evokes Billy Bigelow from Carousel; he’s knowing, wry, an affectionate trickster. But beneath the chit-chat, Mark is keeping the construction tight by internally rhyming hoax / jokes, and bought / thought and then literally tying up the stanza with thing / string. It requires music that disarms the listener and draws them in—a Sondheim-like musical theater vamp, perhaps; but something that, like the words, has the craft to conceal its craft, and the humility not to broadcast how clever it is.

A tomato in my garden

In November.

Late in November.

Mark sits on the delicious, warm “r” sound in garden and November, and—knowing that most composers (certainly me) will want to linger there—repeats the word. This invites the composer to warm up the music, too, to turn up the emotional heat a tad. The lyric provides a neat transition to the next lines, which ably continue ramping up the emotional heat.

A flashing ember in the ashen garden,

Before skies darken,

Before the ground begins to harden,

A bit of (welcome) purple in the fire imagery, which he blows on with a triple rhyme—garden / darken / harden—all those juicy, fruity “r’s” to sing and use to “feel” as a singer. The composer’s job here is obvious: the rhymes are quickening, so the harmonic and rhythmic pulse should, too. In this case, I broke from groups of four eighths into groups of three—an intentional little stretto effect, a little heartbeat gallop, gentle and virile.

Long after we’ve counted our losses

And tossed them into sauces.

An agreeable climax to the parlando arc of the first third of the song—a self-deprecatory bit of practicality: losses become sauces the way that life gives us lemons and we make lemonade.

But there it was,

Round and ripe and real,

With no autumnal flaws.

Bigelow is back, rolling in those delicious “r’s” (round / ripe / real) and pulling us back to the opening conversational parlando—as though to say, “don’t worry, I won’t be highfallutin’."

And then Mark does something elegant because it is prosaic, but sincere, not overly-clever:

I felt compelled to kneel,

And sigh, sigh, sigh:

This is Monteverdi—like me, a November-born Scorpio: Lasciatemi morire, or “let me die.” —But not 20th century death of course, but 16th century death as orgasm. In this case, a spiritual orgasm, more a metaphysical naturalism—the kind of lyric that simply must be attached to falling 2-3 suspensions (returned are the tender triplets of a quickening heart) because, well, that’s what Mark knows composers have done in the west with this gesture for four centuries. It is a delight to set these words chastely to music, and to be able to use them to prepare the singer’s delivery of the central image of the lyric, which calls for intense musical lyricism:

“Pomodoro.”

The Calaf yearning to burst out from within the self-effacement of our Bigelow does so and we’re charmed. He’s a dear, this one, and by nature feels compelled to immediately give us a nice big explanatory Protestant parenthetical that undercuts the Italianate grandiosity of his expression:

(Forgetting I’m not Italian,

Nor much of a gardener,

Though through the years I had acquitted myself,

Adequately enough.)

Mark ends with a little touch of Voltaire’s gardener’s humble pride, like another Billy knuckling his forehead to Vere. As though nodding in agreement, the music bridges with two little repetitions of the fragment of melody to which the words “adequately enough” were just sung. And with those excellent progenitors standing in the wings, the lyric deserves to soar.

Pomodoro.

Pomodoro.

Mark gives us two iterations of the word pomodoro, allowing the composer to climax (as one may and does in Italian) first on the first “ah-o” syllable in the word, and then on the “or” third syllable, a terrific set of mouth shapes (which Mark obviously knows) and also a nod to Italian opera, with which our Bigelow has evidently gotten away from Carousel long enough to develop more than a passing acquaintance. At this point, it becomes not just a lyric and a song about aging, but —poignantly—how singers are often at their best just as their voices are leaving them; about the difference between music theater and opera.

For “tomato” was too mundane, too common,

For this rare phenomenon.

So now we know that the first time the singer sings the word earlier in the song he has to saw “to-may-to” and this time “to-mah-to” because we’re going to go there, too, as Americans who write songs and are about to call the whole thing off. Look at all the “mm’s” there—tommmmato, mmmundane, common, and then a feint to the yummy “r” sound again (“rare”) and a payoff in the delicious word “phenomenon.” Sexy, sensual, and smart. And now, for this sort of song, convention calls for the revelation of a secret, and Mark does not disappoint. It is the composer’s honor to step aside, to provide some simple background chords, to let the lyric speak—with the greatest intimacy and simplicity in the song, since it is the singer’s truth—for itself:

For it had waited,

Until the end of summer had long passed,

To shine the last.

Mark repeats the point, as a lyricist must—

To shine the last and brightest…

…Where he gives the composer an ellipsis because he knows that the syllable “bright” is a gorgeous one to loft high, softly for a male voice, and he is making that possible for the composer without having been asked. Repetition as a device (and punning, since the second and third syllables of the title sound like “adore”) having been established in the lyric, Mark gives two final iterations of the delicious word in question, which provided the climax of the song, and now provides its tender, wistful release.

It’s the difference between lyrics and poetry, lyric theater and a straight play. A great librettist like Mark Campbell knows how to show his hand without committing “hand of author;” knows what kind of words a composer needs to make the combination of the two the only thing that matters. There’s profound poetry and dignity in that.

Pomodoro.

Pomodoro.

POMODORO

When I first saw the thing,
I thought it was a hoax,
The cruelest of jokes.
Had to be store-bought, I thought,

Tied to the vine with string.

A tomato in my garden
In November,
Late in November,
A flashing ember in the ashen garden,

Before skies darken,

Before the ground begins to harden,

Long after we’ve counted our losses

And tossed them into sauces.
But there it was,

Round and ripe and real,

With no autumnal flaws.

I felt compelled to kneel,

And sigh, sigh, sigh:

“Pomodoro”

(Forgetting I’m not Italian,
Nor much of a gardener,
Though through the years I had acquit myself,

Adequately enough.)
Pomodoro.
Pomodoro.
For “tomato” was too mundane, too common,

For this rare phenomenon.
For it had waited,
Until the end of summer had long passed,
To shine the last,
To shine the last and brightest...
Pomodoro,
Pomodoro.

—Mark Campbell (2018)

The tomato in question.

Arizona Opera's "Shining Brow"

Sidney Outlaw as Frank Lloyd Wright in the Urban Arias production directed by Grant Preisser.

Robert Orth as Frank Lloyd Wright in the Chicago Opera Theater production directed by Ken Cazan.

Tim Petty as Frank Lloyd Wright in the Tulsa Opera production.

Michael Sokol as Frank Lloyd Wright in the Madison Opera production directed by Stephen Wadsworth.

Kevin Kees as Frank Lloyd Wright in Opera Theater of Pittsburgh’s Fallingwater production directed by Jonathan Eaton.

Paul Muldoon and Daron Hagen photographed while composing “Shining Brow” in 1992.

Arizona Opera’s president and general director Joseph Specter, and Zackery Hayhurst, director of artistic administration have brought together a thrilling team to mount the new “Taliesin West Version” of Shining Brow, the steadily-revived 1992 opera that Paul Muldoon and I first created for the Madison Opera. For their revival I have trimmed the opera by 20 minutes and eliminated the female chorus, in order to intensify the central story. Chas Rader-Shieber will direct, and Lidiya Yankovskaya will conduct; the costume and scenic designer will be Jacob A. Climer.

• Performance dates in Phoenix are 27, 28, and 29 September; runout performances in Tucson take place on 5 and 6 October.

• More information about Arizona Opera’s production, including cast and associated educational and outreach events here.

• Technical specs, reviews, stills from various productions, and video excerpts here.

• My essay (excerpted from my memoir, Duet with the Past) about writing Shining Brow with Paul Muldoon here.

• The Buffalo Philharmonic’s complete cast recording on Naxos conducted by JoAnn Falletta and starring Robert Orth on Naxos is available everywhere. Here, here, here, and here.

• Fallingwater’s page about Shining Brow here.

• Buy the vocal score at ECS /Morningstar here.

• Buy the libretto from Faber here.

ABOUT THE “TALIESIN WEST VERSION”

(This note will appear in the program for Arizona Opera’s production.)

I was an ambitious, selfish 29-year-old in a hurry when, in 1990, I began composing Shining Brow with the great Irish poet Paul Muldoon.

Not interested in creating a bio-pic, executing a take-down, or confecting a costume drama, we were, as artists in our 20s, taken with that early portion of Wright’s long career when his very public personal struggle between self-actuation and social responsibility appeared most acute. Undoubtedly, the famous love triangle with the Cheneys, his personal, professional, and artistic falling out with his mentor Louis Sullivan, and the catastrophic murders and conflagration at Taliesin were, seen from the safe vantage point of nearly a century, ripe for operatic treatment.

Importantly, we created operatic characters freely based on actual historical figures. As they must, these operatic characters took on a life of their own. Anyone craving reportage will have to look elsewhere, I’m afraid.

The character of Wright, the center of the social upheaval his selfish treatment of others creates, is nearly unworthy of love as a man at the opera’s start; by the end, hubris has been for the moment curbed, he is worthy of our compassion, if not pity, and he may (or may not) be poised to launch into the greatest work of his career. Mamah Cheney’s feminism is inspiring; the bravery of her move to Berlin despite the bonds of motherhood and marriage to Edwin is heroic. That her personal transit appears to be that she ends up as “a codicil to Wright’s iron will” is more than tragic; she is too intelligent and self-aware to be simply a victim.

Her husband Edwin and Wright’s wife Catherine are simply good people; they seem to live their upper-class midwestern bourgeois lives at a safer, slower pace than do Mamah and Frank. One senses that their narratives, however moving, will go on—children will be raised, mortgages paid, social norms will in time reassert themselves.

Functioning somehow above his relationship with even Mamah is Wright’s struggle to come to grips with his mentor and progenitor, Louis Sullivan. Wright would like to think he’s searching for rapprochement, but in fact he cannot resist the reflexive urge to overcome Sullivan. Portrayed as an introverted alcoholic, Sullivan is the opposite of his exuberantly outgoing protégé. Wright’s dignity derives from his understanding, deep down, that he doesn’t “get” Sullivan, but knows that he has to keep trying.

There is a Maid whose deus ex machina role as a Fury signals that we’ve gone over to a deeper, darker poetic reality, one in which we’re compelled to deal with the terrifying work of the Chef.

Standing resolutely aside from any dialectic about gender roles, race, class, and social responsibility is a blurry “essence quorum of souls’ intensities” (paraphrasing Allan Gurganus) that we give shape to in the character of the Chef. It would be too easy to describe his behavior as a karmic manifestation of “what is wrong” at Taliesin; he’s not an anti-hero, he’s a man who has become untethered entirely from the framework. There he stands, uttering (he doesn’t sing; he mustn’t sing) a terrifying manifesto cobbled together from garbled fragments of Amergin and a dozen other cries of pain.

Thirty years later, I identify with Edwin Cheney and his “little potsherd” rather than Wright and his “Promethean boulder.” Asked to compose Shining Brow now, I’d create a very different narrative, but the central argument about the secular humanistic struggle between art and life would remain, because it grapples with the human existential questions—what role does faith play, and what is faith in our time? Mr. Wright struggled with them, as we do today.

—Daron Hagen, August 2019

Pushy Opera Composers

“You know what I like about your opera?” a stage hand at McCaw Hall said to me when I was introduced to the crew during Amelia’s first authorial walkabout there in 2010. Shaking his hand, I was genuinely curious to know. “What?” I asked. “We don’t have to spray ‘Febreze’ on it,” he replied. (Febreze is a brand of household odor eliminators manufactured by Procter & Gamble.) Several other tech people nodded, chuckling. “What does that mean?” I asked. “Well, the opera house is an enormous mechanism,” he said. “We’re all here to make a good show great; a bad show less awful. When someone besides the composer has to step in and make their part of the whole stand out because the music is falling down, we call it ‘spraying Febreze on it’.”

Over an off-the-record lunch a week or so later with a major music critic in town to review Amelia’s premiere, we chatted about the perils and pleasures of composer-librettist-director collaboration. I pointed out that a born opera composer is one whose vision for the opera is so strong that she is the leader among equals. Arts administrators (not to mention opera company boards) understandably yearn for a forceful voice in the development of the works they’ve raised the funds to commission and stage, but that, historically, a man like Speight Jenkins, longtime Intendant of Seattle Opera, has sided with the composer and created a place for her to work without interference. (“Any wishes?” I recall asking him. “Only that it be no more than 120 minutes long,” he replied. “Nothing else?” “I commissioned you,” he replied, with finality.) I found Speight’s trust in me profoundly inspiring and humbling. “There’s a difference,” I remarked to the critic, “between being pushy and being not pushed around.”

During lunch at the Barclay Hotel in Philadelphia with Gian Carlo Menotti in 1982 I asked him, “Why don’t we talk about la parola scenica?” “Ah,” Gian Carlo smoothed the tablecloth with his long fingers as though creating a space, “you are referring to Verdi’s phrase—well, let me tell you….” He began with Verdi, pinpointing the key phrase of music in his favorite scenes; then he moved on to Richard Strauss. His description of collaboration was trenchant: “A stage director looks at a scene one way,” he began. “The composer looks at the scene in another way. The librettist sees it a third way. The composer must craft a scene so clear in intent that all three are compelled to agree.” He looked at me, hard: “You get this,” he said. “You’ll direct your own operas someday and learn this firsthand.”

“What do you think of ‘pushy’ opera composers?” I asked William Weaver one Wednesday evening in 1991 over dinner at his home on the Bard College campus. Kazuo Nakajima served the three of us big helpings of Pasta Puttanesca as Bill carefully steepled his fingers, sighed, took off his heavy-rimmed glasses, set them on the table, adjusted their placement next to his salad fork, and exploded in laughter. “I’ve never heard of a good one who wasn’t!” 

“I had dinner the other night with a director who lamented having to ‘fill in musical transitions that didn’t reflect what is going on onstage with action’,” I said. Bill reached for his wine. “What did you tell him?” he asked. “Well, I asked him to give me an example,” and he mentioned the chord sequence from Britten’s Billy Budd.” “You mean the one during which Britten tracks the offstage conversation between Vere and Billy during which he tells Billy he’ll hang?” But it specifically says that there be no staging in the score,” Bill observed. “He told me Britten was wrong; he said that he felt that the audience would grow bored.”

Bill, in a gesture charmingly like Gian Carlo’s in 1981, smoothed the table cloth before him, smiled, and whispered, “Pushy composer!” 

I smiled. He dug into his pasta. “I certainly hope you’re being ‘pushy’,” he said. “If an opera fails, it is the composer’s fault, not the librettist’s. Have you read the Verdi-Boito correspondence?” he asked. “Not yet,” I admitted. “I’m translating the English language edition right now,” he said. “Both men were composers who knew a thing or two about writing operas. Both agreed that the music was the most important element.” Beat. “Well, I am thinking of Strauss and Hofmannsthal,” I said, “and the clear motivation on Strauss’ part to ‘get the best that was in’ his librettist. Am I to assume that Strauss viewed his writing partner as a co-pilot and not as the pilot?” “Of course,” said Bill. “If an opera fails, it doesn’t do so because of the libretto.”

It was during those weeks that I first played and sang my way through the vocal score of my first major opera Shining Brow for my (then nascent) director Stephen Wadsworth. It seemed to me that he was the epitome of an insightful collaborator: he asked what I intended when he didn’t understand what I had done instead of assuming that he knew better. I did a lot of explaining during those sessions. Several times, my explanations didn’t work for him, and I made slight alterations to my document. Over the ensuing years, I’ve worked with six different directors on their revivals of Brow. Every one of them came up with different—and entirely viable—solutions to the same dramaturgical problems. When Speight reached out to commission me in 2004, his introductory email read, in part: “My first interest is in the music; the crucial factor in any opera is the music.”

I have never had any interest in being a one man band, and I truly understand the alchemical nature of collaboration, but I also know that I have completed my apprenticeship in the lyric theater by performing every one of its constituent jobs, from catwalk to orchestra pit, from donor’s luncheon and the board room to the Green Room: I’ve budgeted, designed and helped build physical productions and sets, projections, and supertitles; I’ve designed lighting and hung the instruments; I’ve served as a grip, and stage managed, and “called” cues; I’ve done make-up, designed costumes, and sound; I’ve sung leading and supporting roles, albeit as a young man; I’ve played piano in pit orchestras, conducted—and recorded the cast albums of—my own operas and others’, copied orchestra parts, orchestrated, and done extensive vocal coaching; I’ve directed straight plays and choreographed musicals; I’ve been “that composer” living through a soul-crushing flop, the one enjoying a career-making triumph, and the one who has learned the limitations of what can be achieved even when one has done everything “right” and it still doesn’t matter; I’ve written my own libretti, effectively managed through selective empowerment powerful, high-maintenance collaborators; I’ve played for opera improvisation workshops in the Village during the early 90s; I’ve “put my own shows over” by singing and playing their scores at the piano for commissioners, collaborators, and colleagues.

Many collaborators have taught me many things. Through it all, I’ve just wanted to learn how to write a good opera.

This is what I’ve pieced together, so far: one stages the opera that the people in the room can perform, not the one in your head; one performs the concerto the way everyone on stage can that day, not the one in your head. One’s truth is useful to others only inasmuch as one has rendered it transposable; even then, “truth” and “love” are not enough. All this is true whether one wrote the thing or not. Art will take care of itself. Critics and colleagues will carp. Life will go on. One’s “best” work will be met with skepticism and incomprehension. So, relax: concentrate on people and process. Be pushy.

Remembering William Smart (1933-2019)

The night I bottomed out in December 1989 it was snowing lightly—little feathery, inhibited flakes that seemed shamed at having arrived as too-early guests. I attempted to get up and felt the stabbing pain of paresthesia in my legs and fell to my knees as though in prayer. My legs were useless. I pushed up from the ground with my fingertips as pins and needles exploded in my shins and began hobbling towards the broad white marble steps of the Venezia Santa Lucia train station like a newborn fawn until the numbness went away. I lurched to the first pay phone I saw inside the station, leaned against it, and placed a collect call.

“Bill, have you got a spare bed?” I asked, head beginning to pound. William Smart, Director of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, answered. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “We’ve got a full house right now.” I counted to five before pleading, “I’ve sublet the apartment on Saint Mark’s Place and have no place to go….” Beat. “Bill, I need to dry out....” Another beat. We had had this conversation before. “…And you’re probably broke, right?” he asked. “Afraid so,” I answered. I had left for Europe without any money in my pocket. And now I was even more deeply in debt. I had no telephone number, no address, and no commissions. The banks had confiscated my plastic. I had defaulted on my student loans. I had spent a lot of money I didn’t have to buy myself more time in Europe to figure out whether I sincerely wanted to return. I couldn’t just kick my former student and her friend out of my apartment on Saint Mark’s Place. They needed time to find somewhere to live. I wasn’t naïve enough to expect Manna to arrive with the dew during the night.  I needed somewhere safe to recover my health. I needed time to compose, and to take copy work to pay debts. Bill helped me. He told me to come to Virginia, and that he would work something out. A few days later, as the plane succumbed to gravity and sank through charcoal-colored rain clouds towards the tarmac at JFK, so did my heart.

I reached Mt. San Angelo in the middle of one of those Virginia winter storms when the air is warm, but the trees are sheathed in ice and look like glittering dowsing rods swaying in the wind. Bill and I cleared out a small storage room. Together, we moved a battered upright piano into it, a desk, found a cot, and roused out one of the Bolivian flags that were used back then as bedspreads. I launched into fifteen-hour workdays, finishing the full score of Common Ground. Ned Rorem had just finished a brass quintet—he threw the copying to me. After a couple of months, I ventured back to New York. I helped my student and her friend pack their things and reclaimed the apartment on St. Mark’s Place. I had an address and a phone number again. Ann Stanke was one of the first to call. At the time, I honestly couldn’t recall why she wanted to talk to me. After admonishing me for having disappeared for six months, she announced that she had good news: Madison Opera had decided to move ahead with commissioning Shining Brow, the opera that launched my career as an opera composer.

Along with being a terrific writer and honored professor, Bill moved the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts to its present home on Mount San Angelo and served for over twenty years as its director. According to Sweet Briar College’s obituary, “Smart grew the artists’ colony into becoming the nation’s largest, rebuilding its campus after a major fire and helping to mentor and inspire hundreds of authors, artists and composers who have gone on to win MacArthur genius grants, National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes and other major fellowships and grants.” He helped found the international organization of artists’ colonies, Res Artis. A decade ago, he moved to Amalgamated in the Bronx. 

Bill and I had fallen out of touch, and not spoken for over a decade. Like me, Bill was an alcoholic. Long ago, during his drinking years, he created his share of hurt and chaos. But he also, at the lowest point of my life, accepted me as I was then, and threw me the rope that probably saved me. I know I’m not the only one he saved. I owed him, and still do. Godspeed, old friend.

The Sweet Water and the Salt

I hear in ecstatic counterpoint the songs of a dozen birds in only ten seconds as they roost in the neem, eucalyptus, palm, and mango trees that surround my father-in-law Bernie and me as we swing like a spider’s dinner in hammocks strung up in the rancho at Rio Mar. I think, there were at least thirty different bird calls in the air. I can only differentiate a dozen. Even though I know that I missed them, I don't mind, and I can accept not having heard them all. Is that what aphasia is like? All at once, the singing stops. Silence.

In the gathering dusk, three stately palomino chanchi sashay down the middle of the deeply-rutted dirt road outside the gates past the “Huevos de Yankees,” (a useless, stalky plant that pops up uninvited all over Nicaragua that gives inedible, tennis-ball-sized green fruit just below its crown) on their way to what used to be Cuban Pete’s place up the hill. Released by Yvette from their pen for the night, the dogs streak past us, mewling, to the outcropping of sonsiquite on the river side of the house, there to stream like champagne over the rocks and out to the ocean where the tide runs very, very high. The first sound to return, now that the sun has set, is that of the surf. It pounds like distant artillery; the roosting birds' feathers rustle as they jostle for position; the northern wind’s whoosh blends with the ocean’s deep song; and the drone of winter cicadas joins the rhythmic, hollow, thumping sound of iguanas on the house’s metal roof fucking.

Bernie is asleep in the hammock next to mine. Aphasic from the post-operative stroke that he suffered six years ago, his world no longer makes much sense to him. The obsessive web-spinning to which I’ve subjected the skein of my memories in an effort to construct from them a meaningful narrative is the equivalent to him of a man brushing cobwebs from before his eyes. The stroke took away his ability to read his beloved Shakespeare, Melville, and Joyce; to consistently recognize his children; to identify my sons; to know with complete certainty, even, where he is. 

His eyes open, he pitches forward slightly, and waves his hand before his face. “All these people I love were looking at me and I was dead!” he says, still in a waking dream. “You were there; the woman I live with; my sister—. Do you get it?” He asks.”Yes,” I reassure him. “That was your wife Gilda, your sons, your sister and her husband, … and your daughter.” He smiles suddenly, “the one who sang!” He cries. “You were waking up after your stroke,” I explain. “They wouldn’t talk to me,” he continues, “but I could hear her singing, and I knew she wanted me to come back.” “You did. You did,” I reassure him. “And the first thing I thought was that I was dead and that every second now is a bonus,” he says. “Do you get it?” “Yes,” I promise him. “But I didn’t make it all the way back,” he says. “We’ve got the best parts, Pappy,” I say. 

"Our coordinates, according to my phone," I tell him, "are: 11°38′11″ N  86°20′59″ W. We are two old, white-haired, gringo Quixotes painted red by the sun worrying about our wives and children who’ve been shopping all day in Masaya and Diriamba." "So, that's where we are," he chuckles. There is no comfort in exactitude. “Are you hungry?” I ask him. “No,” he answers out of principle. “Maybe a cup of coffee.” “I’m putting some eggs and cheese on a tortilla and making a fresh pot of coffee for myself,” I say, airily. “OK,” he says, and falls asleep. 

Since there’s no time here except for the enormous seasonal rhythm of the stars and tides, he picks up where he left off when I help him out of the hammock and place the good, hot coffee in his hands. Digging into his eggs with a will, he observes, “they love us here, kid. I really don’t know why. But they do.” I don’t answer. Tearing a warm tortilla in half, I hold it to my nose and inhale its wholesomeness—so like the way my son smelled when he was born. I hand it to him, observing, “we’re very lucky guys, Pappy.” He takes it and uses it to scoop up his eggs. We finish the meal in agreeable silence. 

Just when we start missing them most, Mama calls Yvette’s phone with the message that they’re all fine and that they will be home in a couple of hours. We don’t discuss it, but each feels the other’s relief. We’re free to pretend for a few more hours that we’re self-sufficient. After we wash the dishes, Bernie climbs back into his hammock.  Just as he’s about to nod off, he observes, “I don’t know why I’m still here. I can’t really do anything any more except love all of you.” He’s suspended again in the web between waking and dreaming, between life and the other. I clear my throat lightly. He opens his eyes. “Orson Welles is supposed to have written, ‘We’re born alone. We live alone. We die alone. Only through love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we are not alone’,” I tell him. “Well put,” he says, closing his eyes, for the moment mollified.

It’s late. “The eggs were good,” he says. “Gramma made them. I only heated them up,” I say. We’re quiet. Long after I think he’s asleep, he rolls over and mutters, “Huevos de Yankees.” I chuckle. He winks. No more sounds of birds, iguanas, livestock, or even children. Just the gentle heartbeat of the crickets, the occasional surge of the breeze over the Rio Casares, and the sea comfortingly caressing the shore. 

Bernie is fast-asleep, and I’m half-awakened by the well-thumbed copy of Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World that slips from my hand when Harold steers the Trooper in. My older boy carries in groceries—pastelitos, picos, and local coffee from Diriamba; Harold shoulders in a six-gallon jug of potable water; the women ferry in presents to take back to the States. We allow our younger son, who has fallen asleep during the drive home despite the wild roads, to doze on in the jeep. Gilda turns down the boys’ beds; her mother begins stowing things in the kitchen; Yvette closes and locks the gate; and I awaken Bernie and guide him inside. 

Returning to the jeep, I gather my son in my arms and bury my nose in his fine, long, straight hair—exactly like mine at his age—and smell the burnt leña and dust of the market in it as I carry him to bed. The next time we return, Bernie may be gone, I think, climbing into bed with the boys, pulling them close, and singing them their secret songs. A few hours later, disentangling myself, I rise.  Alone, I stroll to the ocean with a cup of coffee and honor the dazzling full Blue Paschal Moon—the first to be followed the next day by Easter Sunday since 1714. The surf intensifies as the sun begins its ascent behind the trees; the pelicans begin to rustle; and there’s the staccato nicker of a horse. As dawn breaks, instead of the sound of the rooster’s call, comes the plaintive howl, nine beats long, starting low, rising, and dying as it falls, of a lone hound, from across the estuary where the sweet water of the river meets the salt of the sea.

Solitaire with Orson

I am sitting at the window of my hotel in the Loop, looking down at sheets of ice shuffling and reshuffling themselves like cards in the Chicago River as I work on Orson Rehearsed, the opera I'm developing with the Fifth House Ensemble and my own New Mercury Collective at the Chicago College of Performing Arts. Tomorrow I'll conduct Fifth House for the first time in sections of the work; Mercury performer-gladiators Robert Orth and Robert Frankenberry will sing multiple manifestation of Orson Welles' enormous inner self.  (To learn more about the show, click here.)

I diarized obsessively for decades, but stopped when my sons were born. They're my narrative, now. I "moved up one," grew impatient examining the contours of my own navel, and took on the truth that Art played the role of MacGuffin in my Life. I write with some trepidation, because my comments here are poetic in nature, not polemical. I'm not engaging in disputation or Academic debate. These are the thoughts of a working artist—or, more precisely, a father whose sons are enjoying a snow day back in Upstate New York while he finds himself, unaccustomedly, with a free hour in his hotel room on the road, working in this, a city that his father worked in when he was a child.

Allow me to deal this round of Solitaire, as my Father did the night my mother died.

1. One of Spades

Oh, how we enjoy cutting our heroes down to size. Type "drunk Orson" into a search engine and an awful video of an aged, bloated, wounded-bear of an Orson Welles, three sheets to the wind, seated at a table gripping a wine glass, slurring advertising pabulum about a mediocre table wine comes up. We laugh. He's ridiculous, worthy of our contempt. Yet, at 29, in 1944, Welles was still beautiful, stumping for weeks on end for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then seeking an unprecedented fourth term. Welles is said to have coached FDR in public speaking; he wrote speeches for him. Only three years after he and Herman J. Mankiewicz had taken on William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his time, a gigantic Authority and Power figure, in Citizen Kane, Welles replied to a "get well" telegram from the president (Welles had made himself ill campaigning for FDR) by pledging that, "this is the most important work I could ever engage in."

2. Two of Diamonds

Welles' greatest success as an actor and director in the theater was probably his legendary "modern dress" Caesar, a bare-stage, poor theater reinterpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that debuted in November 1937 as the Mercury Theater's first production. Born of necessity—there was little budget, and street clothes were free—the genius was in the decontextualization of the play as a critique of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Theatrical lighting pioneer Jean Rosenthal and Welles collaborated on Caesar's lighting, which—since there was no set—shouldered the majority of the emotional and psychological storytelling. A gifted visual artist, Welles knew the importance of not illuminating the most important thing on the stage, as well as light's ability to shape and define physical space with filmic fluidity. That Leni Riefenstahl’s agitprop Triumph of the Will had already thrown up "cathedrals of light" was known—it also happened to be financially prudent, and in step with the flowering of an emergent theatrical technology. Deftly fusing the iconography of religion and politics, he used electric light to take the place of "Divine Radiance" like Prometheus stealing fire. Light, however evocative, is in itself soulless, and he knew that. The result was that he evoked the gestalt of Auden's Age of Anxiety, and the Quartet for the End of Time existential ennui of the characters in Sartre's Paths to Freedom. That's a lot of illumination to pile on an Everyman Brutus' shoulders. 

3. Three of Clubs

The first scene of Kane after the newsreel is triply reflective: In a movie called Citizen Kane, actors portraying Reporters (observers of life; supposedly seekers of truth) watch a newsreel (photographs of a life edited together—"fake" news?) in the dark. They're aware that they are missing something, and set out on a search for the meaning of "Rosebud." The Mob in Caesar is transformed into secret police: they're looking for safety in the wrong place. The reporters return empty-handed; the Mob gets exactly the sort of politicians it deserves.

Welles believed in FDR the way Beethoven believed in Napoleon. Albert Einstein, the first publicly intellectual scientist, famously spoke out against nuclear weapons; but it was the popularizer, Carl Sagan, who really captured peoples' imaginations with Cosmos. He did so by traversing the liminal zone between advanced scientific study and poetry. Welles sought truth, too; but, rather than looking out into the cosmos, or taking to the political bully pulpit, he looked inward, choosing as his vessel of exploration the plays of Shakespeare. He repurposed Polonius' advice, "to thine own self be true" to read, "to love, Jedidiah, on our own terms" in Kane.

Welles did want to be loved, and he knew how to arrange that. (Leonard Bernstein to Ned Rorem: "Our problem is not that we want everyone to love us; its that we'll never meet everyone.") Welles seems to have believed that he'd make a fine politician (he contemplated a run against McCarthy in '43), but he was self-aware enough to have the corrupt politician point out to Kane that looking for love from the Mob will get you nowhere. There's plenty of commentary about Welles' search for the "Rosebud" of love. Most of it limns a narrative which describes a much-caressed genius-boy of nine who lost his mother prematurely, and his charismatic father soon after. It's easy to pigeon-hole Welles the way Harold C. Schonberg, and even friends like Oscar Levant viewed Bernstein—as the "great popularizer of commonly accepted truths as insights." But Welles saw past the transaction to what lies beyond acceptance, even admiration.

“Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and the Muppets would take seats in the Senate.”

— Orson Welles

Throughout his work, Welles asked whether love is true, or if Love is Truth, and the other way around. We do get the politicians we deserve: obviously the current occupant of the White House wants to be loved, but, paraphrasing Robert Bolt's screenplay to Lawrence of Arabia, "some men lie to others; they conceal the truth. Other men lie to themselves; they forget where they hid it." True, one cannot write about love with tears in one's eyes, but Welles was a romantic who did not lie to himself. He spent an awful lot of time thinking about crafting the illusion of love, as manifest in his fascination with magic tricks, for example, his documentary essay F for Fake, and so forth. Isn't it all a Muppet show?

Welles points out, through the character of Jedidiah in Kane, "That's all [Kane] wanted out of life ... was love. That's the tragedy of Charles Foster Kane. You see, he just didn't have any to give." Like Bernstein, Welles had an enormous capacity to give and to get love; that capacity made them both great popularizers and artists. But Welles could have settled into a senate seat about as comfortably as Bernstein the executive directorship of an orchestra.

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”

— Orson Welles

4. Four of Diamonds

Welles' dramaturgical chops were those of one who, like Bernstein, intuitively knew exactly what the emotional and psychological nuclear reactors powering a scene were, what each relationship sparked from, what powered each work as a whole. If Bernstein had Mahler, Welles had Shakespeare, and both did their finest work in the theater when editing and reinterpreting the Bard—Bernstein with West Side Story and Welles with Caesar.

He sought artistic freedom (as opposed to simple self-actualization, which is easier, because it requires only selfishness and singleness of mind to achieve), of course, and achieved it. While to the outside world Welles lamented that he spent ninety percent of his time raising money, he wisely had Kane lament, "If I hadn't been rich, I'd have been a truly great man." I believe that Welles' masterpiece was not Kane, or Chimes, but Moby Dick Rehearsed, for thirty years after having noted that RKO had given him the "world's biggest train set," he was able to create a theatrical sandbox in which every performance was different, every evening like a page from Joyce's Ulysses, disconnected from other performances, but connected because the ideas flow from one place to the next like water. He found a way to be paid to do as he pleased.

The enormous self-restraint required to cope with complete artistic freedom (and to therefore not deserve the slings and arrows of every critic who lays it on with the "self-indulgence" rap because its easy, and because they can) prompted Stravinsky to point out at the start of the 20th century that, "now that we can do whatever we want to do, we must first decide what we do not want to do." Welles understood that people resent being preached to—hence the Bible's parables, which really are ripping yarns. He understood that, for every Poetics of Music (whether ghost-written by a Robert Kraft or not), Carl Sagan Cosmos, Joseph Campbell Hero With a Thousand Faces, or Bernstein Harvard lecture, there will always be a host of intellectuals smarter, more insightful, more adept at argument, poised to envelop the scene in the smoke of argument, the entanglements of nomenclature, the rules of rhetoric, so that, in a couple of beats, we're all back on “safe” ground, mundanely talking about talking about the thing rather than doing the scary work of, as Wallace Stevens pointed out, grappling with "not ideas of the thing but the thing itself."

It takes a poet running at full bore to conjoin, as Welles did in Midnight, Shakespeare's "nimbus floods" with Melville's allegorical mists, and the moral haze hanging over Walt Whitman's descriptions in Specimen Days with a healthy, Midwestern dollop of 1 Corinthians on top, reminding us, like the angels in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, that "we see through a glass, darkly."

Which brings us back to those reporters sitting in the dark at the beginning of Kane, seeking truth in fiction. Manifesting the Aristotelian admonition to grapple with the Art and Life paradigm, Welles staged them as denizens of Socrates' Cave. Behind the fire, the javelin of light stabbing down from the projection booth, is a stage / screen. We're all puppeteers, he reminds us, vying with one another to construct the most viable reality. Remember high school classics class? If you skipped it, or didn't do your homework; or of you did do your homework and you fall for the appeal of the Big Lie, then you call what you see and don't agree with nowadays "fake news."

One person escapes the Cave. He emerges into the sunlight, sees the Cave for the prison and illusion that it is, re-examines his former existence, and determines to return to the Cave to spread the Good News. Naturally, they crucify him.  (Look at him! He doesn't work out; he's obviously not disciplined or in control of himself! He's fat, drunk, doing a wine commercial. He's the object of ridicule who seems to have learned nothing from Falstaff, for there he is, looking and acting just like him! Why should we believe anything he says?) As Andre points out so wittily to Wally in My Dinner With Andre, New York City may in fact be a prototype of the concentration camp of the 21st century, built by the inmates who take a perverse pride in what they've created. "Aren't we schizophrenics?" he asks. "Are these flickering shadows Reality?" asks the returning escapee, the reporters, the audience, the artist.

5. Five of Hearts

"Rosebud" is anything you've loved and lost. Lost childhood, lost parents, lost lovers, lost youth, lost dreams, loss, loss, loss. Welles allowed that Kane, the ultimate narcissist, must "at least have loved his mother." Maybe Rosebud wasn't a sled; maybe Rosebud was Light.

Jedidiah pans Kane's wife's performance. She, of course, has little talent, and Jedidiah has a choice: he can go easy on her out of compassion and pity, or he can assess her as an extension of her husband’s ego. She's "nothing special," but she's special to Kane. ("When everyone's special, nobody is.") Rilke reminds us that Art is never understood by criticism; beauty's in the eye of the Beholder, etc., but Kane's inability to see his wife as separate from himself is what motivates him. He demands she be perceived as gifted the way that our current president feels that he's a genius because "fate is what happened." Jedidiah hits the nail on the head. ("Never," my Uncle Clifford once admonished me, "rub a man's rhubarb.") Kane must fire him just as surely as the denizens of the Cave must, upon the Hero’s return, reject the bringer of news of the blazing, brilliant, brightly-lit outside world.

“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.”

— Orson Welles

I believe that Welles, upon his return to the Cave, calmly elected to order lunch. Lucas, Spielberg, and other more “commercially viable” great filmmakers sugar-coated Truth better, so they made more money and acquired more Power; but Welles' Authority has never been questioned.  When Welles tried to play the game of life their way, he couldn't help leaving the results on the cutting room floor because he was constitutionally unsuited to "selling out"—even Touch of Evil is an art film flying under the radar as a potboiler with the hysterically miscast Charlton Heston serving as Hollywood's canary in the cinematic coal mine. Welles had heard the Chimes at Midnight. He had learned that it is more important to be understood, in the end, than it is to be loved.

Delivering this talk at Amherst College in March 2018.

The night my mother died in my arms, my father, who had been playing Solitaire downstairs, quoted Joseph Cotton's line to me by way of explaining himself and why his wife hadn't died in his arms. When my own personal Jedidiah writes his review and hands it to me, I hope that I am wise enough not to hand him his pink slip.

This essay served as working notes for a public address at the Chicago College of Performing Arts Center for Arts Leadership delivered on 18 January 2018 and on 5 March 2018 at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College.

Remembering Mel Rosenthal (1940-2017)

For my particular friend Mel Rosenthal, photography was an instrument for social justice. His Leica thrust before him like Quijote’s spear, he hurled himself into the back of squad cars in the South Bronx to raise awareness of social issues surrounding poverty and equality, into the Tanzanian countryside during the 70s to document medical care, into the Nicaraguan countryside to witness the effects of the revolution there. Mel was incredibly well-read, and taught English at Vassar for a few years. (We were both devoted readers of the Aubrey-Maturin books, which Mel could quote at length.) “Antonioni’s Blow Up blew my mind,” he told me once over Mescal one winter during the 80s at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. “I didn’t have a damned clue, but I knew I needed to be a photojournalist.” In time, Lisette Model mentored him. He was Susan Sontag’s age, and had a huge crush on her; he used to tease me about the fact that I, 22 years his junior, had one, too. 

He joined the faculty at Empire State College in 1975, and added artist mentor to his folio. But he never considered himself an academic. “I’m a messenger,” he told me once. “You touch people with notes; I do it with images. I take their pictures and give them back their image; you listen to what they say and give it back to them in music.” He was a poet addled by one-hundred-too-many waltzes with malaria, kicks in the ribs in pursuit of a shot, and the broken heart of a man who couldn’t—wouldn’t—forget the things he’d seen. Another winter in Virginia, we wept together, tenderly passing pages of our mutual friend Jerome Badanes’ just finished manuscript of The Final Opus of Leon Solomon to one another as Jerry sat, head in his hands by the fire, vulnerable and over-exposed. 

Mel was a clear-eyed sentimentalist who could handle himself. When Gilda Lyons and I married, Mel—to our astonishment and trepidation—volunteered to photograph our wedding. In the event, Mel covered our wedding like an infiltration of enemy territory. Shoulder to shoulder with my bride before our priest in Rhinebeck’s Church of the Messiah, ring poised over her extended finger, I looked into our priest Gerald Gallagher’s eyes and followed his gaze downwards to see Mel, flat on his back at our feet, framing up a Gregg Toland-style hero shot. Gallagher, a tolerant, intelligent man, whispered, “Mel, I’m not sure that this is appropriate.” Swinging the camera away from his face with an enormous grin, Mel wasn’t about to take orders from a priest. “I don’t work for God … or for you, Jerry” he said, and got back to it. “The guys with the Berettas on Bathgate trusted me,” he told my father-in-law Bernie at the wedding reception, “because they knew I was a stand-up guy.” “But you still know why there’s a bat leaning against the wall by my front door,” Bernie, a classics scholar from South Buffalo, observed, in return. “Of course,” Mel laughed.

When the opera I’d written with Paul Muldoon called Vera of Las Vegas debuted at Symphony Space in 2003, Mel decided that he wanted to document it. Gilda stepped in at the last moment to portray one of the Catchalls. Opening night, Mel and I sat beside Leonard Garment, Ned Rorem, and Gary and Naomi Graffman at a catwalk-side cocktail table in the Leonard Nimoy Thalia. During the “Strippers’ Chorus,” Mel’s unerring sense of where the true story lay compelled him to document the following scene not in the opera but arguably more interesting: Gilda was staged with her derriere poised above our heads. Mel’s camera snapped as Naomi observed, gimlet-eyed, to me, “And you’re expecting her to count seven against five, for godsake.” Len, peering up at one of the Catchalls, touched my arm and said, “you’re a twisted man, Daron.” Mel photographed Gary as he gazed at Shequida like a cobra hypnotized by a mongoose. “This,” I replied to Len, “coming from Richard Nixon’s lawyer.” Sound of shutter clicking. “Yes, well—,” Len replied. Mel’s camera clicking again, capturing Len’s pride in his son (my Curtis classmate) Paul, playing a solo in the little cabaret ensemble as he absent-mindedly remarked, “The President didn’t wear fishnet stockings.” Beat. “That I know of.” Beat. Shutter-click. Mel, in heaven, shooting every face, mapping each reveal. Ned, genuinely curious: “How can Gilda sing in that getup?”

Visual artist and professor Bobbe Perry probably saved us all from scurvy one summer at VCCA, building beautiful soups from whence we all spooned wholesome lunches during a rocky period in the kitchen. She and Mel fell in love that summer and made one of the most beautiful couples I’ve ever known. They were like Dickinson’s “two butterflies,” in their questing hearts and profound mutual understanding. Both deeply-committed, sensitive artists who really knew one another. They lived around the corner from us on West End Avenue for years. Five years ago, we moved to the country. “Not enough pavement for me there,” groused Mel when Bobbe tried to get him to their country place. “It makes me tense.” We no longer ran into one another at artist colonies, or late at night, or when the dog needed walking, or over produce at Gourmet Garage, or at friends’ openings, and funerals.

In 2001, at our annual Halloween party, I was Diego Rivera, Gilda was Frida Kahlo, Bobbe was radiance itself, and Mel came as Che Guevara. The tiny apartment was packed with mutual friends and even some people that nobody knew, adult beverages were consumed, everyone was sweaty, Jerry Badanes and absent friends were toasted, righteousness was summoned, at one point the Internationale was sung. He pulled In the South Bronx of America off the shelf and read the inscription he’d written in it the previous March: “For my old loyal shipmate and particular friend Daron. May we continue to have wonderful voyages together. Love, Mel.” I hugged him fiercely. “I was lost on the infinite sea,” I sang into his ear, “but I’ve seen where she’s bound for.” He closed his eyes. He knew the Melville. And he knew the Britten. “There’s a land where she’ll anchor forever.”

We’re gonna be okay, Mel; forever’s a long time, but we know where you’re bound for.

This piece has been syndicated in the Huffington Post. To read it there, click here.

Cathedral of Dreams: Milwaukee's Oriental Landmark Theater

Summer 1978

Father was plastered. Around seven, he had called, slurring, from the Clock, a cocktail lounge downtown, and demanded a ride home. Mother had taken too much Valium to drive. Learner's Permit in hand, I headed downtown to pick him up. Double parked on Wisconsin Avenue, I waved him down. He sloped to the driver's side, in no condition to take the wheel. “Slide over,” he commanded, pounding heavily on the window. Oh, he was mightily pissed. His face was flushed; his mouth was twisted into a snarl. He'd jeopardize both our lives if he got in. For the first time, I had the nerve to refuse him the keys. I drove us home. I was sixteen. It was as though Father, who we had been surrendering as a family to drinking and depression by dribs and drabs over the course of my childhood, had finally made himself into the Man Who Lived Downstairs.

Music alone couldn't yet fill the emptiness I felt, and I was too sheltered a suburban adolescent to adequately come to terms with the wild, impractical, somewhat lurid thoughts and desires my brain was generating. That night, without asking, I simply took the keys, and drove my friends Brian Anderson and David Merkel to the Oriental Landmark Theater, a Grand Prewar Temple to Cinema in downtown Milwaukee. It was only a 25-minute drive from 13014 West Needham Drive to 2230 North Farwell Avenue. For the next two years, I practically lived there. I have had a profound attachment to the place since the first moment that I entered it.

Diane C. Doerfler in 1979. (Photo credit: Cilento)

I’ll never forget how the place smelled. Freshly popped corn and stale cigarette smoke filled the lobby with its fragrance. Onstage, the wet dog musk of moldy fire curtains combined with the ancient aroma of long-settled dust. The air, high up in the huge balcony that yawed heavily over the orchestra like a sumo wrestler’s ceremonial sash, had the arid taste of steam-heat in the winter, and the slight tang of refrigerated moisture on sultry late summer evenings.

The Oriental provided us with a refuge, a chance to see grown up movies, of which many our parents would never approve, a place to dream, to share Communion in the Dark, to play. It was the crucible in which I first began ginning up what Gore Vidal calls one’s “sacred story.” Hormones and an unshakeable belief that in some specific way I had something unique to offer the world provided the cocktail of raw material. Our English teacher, Diane C. Doerfler provided the catalyst. Doerf, as we called her, was an inspirational teacher, a planter of seeds. I recall her now as I saw her then—tomboyish, a lovely combination of Katherine Hepburn and Jeanne Moreau, seemingly something of a Transcendentalist, personally elusive. She began the year by etching in a quick rat-a-tat-tat of chalk on the board LIFE = ART. Then, she paused, turned back to us grinning like a Siamese cat, scanned the room, purred, “Well, what do you make of that?” Thanks to the movies I saw at the Oriental and the books that Doerf gave me, my world was enlarged at the expense of myself, enabling me to grow into and desire access to, the world at large.

Designed by Gustave A. Dick and Alex Bauer, the themes of the Oriental's decor are in fact East Indian, with no traces of Chinese or Japanese artwork. It is said to be the only standard movie palace ever built to incorporate East Indian decor. Opened to the public on 27 July 1927 on the site of Farwell Station, a horse and streetcar barn as the flagship of a chain of 47 movie theaters operated by John and Thomas Saxe, Irish brothers who began as sign painters at the turn of the century, the 1800-seat Oriental incorporated elements of East Indian, Moorish, Islamic, and Byzantine design. It included three eight-foot-high chandeliers adorned with images of the Buddha, eight gleaming black porcelain lions flanking a massive tiled ceremonial staircase to the balcony, hand-painted frescoes of Turkish scenes, dozens of custom draperies, and literally hundreds of elephants—elephants everywhere, from the bathrooms to the 1920s smoking lounges to the remotest corners of the balcony.

The Oriental Landmark Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo credit: Landmark)

Failing, after fifty years of continuous operation as a traditional movie palace, it came into the hands of Robert and Melvyn Pritchett, Milwaukee brothers and electricians who acquired it in 1972. They chose the films that they showed themselves until 1976, when they agreed to a proposal by the Landmark Theater (then Parallax) chain to take over programming.

There were six enormous Buddha statues—three on each side of the broad orchestra—adorned with glowing “rubies” in their foreheads, smoldering green eyes, and dim orange pools of light that warmed their ample tummies from below that remained on until the marquee was shut off, the work lights extinguished, and the lonesome ghost light turned on. The Pritchetts clearly loved the palace, and tolerated my adoration to the point where, on several occasions just before locking up for the night, they allowed me to perform the ritual.

The Oriental also boasted a shallow orchestra pit suitable for a vaudeville-circuit-sized ensemble of about 25 players, access tunnels, storage rooms, dressing rooms (with smeared autographs of now forgotten, once nearly-famous performers still on the walls), and a spacious stage with the original rigging still in place, and an organ's pipe loft. During my day, the organ was in disrepair. Now restored, every Friday and Saturday before the 7 PM show, the plush sounds of the Kimball Theatre Pipe Organ—the largest of its kind in a theater in America and the third largest in the world—introduce the film before the instrument sinks into the pit.

For a while, after its vaudeville years had long passed, the Oriental occasionally served as a live performance venue. I saw Laurie Anderson there. The Violent Femmes got their start by standing in one night as the opening act for the Pretenders. When I knew it best, the Oriental was still a calendar house, a place where adult things happened. It had danger implicit in its darkness, its genteel shabbiness, in the avant-garde and erotic films on its monthly bill of fare. In 1978 a double feature set you back $2.50—well within the budget of a teenage refugee from the suburbs in possession of a probationary driver's license and his mother's ‘75 Ford Granada.

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The Oriental was a "calendar house," which meant that its offerings changed every couple of days. These are monthly calendars from the period described in this essay. (Photo credit: Legend)

Communion in the Dark, the sitting around a campfire telling stories to explore the unknowable, remains one of the chief reasons I compose operas. François Truffaut's La nuit américaine explores the theme of whether making art is more important than life for the people who make it. First seen at the Oriental, this film led me to a comprehensive engagement with Truffaut's films over the years, which climaxed in meeting him at the end of a retrospective of his work at the Regency Cinema, a second-run house on Broadway near Juilliard, in 1986. When I began Shining Brow, which explores this, I asked Paul Muldoon to make this one of Frank Lloyd Wright's foremost concerns: “Can a man be a faithful husband and father,” asks Wright, “and still remain true to his art?”

Suspending the audience’s disbelief being the first step in making art, I made conscious note of the strategies filmmakers used to do it. During those years, I assembled the psychological and emotional skill set required for coping with life as a creative person. I couldn't help watching films critically; I was keenly aware of the artifice, and loved it. The venue was a refuge, but the films were not an escape.

The August 1978 evening that I fell in love forever with the Oriental the double bill was Casablanca and To Have and Have Not. Although it would be years before I understood that is only a single step from Max Steiner to Richard Strauss, from the moment Steiner's grand Warner Brothers Fanfare began, I was enthralled—more by the music than the images and narratives. Steiner's godfather had been no less a musical force than Richard Strauss; his piano teacher was Johannes Brahms, and he took composition lessons from Gustav Mahler. These men took their work seriously: as the saying goes, “there was also a movie going on.”

The large and appreciative audience knew the film, hissed the villains, and cheered the great lines. It was the first time I ever felt surrounded by an audience so in tune with the rhythm of a script and set of actors that they literally sighed in unison. A few folks mouthed the dialogue along with the actors. Men wept openly during Rick's breakdown scene; people stood up when partisans at Rick's began singing La Marseillaise to drown out the Nazis singing Die Wacht am Rhein; couples consoled one another when Rick and Ilse parted.

It transported me. During the intermission, I began prowling around the theater, which already felt like home. (The only other place that has affected me in exactly this way is the artist colony Yaddo—more about that later.) My parents were on their own Revolutionary Road in the suburbs, their lives together unspooling. Mine was rapidly expanding here, in the semi-darkness, among the threadbare velvet seats, the mildew-perfumed draperies, the dicey wiring, illuminated only by “emeralds”, “rubies”, and a shaft of light slicing down from the projection booth to the broad, off-white screen with a blemish in the upper left hand quadrant.

The second feature began: Ernest Hemingway's story, adapted by William Faulkner, directed by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart and ... Lauren Bacall. “You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? Just put your lips together and ... blow.” The frisson I experienced was real. Seeing the film thirty-five years after it was made, I could not in my wildest dreams have imagined that I would one day meet Bacall—well, fall at her feet, anyway—on a stairway at the Dakota.

Twenty-six days later, I brought friends to see Toshirō Mifune in Hiroshi Inagaki's great Samurai Trilogy. There were only about thirty people scattered around the theater. The first of countless games of hide-and-seek was played out in the soaring balcony; the illusion that we were alone in the vast screening chamber became, during the third hour, a reality. No doors were locked and we got into everything: the dressing rooms, the tunnels, and the service closets. I watched Musashi's duel from behind the screen, lying onstage on my back with a sand bag beneath my head, my fingers interlaced at the nape of my neck.

That October, I was given a tour of the projection booth during the screening of Federico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits and 8 ½. My epiphany came during the latter, when I realized, watching the screen through the same hole (the “fourth wall”) that the powerful projector was throwing the image through, that all the settings in Fellini were intentionally artificial so that they would appear on film as hyper-real. Opera.

The next week West Side Story continued to counterpoint my evolving young thoughts. I'd seen the film on television, of course, and had spent fifth grade walking to and from Linfield Elementary School singing the tune of Maria, substituting Jean’s name. However, I had never seen the Jets swoop across a three-story tall movie screen. The boys leapt; so did my heart. The hair on my arms stood up. We were being invited not to buy into the idea of a bunch of tough street kids dancing but to witness their spirits fly through the air.

The Oriental provided my first introduction to serious camp. The double bill was Humoresque and Johnny Guitar. (Truffaut famously referred to it as a “phony Western.”) The film was to me like Weibbier with a slab of lemon in it: all the roles, from Joan Crawford to Sterling Hayden, were clearly gender-swapped. Paired with an even higher-camp classic starring a beautiful young prizefighter of a James Garfield, a leonine Crawford, an exquisitely rumpled Oscar Levant, and Isaac Stern's hands, it made for a swampy, soupy, delightfully sentimental evening at the movies—an impossible film to forget, and one I’ve seen a hundred time.

Lower camp was also on the bill. The Oriental is the world record holder for a current and continuing film engagement. The Rocky Horror Picture Show has played as a midnight film since January 1978. I was one of the original regulars. I dressed the part for a dozens of showings, danced the Time Warp, brought bags of rice, toast, squirt guns, newspapers, and so forth, knew my lines (“Dammnit, Janet!”) and delighted in the lovely community of genuinely joyful people that has made the Oriental the U.S. record holder for a continuing engagement of the film.

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Group portrait of the Legend staff in 1979. (l. to r.) Channing Hughes, Joseph Puchner, David Merkel, Ann Hallanger, Daron Hagen, Max Sanders, David Puchner, Chris Hughes, Marybeth Hughes, Brian Anderson, Jeffrey Ripple, Carol Hallanger. (Photo credit: Hagen collection)

On 8 December 1978, during a double bill (East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause), I held hands with a date for the first time. Leonard Rosenman's sophisticated modernist scores (he studied with Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Roger Sessions) for these back-to-back knockouts moved me more, I'm afraid, than the crisscrossing of young fingers in the dark. Eleven days later, more film noir—I saw The Third Man for the first time and immediately determined someday to turn it into an opera. In fact, I pitched an updated adaptation of the Graham Greene screenplay in 2006 to Speight Jenkins, Intendant of Seattle Opera, who nearly went for it.

I didn't just visit or even inhabit the Oriental, I infiltrated it, climbing into the organ loft, sleeping on the stage, haunting the projection booth, canoodling in the balcony, and spelunking the tunnels. Any movie would do in my Cathedral of Dreams, because, if the media can be the message, sometimes the venue is the vision.

Christmas 1981

It was snowing lightly—little feathery, inhibited flakes that seemed shamed at having arrived as too-early guests, when Mother met me at the airport. I’d returned to Milwaukee for the Christmas Holidays. “Here,” she said, handing me the keys, “you drive. I have some news for you.” Once in the car, she broke into a fit of deep coughs that drained her. “That’s a bad cold,” I observed. “Yeah,” she agreed, “bad.” I turned the key in the ignition, and guessed, “You’re finally going to leave Dad and move to Paris?” She twisted her head toward the passenger window and looked out. The window was steamed up. “No.,” she said, and turned back to me, giving me that sudden, dazzling smile. It always killed me. “There’s a Hitchcock double feature at the Oriental tonight,” she said, brightly. “Let’s go.”

That night, during intermission, Bernard Herrmann’s music for the final few minutes of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 played. Mother reached for my hand and, as we both stared at the blank screen, she told me that she had been diagnosed with a particularly nasty form of inoperable lung cancer. First, there would be chemotherapy. There would be a rally. Then she would “get bored of dying,” she predicted, “get on with life, and die.”

“I’ll come home to take care of you,” I said. “Christ, no,” she said. “Do. Not. Come. Home. I want you to get on with your life. Get. Out. Of. Here.” The music stopped. The lights dimmed. We held hands as the Main Title for The 39 Steps began. We watched the entire thing, holding hands like high school kids. She’d obviously chosen the Oriental, of all places, to share her news because she knew that I felt safe here; she’d timed her news to coincide with intermission so that I’d have the entirety of the second film to begin digesting it. By the time the lights went up after the second feature, I had recovered enough to ask, “What’s next?” Pulling on her coat and arranging her scarf around her neck, she looked pensively into the middle distance. “Ice cream, I’d say,” she said.

The lobby of the Oriental in spring 2015. (Photo credit: Hagen collection)

Spring 2015

In town to direct a new show for the Skylight Music Theater, I took my wife Gilda  for the first time to a matinee at the Oriental. The old place's magic coursed through me as we stood in the lobby and breathed in its faded, funky, faux opulence. As an organist fumbled loopily through an awful medley from Carousel, I shared without embarrassment the precious treasures of my youth. I introduced her to the golden-eared onyx lions flanking the broad staircase as we climbed to the low-slung, sweeping balcony, the Buddha’s, the stage area with its massive dimmers, the dust hanging in the air just as it should. “I can’t explain it, I just can’t,” I said, as we walked, hand in hand, up the main aisle. “I love this place the way I love Yaddo. It’s what Allan Gurganus wrote … you know, ‘some essence quorum of our souls’ intensities’.” Gilda nodded. “This place,” I continued, “is in my spiritual DNA. I feel as though I spent entire hours here suspended in that ‘chanceful,’ formative state where anything could still happen, safe, but questing; still a child, but on the cusp….” I stopped. She smiled. “I know, honey,” she said. “It’s what you and Gardner had Amelia say to her baby— ‘Anything is possible’.”

The organist stopped playing. “Show me where you and your mother sat,” she said, tenderly. Gilda had led me to within a few rows of where Mother and I had sat that cold winter afternoon in 1981. “Um,” I said, looking away from her slightly so that she wouldn’t see the tears that accompanied the smile on my face and gesturing. “It was just … over here.” I placed the fingertips of my hand under her elbow, indicated with the other hand a nearby spot, and walked her the few feet. “We’re here,” I said, not believing it. “Well,” I laughed, “if this isn’t exactly the spot, then it should’ve been. How about here?” My God, I thought, as Gilda sat down and shook her hair in just that way and my heart leapt up and I couldn’t help it I just choked and smiled and shook my head with love and awe and gratitude as she turned and flashed me the same sudden, sunny, dazzling, lopsided smile Mother used to. Gilda was more glamorous than Rita Hayworth, every bit the artist Mother had been and more. A vibrant, powerful woman in her prime, Gilda turned to me and—moving far, far past transference to transforming sorrow into joy in a heartbeat—remarked, “Honey, it’s like your mom said: ‘It’s a poem about rebirth’!”

There’s a splendid, self-sufficient egoism in being young. Closed about with unearned affection from parents who will love you no matter how selfishly or casually you behave, you’re free to indulge independence and individualism.

Becoming an adult is realizing alone-ness, understanding how tenuous the integration of lives really is, and facing the unpleasant necessity of having to earn affection. You’re not born into other people’s lives, people who will love you immediately and irrevocably; pamper your whims and love you for them or despite them. This is a sober fact that’s shattering to comprehend, but it makes an individual sooner than the cocoon-like, womb-like protective existence of adolescence.

Love is lost so easily: you can’t strangle it by putting it on a golden chain, expecting it to understand it’s free to move only a few feet in either direction. Nor can you pick it up and fondle it only when your fancy so pleases. You treat it gently because it is volatile, owes you nothing except if you prove there’s been a continuous effort to earn it. Then you’ve crushed out ‘selves’ into one ‘self’ that’s the basis of all sympathy and human understanding. Love is selfish-but you must never be, for fear of losing it.

This essay originally appeared in the Huffington Post on 6 December 2013 in an earlier iteration. You can read it there by clicking here.

Nicaragua: Barb of Sorrow

We piled into the Jeep that winter morning in 2006 and drove in to Diriamba, the birthplace of El Güegüense, where a traditional drama reenacted each January during the feast of San Sebastián, the city’s patron saint, took place. We would end up at the beautiful Basilica of San Sebastian of course, but first we had to change some money. Diriamba had a bank, or maybe two, I suppose. I never went into them. Why in the world would you buy córdobas at a bank? The best rate to be had was at the gas station on the Carretera Panamericana. One “negotiated” the exchange rate with the Coyotes, scary-looking dudes who stood between the gas pumps, wearing crisscrossing ammunition belts, a wad of bills in one hand and an automatic weapon in the other. Equal parts Malcolm Lowry  (there are literally a dozen active volcanoes in Nicaragua at and given time) and Jim Lehrer (of the Viva Max, not the PBS NewsHour vein), I loved the unhinged madness of my mother-in-law’s birthplace—where gun-toting lunatics fired off shots next to fuel pumps; people bought baggies of pastel-colored mystery booze from street vendors straddling the median strip; we slept with a machete in the bedside table; and the sunrises, every one of them, broke your damned Yanqui heart. I felt intense, crazy pride, as I watched my fearless mother-in-law intimidate the Coyotes into giving her a better rate.

I love the family I've been blessed to have married into, every member of it, with the fierce, wild appreciation and gratitude of a man who never thought he could ever be anyone’s son or brother or husband again. Even after a stroke, Gilda’s father Bernie can still handle himself and quote Shakespeare at length. His wife Gilda was born to the respected Alemán family; they operated Diriamba’s department store, co-owned several small Cinema Paradiso-like movie theaters—and, as I learned the very first time I was shown the town, built the municipal Clock Tower—in nearby Diriamba. Bernie and Gilda met in Upstate New York, where they attended Woodstock, among other things, and earned their teaching certificates. Bernie taught English and Gilda taught Art to emotionally unstable children from troubled backgrounds at Pope Pius XII High School, in Rhinecliff, New York. They retired a few years before Gilda Marie and I married.

Latin America is a bloody clot of Life and Death, Good and Evil, Wealth and Extreme Poverty, Man and God. For me, as it does for many folks, this inspires a heightened awareness of possibility, an intensification of experience that renders emotions more vivid, the appreciation of the fragility of life more sanguine.

We enjoyed a horse-drawn coach ride around the colonial city of Granada—a town dressed for wealthy travelers—and boated on the fresh water of Lake Nicaragua, prying monkeys off our shoulders—a lake so large that you could drop Puerto Rico into it. We trekked up the paths surrounding the active cone of the Masaya Volcano, made our way through the bustling markets of Masaya and Jinotepe, and spent our last morning in La Boquita on a ten mile walk on the beach to the shore’s point (which revealed another point beyond that) at dawn. All the while, we were treated to incredibly lavish and sumptuous meals prepared by our Tia Leyla as well as delicious foods in fine Nicaraguan restaurants.

Either it was a discarded bone needle of the sort used by fishermen to repair their nets, or it a stingray’s barb, a rusty nail—whatever, the four-inch-long espina passed through my Gilda’s foot like a red-hot knitting needle through butter when she stepped on it in the Pacific surf.

The patriarch of the family there, Ricardo Gutiérrez (Tio), was one of the preeminent horse trainers in Latin America. (In the Spanish style, each dictator, once they become an eminence, keeps horses.) The horse in Nicaraguan society served not just a beast of burden, but also as a mark of culture and prestige. One day we attended the Ipica—a huge equestrian festival—in Diriamba where $100 workhorses were ridden proudly next to $150,000 show horses. Because of his personal charisma, character, and his talent as a horseman, Ricardo seemed to know and be respected by everyone—from the peasant driving his burrow down the street to the President of the country, Enrique Bolaños, to whom we were introduced at one of the house parties to which Tio and Tia brought us during the festival.

The President had served as vice president under his predecessor, Arnoldo Alemán and just begun his term, which ended when Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas came back to power in 2007. He has since retired from politics and runs a non-profit educational foundation. Casually dressed men loosely ringed him with automatic rifles propped against their hips, and came to surround us as well as he—to our surprise—chatted with us for nearly twenty minutes.

Gilda turned chalky, one foot out of the water, the other in. “Don’t move” I said. “I don’t know what it is,” she said. The pain moved across her face like a shadow. I bent down in the waves and felt for her foot as, reflexively, she lifted it.

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Basílica Menor de San Sebastián, Diriamba, Nicaragua, March 2005. (Photo credit: Daron Hagen)

The festival of San Sebastian celebrated the meeting of the patron saints of Diriamba (San Sebastian), Jinotepe (Santiago), and San Marcos (San Marco). Evidently, statues of San Sebastian and Santiago were en route from Spain when the boat carrying them capsized. Fishermen found the statues floating in the ocean, dry and safe in sealed boxes, as close to each of their intended destinations as they could have been. The folklore surrounding them is that, with this history, they must be traveling companions, and very close friends. Each year San Sebastian invites both Santiago and San Marcos, as he is from another nearby town, to celebrate with him in Diriamba.

Blood poured out of both the top and the bottom of her foot and into the water, on my hands, all over her suit. I quickly checked the entry and exit wounds. Clean. Tore my shirt off and bound her foot. It stanched nothing. “I’ve got to get you to the house. Don’t look at the blood,” I said, trying to tie the shirt tighter.

Faithful from each town carried the statues from Diriamba, Jinotepe, and San Marcos to Dolores, a town in the middle of all three Saints’ homes, where the three met and then parade back to Diriamba. A huge Mass was celebrated in the basilica there and everyone processed, carrying the saints’ statues, accompanied by extravagant, beautiful dances and music. Children as young as four years old—dressed up in elaborate costumes—threw themselves into the moment. Faithful of all ages walked on their knees to fulfill promises to the saints. The incredible smells of fresh—and delicious—festival foods like picadillo, chicharrón, yuka, and nacatameles as well as of horses, people and the spent gunpowder of fireworks—all overwhelmed.

“I’m okay,” she protested. “I can walk.” Putting weight on the foot, she nearly passed out. I looked back at the house, across a finger of water and far up the beach. There was no one for three hundred yards in any direction. “I’m going to ferry you, baby,” I said.

We attended Mass in the choir loft above the front door of the basilica with several priests, and five or six members of the family, leaning over the rail and looking down towards the altar. People were packed tightly in as the choir sang. At the customary moments in the Mass, probably three thousand voices inside the basilica, another several thousand outside in the square, sang.

“Sit down, brother,” commanded Christopher gently, as I placed her in a chair on the porch of the little bungalow. He took over. The blood had by that time soaked everything we had on. ‘You look like you’re going to pass out,” he said, seizing my arm. “You should sit down.” My tailbone connected with the ground as I nearly fainted from the sprint up the beach.

The cardinal finished, the procession began. The statues of the saints, covered in ribbons and silver Milagros were carried down the central aisle, preceded by dancers, huge waving flags, drummers, and flute players. The basilica trembled and I felt what it is like when sound itself moves. Deafening fireworks exploded outside, thousands sang, and—a few feet away from us in the belfries—the bells began to peal. It was as beyond the pale as New Year’s Eve in Venice in the Piazza San Marco, but even more intense, with a more fervent undercurrent of religion and danger.

Now that Gilda was safe, my mind began to fly off like a busted kite. “Like stigmata…” I shuddered, trying to steady myself by looking out to sea. The fist around my heart tightened. Blood still pulsed from the wound, but her color was returning. “Kierkegaard called it—what was it—a barb of sorrow?” I was going into shock. “If it is pulled out, I shall die,” I half-remembered.

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Looking southwards toward Rio Mar from Casares. (Photo credit: Chris Lyons)

Every hair on my goose-bumped arms stood on end in the heat as the procession passed out of the church through the doors below. I was guided to a rope like a blind person and directed to help toll the bells. Flying a dozen feet up and down, drowning in the sound of the singing, of the bells, of the blood pounding in my head, I looked first one way to see waves of people reaching up to touch the saints as they pass in the plaza, then another to see the Christ hanging above the altar, hands and feet nailed with barbs of sorrow to the Holy Rood. I looked another way and saw the huge clappers inside the bells, then another and saw the bullet holes pocking the belfry’s inner walls, and then another to see Gilda’s ecstatic face in song.

“In this country,” Chickie remarked as he wound gauze around his sister’s foot, “Death sits right next to you at the bar without asking, claps you on the back, looks you in the eye, and buys you a Toña.” 

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This essay first appeared in an earlier iteration in the Huffington Post. You can read it there by clicking here.

Yaddo: Transforming Sorrow into Joy

Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, is more than America’s most prestigious artist retreat: it is a testament to one couple’s determination to transubstantiate loss into works of art. Like mine, Yaddo’s story is about what poet Kim Addonizio calls "the presence that absence makes." After the tragic deaths of their children, financier Spencer Trask and his gifted wife Katrina dedicated themselves to the creation of Yaddo for the same reason that my parents created me. There envelops Yaddo (rhymes with “shadow”) a profound Victorian melancholy that serves as an unspoken reminder to even the fastest of trackers in any given pack of ambitious young artists passing through the place of serious art’s immense stakes. To me, Yaddo is not just a hallowed place, but also my home.

I ended my mother's doomed gavotte with cancer at her request during the 1982 Christmas holidays, returned to school at the Curtis Institute, and unspooled my final year there as a pupil of Ned Rorem's. Upon graduation the following spring, without an address, my books in storage, my life a completely chance-ful thing as I prepared to move to Manhattan where, in a succession of sublets and rentals for the next 30 years, I'd live, I first came to Yaddo in summer 1984. I landed there at the very, very end of Yaddo's first great era, a time not long after the days that one could not even apply; Elizabeth Ames invited people directly. So it happened that Ned telephoned the President of Yaddo, Curtis Harnack (that wonderfully humane man), and his brilliant, wise wife, Hortense Calisher to arrange for my first visit. 

“Yaddo,” wrote Ned, “is necessary for you now. Don’t try so hard to be Rastignac. Perhaps a little less need to get ahead, to be a “professional”; a little more introspection and, indeed, egotism, will do you good. But who knows? One man’s meat, etc.….” Ned instructed me to ask David Diamond (with whom I would begin studying at Juilliard the following September) what books I should read before entering his studio. Along with decreeing that I spend the summer studying “Beethoven Quartets op. 59, No. 1, Opus 131, Haydn’s Opus 33, No. 1, Mozart, Brahms, Bruckner, and Berg,” David had commanded me to read Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. I arrived at Yaddo with the need not to be Rastignac, but Orpheus; I desired nothing more than to sing my departed mother’s spirit out of the Underworld, bring her back to life.

Daron Hagen at Yaddo. Summer, 1984. (Photo Credit: Hortense Calisher)

After a train ride up the Hudson, I disembarked at the Saratoga Springs train station. I had with me the clothes on my back, Mann and Rolland in my backpack, four shirts, three pair of underwear, two pair of jeans, four pair of socks, mechanical pencils and erasers, thirty dollars, and lots and lots of King Brand manuscript paper.

Now retired, James Mahon, a courtly, red-bearded Charon with a mild voice and probing, intense eyes who gravely addressed me as “sir” long before I had any claim to it, placed my backpack gently in the beat up old company station wagon. We drove slowly through town, past Town Hall and the Post Office, and the Adirondack Trust bank. We passed the Parting Glass, where mingled during August the jockeys from the Saratoga Race Track and their tall, glossy girlfriends, the Yaddo artists, the City Ballet dancers, the Philadelphia Orchestra players, the townies, and the bettors.

James turned on to broad, tree-lined Union Avenue—one of the Hudson Valley’s grandest boulevards. Flanked by over a dozen Queen Anne-style mansions built during the late 1800s, it begins at Congress Park and culminates a mile and a half later at the Northway. In 1978, the entire area was listed in the National Register of Historic Places as the Union Avenue Historical District. As the car rolled by the racetrack, with its bevy of Victorian structures, I felt as though we were going back in time. We passed the National Museum of Racing. I thought aloud: “Seabiscuit.” “Ah, yes sir,” James drawled, glancing at me curiously in the rearview mirror, “that was a brave little pony now, wasn’t it?”

“Whitney,” I said, “Jerome, Vanderbilt….” “Ah, yes sir,” James drawled, “those would be some other names associated with the race track, that’s for certain.” On our right, at the far end of Union Avenue, adjacent to the track, began a dense, shadowy forest. “This would be Yaddo, sir,” James said, turning on to the grounds.

The life-sized portraits of Katrina and Spencer Trask that hang in the mansion's main hall. (Photo credit: Hagen Collection)

Spencer Trask, founder of the well-known Wall Street firm, and his wife Katrina had the mansion built in 1892 by architect William Halsey Wood, who did little but execute the designs provided by his clients. 55 rooms, a medieval dining hall and tower, barns, outbuildings, four man-made ponds bearing the children’s names, a rock garden, and a large formal rose garden, all laid out to Spencer’s specifications.

James slowed the car as we passed between the lakes. We veered left, and then right, then climbed the drive, and to our left the mansion blossomed into view atop the hill. I gasped. Embarrassed, I looked toward the rearview mirror and saw that James’ eyes were warm. “Yes sir,” he smiled, “that’s the Main House. We’ll be driving past West House, Pine Garde, and East House so that I can drop you at the Office.” We shook hands and he handed me my backpack after I got out.

Tears spontaneously flowed as beloved, infinitely capable program director Rosemary Misurelli (who I had never met) bundled me up in her Rabelaisian Earth Mother arms at the front door of the office. “I feel as though I have come home,” I burbled. Weeping, she covered my face with kisses, and then took me in to meet Curt, who asked me why I was crying. “I have no idea,” I said. “Are you okay?” he asked. “I think so,” I said. “I don’t understand why I’m crying.” “Oh, I do,” he said, with a kind, open mid-western smile.

Upon arrival, a Special Assistant to the President escorts every artist to his or her studio and bedroom. That summer, Doug Martin and Nancy Brett served. I was given a tour of the grounds, and then shown into the mansion’s grand hall. Hanging there were two life-sized full portraits. Before being told her identity, I was as irresistibly drawn to Eastman Johnson’s painting as I had been to the Norman Rockwell portrait of Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist. We hadn’t met, but my heart instinctively moved out to her. I felt safe here. “Yes, that’s her,” Nancy said, gently pulling me away and leading me up the sweeping stairs. “Katrina Trask?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, pointing up at the two-story tall Tiffany window atop the stairs. “That’s her, too.”

My younger son draws from the lead-lined treasure chest in the library the note that has resided there for a long time and left, as far as he was concerned, just for him. And, at Yaddo, why not? (Photo credit: Hagen Collection)

We turned left at the foot of the window, passed a large brass spittoon, and reached the sliding door leading to Oratory (a place of prayer), the room next to what had been Spencer’s den that would serve as my bedroom.

Everyone who has lived and worked at Yaddo over the past century has heard stories about the ghosts. There’s the Puritanical one that keeps watch in the bedroom on the second floor of the mansion opposite the stairs that opens the windows when something naughty is happening in the room. There’s the Testy one that slams the closet door in Katrina’s bedroom when the current occupant spends a little too much time on the fainting couch.

In May 2007, I sat before the upright piano in the Acosta Nichols Tower studio, writing with trepidation the title Amelia over what would become the first page of over four hundred pages of piano sketch of my opera about flight and rebirth. A bird flew in through the open door and flew frightened circles high above me in the white cone of the ceiling. I got up and spoke quietly to the bird, “You’ll be okay, friend. Everything will be fine. The door is open. Fly through it.” As though on cue, the bird swooped down and glided back out through the door to safety in the surrounding forest. It was the plainest sort of blessing, and a perfect example of the sort of thing that happens at Yaddo.

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There are always beautiful seasonal arrangements at Yaddo built of flowers from the estate's gardens. (Photo: Hagen Collection)

Yaddo is about the work, first. My work book lists the following pieces composed all, or in part, there between 1984 and the present: four major operas: Amelia, Bandanna, Little Nemo in Slumberland, and Shining Brow; two cantatas: A Walt Whitman Requiem and Light Fantastic; my Symphony No. 3; and nearly a hundred art songs and chamber works, large and small.

Much of Yaddo’s magic derives from the effect that it has on one’s fellow artists. For example, I had learned about the extravagance, the power, and the beauty of raw talent at Curtis, that talent is like a natural resource—amoral and unearned. It can be cultivated and strengthened by its possessor, and it can be misused, of course. But I had never (and have never, since) met anyone quite as joyously talented as David Del Tredici, who I befriended during my first residency. He was—and remains—a nova.

At Yaddo with fellow composers David Del Tredici and George Tsontakis, Autumn, 2006. (Photo credit: Gilda Lyons)

I first met Joel Conarroe that summer. Joel, the author of books and articles about American literature and anthologies of poetry, president of the Guggenheim Foundation from 1985-2002 (and a trustee until his retirement in 2016); former chair of the English Department, Ombudsman, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and former president of the PEN American center, was deeply gentle, erudite, decent, and agreeable company over dinner during the weeks that our visits overlapped.

In 1994, Joel and David Del Tredici  reached out to Donald S. Rice, then Chairman of Yaddo’s Board of Directors, and together nominated me for membership in the Corporation. Subsequently elected by the Directors and Members that year, I was further elected by our brothers and sisters fifteen years later to continue beyond the restriction of a term limit as a “Lifetime Member”–an honor bestowed on only one other Member: Susan Brynteson, Yaddo’s beloved Librarian, and (now retired) Vice provost and head of the University of Delaware Library. In his letter commending me to Don, Joel described me as “represent[ing] the best of what Yaddo is all about.” I treasure Joel’s approbation and this honor above any other I’ve received in my life.

Performing with Gilda Lyons in the Music Room during the Annual Meeting. Aaron Copland premiered his Piano Variations on this exquisite instrument. (Photo credit: Angellos Ioannis Malefakis)

I was taught a briskly affectionate character lesson of immense value one evening at West House during the early 80s by novelist Lynn Freed. She’d been in residence long enough to observe our small society in action, but it was our first real conversation. “What do you make of so-and-so?” she asked. “And him? And her?” We compared notes. Presently, she asked, “Darling boy, why are you such a Rabbit with people in public, and so Dead-Spot-On-Brutal in your assessment of them in private? Surely there’s a balance, no?”

When at 16 I told my English teacher Diane Doerfler that I intended to move to the east coast, she presented me with the volume of John Cheever's short stories I possess to this day: “Read these,” she said, throwing me a rope. “He and Updike seem to get it right.” Only a few years later Susan Cheever and I became friends at Yaddo. I imagine Doerf would be pleased to know that I told Susan about her gift. Years later, playwright / actor Ayad Akhtar was made a member of the Corporation. He charmed me, when we met for the first time during the annual fall meeting, by regaling me during dinner with fulsome reminiscences of Doerf, whom he credited as “an essential guiding force in his early development.”

Yaddo's Collected Balzac, shelved in West House.

It was at Yaddo—reading the Trask family’s exquisite 1901 Little, Brown and Company Works of Honoré de Balzac shelved in West House—that, over the course of fifteen years, I savored every word of Balzac’s monumental La Comedie Humaine, in English, and then in French. He remains to me as precious as Georges Simenon is to Ned. Rastignac—he, whose name is an insult in France, has served all my life both as a warning and as a negative example, as surely as Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe has constituted a blessing and an imprecation. In other words, on the one hand, “la vie humaine se compose de deux parties: on tue le temps, le temps vous tue,” and, on the other, “there are some dead who are more alive than the living.”

Katrina Trask’s was one of what Rick Moody calls the “momentous and astonishing and beautiful deaths” that have taken place at Yaddo. During my first visit—summer 1984—I had spent several weeks composing a requiem, what poet and memoirist Richard McCann might call a “ghost letter” to Katrina. Richard wrote, in one of his poems, “Quiet! Don’t you know that the dead go on hearing for hours?” I believe that they continue hearing forever if they are of a mind to. I believe that Katrina Trask continues to hear what goes on at Yaddo to this day.

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A photo of a Daguerreotype of Katrina Trask that hangs in West House.

Here’s how I met Mrs. Trask. Near the end of my first visit, novelist Doug Unger was sitting on the second-floor landing, around eleven-thirty in the evening, reading The New Yorker. Across from him sat a third person, whose name escapes me. That reassuring, late-night quietude (the plashing of water in the little fountain next to the front door, the soughing and whispering of the pines, underpinned by the steady thrum of automobile wheels on the Northway) unique to this house surrounded us. I didn’t know at the time that Doug was up there. I was reading in the Great Hall, next to the fireplace with the phoenix on it.

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The Grand staircase. Katrina Trask is portrayed in the Tiffany window. (Photo credit: Hagen Collection)

At that instant, I less “saw” her than “felt” Katrina Trask’s presence. In the same way that one might glimpse a child streaking out of a suburban front yard and into the street, and with the same terrible wave of heart-in-the-mouth dread, perceived peripherally, intuited while focusing elsewhere, a woman descending the main staircase in what John Cheever mischievously described as “poor Katrina’s shower curtain” came before my mind’s eye. It was unquestionably Katrina’s ghost. Her right hand was slightly raised, as it is in the portrait, and in it was a telegram, a poem, or a letter. Allan Gurganus suavely describes what I saw as “some essence quorum of our souls’ intensities.” At the instant that I noticed the apparition, I heard a cry from the second floor. I leapt to the foot of the stairs to see what the matter was. Looking up, I saw ashen-faced Doug.

“What did you see?” I asked. “A woman in a white dress, so help me God,” he said.

From behind him in the darkness the third person—who couldn’t possibly have seen the staircase—said, softly, “It was Katrina.” We coughed, laughed, looked at our feet. I have seen an angel, I thought. I used to describe the feeling I took away from the moment as being exactly like the way I used to feel when I heard the crunch of gravel in the driveway that meant Mother was home. Now, as a father, I recognize that the feeling was more like the way I feel when my children are sleeping in the next room, yet I am in every way but physically with them.

My younger son at Yaddo, Summer 2016.

How, I wondered as a boy, would it feel to experience happiness without dread, and, if I did, how long would it last before the inevitable happened and I ended up, at two in the morning, my ass is in the air, scrubbing again and again the same square foot of asphalt tile until I had forgotten what the question was? Now I wonder, when I’m telling my sons a bedtime story about the animals at Yaddo (who have names, and speak, and have adventures, and inhabit a world that is entirely real to my boys, as real as Yaddo is to me, and as precious), I wonder how it is possible that there is no dread in our home; how is it possible that this happy story won’t end for my sons the way that it ended for my brothers?

After much discussion, and many Yaddo bedtime stories, and Elaina Richardson’s permission, I agreed to take my son with me to attend the 24 July 2015 ceremony at Yaddo at which the mansion and grounds would be proclaimed a National Historic Landmark.

The water in the “Sleepy Naiads” fountain was cold and clear. “Brr,” said my son, now aged 6, pulling his small, perfect feet out. It was his first visit to Yaddo. To look our best, we had dressed in matching starched white shirts and shorts. But a child’s a child, and we’d decided that, before touring the mansion together, we ought to dip our feet in the fountain. I passed him his stockings. We sat in the grass. I handed him his shoes. “You make the ears,” he explained. “Then you jump through the hole, right?” I asked. “Uh huh. And then you pull the ears tight,” he said, pulling on his shoelaces with a look of satisfaction.

The Yaddo Mansion seen from the Sleepy Naiad Fountain. (Photo credit: Hagen Collection)

I looked up. At the top of the hill, framed by cloudless blue sky, sat the Yaddo mansion. My son's attention shifted from his shoelaces to follow my gaze. “Papa?” “Yes, honey.” “How did the children die?” he asked. I looked back down at the grass, deciding how much to say. “There were four of them. They all died before they were teenagers,” I said. His eyes widened. “Do you really want to hear this?” He nodded gravely. “One lived only 12 days.”

My son shook his head in wonder: “Like the ‘Other Daron,’ Papa?” “Yeah,” I answered. “No wonder you love this place so much,” he said. “More than you know, baby,” I said. “So, tell me,” he said, placing his hand on my beard the way that I sometimes stroke his cheek. “The oldest child had Uncle Kevin’s middle name, Alansson,” I began. My boy looked up at the house as I spoke. “He died of some childhood disease. The middle children were Christina and Spencer Jr. At some point when they were children, they caught Diphtheria kissing their Mama goodbye.” He turned suddenly, and asked, “Did their Mama die, too?” “No,” I answered, “their mama Katrina was okay.” He threw his arms around me, and began to cry. “It’s okay, baby,” I said, stroking his hair. He looked up at me, and asked, “What happened to the last one?” I pulled him close. He buried his head in my chest. “The last child was named Katrina,” I told him, stroking his hair. “She lived only nine days.”

Presently, we gathered up our things and walked to the car. "Can we come back, Papa?" "Not only can we return, we must," I told him firmly, digging my chin into the top of his head as I held him, tears falling into his hair's golden ringlets. "Why, Papa?" I looked at him—his tender, small frame just beginning to flesh out with the wiry strength of the man into whom he'd grow, and I thought to myself that Life is fragile, that Art is fragile, too; I thought that the Loud drown out the Rest most of the time, but that Art, so simultaneously ephemeral and eternal, like Love, can do more than prompt a tyrant's tears; it can give strength and hope to those fighting for a better world for our kids, a safer place to bring them up, a more tolerant mindset, more open hearts. I had to look away from him. and up the hill towards the mansion as I formulated a simpler answer, an answer that, hopefully, even a child might understand. "Because Yaddo," I whispered, "is a place where sorrow is transformed into joy."

My older son at Yaddo, Summer, 2014.

My younger son at Yaddo, Summer 2016.

This essay first appeared in the Huffington Post in an earlier form on 5 June 2012. You can read it there by clicking here. Below is a little fundraising video shot in the Yaddo Mansion's Music Room several years ago.

Composing as Gardening: How it Took Me 33 Years to Finish a Piece

The Loomis Chaffee Academy

Mark Gottschalk

Composers create new works the way that Johnny Appleseed threw seeds around. We’re gardeners. Some of the things we plant die, some flourish, and some sit, oddly dormant, for many years, before springing into life. Such is the case with my Walt Whitman Requiem, which E.C. Schirmer is publishing in September, and whose release I celebrate with greater excitement than I have any new work for years.

The fact that my Walt Whitman Requiem required the longest developmental period of any work in my compositional œuvre—fully thirty-three years from first sketch to final draft—is an indication of the seriousness with which I approached the project. The work was first commissioned by Mark Jon Gottschalk for performance by the Loomis Chaffee School chorus and string orchestra, with Susan Valcq Gottschalk soprano soloist. Although I had composed several works previously premiered by major ensemble—including Prayer for Peace, which the Philadelphia Orchestra had premiered shortly before this work was begun—the requiem is, in fact, the first commission I received as a professional musician. Gottschalk was a close friend of my brother Kevin’s, and this gesture of faith in my abilities came, in my mind at least, from them both. I began it in New York City and completed it at Yaddo, the artist retreat in Saratoga Spring, New York, during my very first artist residency there, in August 1984.

“I bought myself breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Central Park South to celebrate,” I recalled in a 1998 Wisconsin Public Radio interview. “Even though I didn’t have the rent money, it seemed the thing to do to mark what I hoped would be a career blessed with lots of meaningful (and profitable) commissions.” In fact, the work came to represent to me a deeper understanding of what being a composer entailed, since I immediately began to feel that it required revision. Nevertheless, Gottschalk premiered the first version of the Mass on 10 May 1993 at the Loomis Chaffee Academy, a prestigious boarding school in Windsor, Connecticut. I don’t recall ever having received a recording of the performance. Life, other projects, and, to be honest, a sort of discomfort at not having gotten right my very first big commission, prompted me to set the thing aside.

Michael Haithcock

In 1999, former president of the College Band Directors National Association and the leading spirit behind the commissioning of my opera Bandanna, the premiere production of which he conducted, Michael Haithcock, had taken on the leadership of the bands at the University of Michigan. He was on the prowl for large works for chorus and band, and asked after the requiem. A small consortium of colleges was assembled to underwrite my revisions to the work and the re-orchestration for large wind ensemble. At that time, I added a movement—the Trope, in order to more acutely focus the work on Whitman’s identification with the young Civil War soldiers he equated with Jesus in the poem that I had chosen to intercut with the final Libera Me. As fate would have it, I executed most of the work at Yaddo, during another halcyon summer there. I extracted the parts, sent them off, and then … nothing. It was as though the piece was cursed. I immediately turned my attention to other projects, and it slipped out of my thoughts again. Robert Schuneman, whose early and staunch support of me as a publisher—not to mention wise tolerance of my crazy foibles as a brash young composer—had taken on the first version of the requiem back in 1984, and had high hopes for it, although he considered it “far too difficult as it stands for the mainstream choral market.” It had sat, available, but in manuscript, unperformed, but not entirely forgotten, in ECS’ Boston warehouse, across the street from Fenway Park.

Robert Schuneman

In summer 2017, both Bob and his wife Cynthia having passed away and the company acquired by Canticle Distributing in the Midwest, the requiem had come to me to represent a lost child when an Email from Stanley Hoffman, E.C. Schirmer and Galaxy Music’s Chief Editor asking what I was going to do with it made me pull the score from the shelf to take a hard look at it. Placing it on the piano rack and playing through it, a hundred memories flowed through my fingertips as I confronted the young composer hubristically spending money that he did not have on breakfast at Deverieux’s to celebrate a piece that was in fact in no way complete. I thought of the Britten War Requiem, to which it bore an obvious and, possibly, crippling debt, as I played. Reaching the final double bar, I realized that I had to now decide whether to withdraw the piece, accept defeat, and move on, or go back in one last time, thirty-three years older, and not try to “fix it,” but try to chip away whatever stone was left around the ideas to reveal what that nervy young composer had had in mind.

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The 1999 and 2017 versions, side-by-side.

After several weeks, I completed another pass through the work during which I eliminated some of the more self-indulgent range requests of the singers, all of the quirky harmonic spellings that my immature ear had led me to use when notating the (very) chromatic, demanding music. After the practical experience of having composed nine operas, I was able to make the piece only “as hard as it needed to be” and no harder. I've grown up a lot. Honoring Gottschalk, my brother, Schuneman, Haithcock, and Hoffman—all of whom kept faith with the work (and, by extension, me) even when I did not—I put down double bars at the end of the thing for the third time in 33 years and now consider it finished. I’m proud to have one of the very first pieces that my first publisher ever took on finally issued in a form that I think appropriately manifests its subject.

How did I celebrate? By pouring myself a cup of coffee, carrying it out into the back yard of our home in Upstate New York, a wiser, more humble and reverent man, setting it down, and, noticing that the rhubarb needed watering, turning my attention to gardening.

"Now is the Time": Peace, Justice, Good Tunes

There it is, the piano vocal score of your new opera. All those notes. Hundreds of pages of meticulously elevated text. Characters limned through motives, orchestration, clever gimmicks. You flip through the thing, looking for the memorable tunes and....

“I can’t teach you how to write a good tune,” Ned Rorem told me during my first lesson in September 1981 in the tiny attic studio in the mansion at 1726 Locust Street that served as the Curtis Institute, “but I can show you how to make a ‘perfect’ song.” Professional composers craft "inevitability," which listeners and enthusiasts interpret as inspiration. Some readers confuse the joy of “shop-talk” with academic study, and attack composers who pull back the veil in little essays such as this that demystify the process by which a composer does her work.

The fundamental problem with contemporary opera—which is in fabulous shape, in my opinion: lots of new composers trying their hand at lots of vital, socially-conscious subjects, in lots of alternative venues, using all sorts of new technologies—is that, still, still, the overwhelming majority of composers think that creating “elevated parlando” of the sort that this little essay discusses crafting is enough. In fact, if a composer succeeds in creating an opera that sets text in this manner more than half the time, then it is going to be yet another show in search of tunes. Bernstein, looking at one of the tunes that I had penned for my Shining Brow long ago, said that the fact that it rose into recognizable lyric melody was what made it good, and that when it did that, it reminded him of what Marc Blitzstein used to say: “Peace, Justice, and Good Tunes!”

I can’t teach how to compose a good tune any more than Ned (or Lenny) could. And they never talked to me the way that I’m going to talk about setting a line of text to music in this essay. My aim is not to lay down rules, or to make value judgements. This is not particularly deeply thought-through; it is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of strategies. (For example, I’ve completely omitted humorous line-readings, and settings that make the singer a liar, or in disagreement with the words. I'm also leaving out triple and compund meters, and music where the pulse is moving at the eighth note.) I don’t pretend to be an academic. Nothing you’ll read here can be empirically proven to be right or wrong, better or worse. I offer the following thoughts about setting a simple English phrase to music for the delight of non-musicians and the amusement of fellow-composers. We’ve all been here, and, with opera enjoying the resurgence here in the States that it is, there are more of us here than ever.

This essay is not particularly about prosody; rather, it talks about how to make a “highly-elevated” parlando setting of a single, stand-alone common English phrase: “Now is the time for all good souls to come to the aid of their party.”

Somebody once told me: “Play the clarinet in the room; not the one in your head.” It’s great advice. In the case of setting words to music, one has to remember that singers lean heavily on the tradition of “strong” and “weak” beats when deciding how to phrase a melody. Further, when they study their role, they are trained to look for important words, which, traditionally, are put on strong beats. The most important word in a phrase is generally the highest note. If a composer plays against these basic traditions, she should do so knowingly.

I usually begin setting a line of text by doing a “cold read” of it. I set for “sense” first, not for “feel.” Some words, as Jack Beeson explained to me once many years ago, are “inherently fast:” short words, and single syllable words that, if elongated, postpone the amount of time that a listener must wait until they understand what the singer is saying. My stance is that the listener should understand the text above all. Only after I’ve achieved that may I begin to add emotion, color, and psychological effects using the various musical tools in my toolbox. Every moment that an audience is in front of the singer, waiting for her to give them the sense of what they are saying, diminishes the drama just as much as a plot point so obvious that the reveal comes as no surprise.

Having chosen the word deemed “most important” (in this case, I've chosen the word “come”), let’s make it the climax tone. (This is where all those counterpoint exercises you did as a kid come in useful.) Sometimes the most important word is not one that will sound good slung high; that's when you go to Plan B—either by choosing a different word, or through a number of clever tricks we won't talk about here. Then, simply lead up to it, and down from it. Repeatedly hitting the climax tone ends up sounding funny (as Adams intentionally has Madam Mao cluck, chicken-like, about “the book” in Nixon in China) or naive. In any event, it is common sense that, the higher a singer sings, the harder it is to sing; the harder it is to sing, the more intense the emotion. That is the bread and butter of writing for voice.

“Irrational rhythms” include all “tuplets” and non-naturalistic syncopations. (The more "irrational" the rhythm, the more vehemence is being conveyed.) In fact, with parlando recitative, which is what we’re trying to craft here, one starts by trying to capture in the simplest rhythms the essence of a natural line reading, and then, with increasing stylization, aims to enhance the effect of that reading to maximally carry emotional and psychological information. Any time you tie a note across a beat, or introduce a tuplet, emotion increases. The relative weight of the words also shift, making the climax stronger.

One can enhance the naturalism of the line reading by dropping the pitch of the least important words in the lyric. In this case, I dropped the words is, to, and of.

Another strategy is to make certain words “lower neighbors” that are associated with passing chords and secondary dominants in the harmony. In this case, the words is, all, come, and there are associated with intensifying chords. This further puts the spotlight on the most important words. I’ve also made the line more “abstract” this time, separating it into three parts as I would a fugue subject. This is particularly useful if you intend to have the phrase recur in an ensemble later, where you’ll need to be able to treat it contrapuntally. The held tones leave space for other voices to be heard. There’s more artistry and elegance in this line reading, of course, and, with the elegance comes greater lyricism.

The bigger the melodic leap for a singer, the more emotion is generated. Verdi taught us that a dotted rhythm preceding a leap is a thing of great joy and comfort to singers, and excitement to listeners. Dotted rhythms bring out a “marked” quality that voices naturally take on—even stentato can be achieved—remember the way that your mom called out to you the fourth time when you didn’t come in from playing in the backyard for dinner the first three times she called. Big octave leaps also deal efficiently with the problem of moving through the passaggio, if brutally.

Conversely, a line reading can be infused with an enormous amount of emotion quite easily by filling it with suspensions, little staggered breaks, and stretto. This “sobbing” effect is to me the sexiest, most emotionally compelling thing about Monteverdi and company; voices “throb” marvelously (and spontaneously) when asked to do this because of the rubbing together of the vertical harmonies that are being implied by the lubricious melody. This simple arch form is now quite ripe for maximum emotional punch in the hands of any singer—partly because of the hundreds of years of performance practice from whence it cadges its moves.

A singer looking for clues to their character often look to what the composer elects to put above the passaggio; a composer who wants her words understood places them below the passaggio. The “break” in the voice—let’s say it is a D on the second line from the top in treble clef for females and the same place an octave lower for males—is a naturally-occurring resource, or curse, depending on how you look at it. Singers work hard to iron out the change of sound between the two voices whilst traversing it. Composers playing “the clarinet in the room” need to be aware of that. One can help a singer out enormously by simply putting a rest in where they would customarily change voices. In this case, I also messed with the suspensions, pushing them together in stretto to increase the excitement of the line reading.

Another way of creating “arc,” or “lift” to a phrase while enhancing the sense of the words is to make of entire clauses musical gestures. In this case, I’ve made the first measure into an up-beat to the word “souls,” and the rest a simple “paying off,” as in when a ship has just crested a wave.

Another, subtler, method of intensifying understandability and emotion simultaneously is the insertion of dissonance on key words. In this case, I’ve limned the words time, all, souls, aid, and party as though smudging them with my thumb. They “grind” a bit, and hit the ear harder. Combined with lower neighbors, the underlying tune remains secure, but the decorations act as melodic intensifiers. Also, in this example, I’ve intentionally placed two segments of the line “time for all good” and “come to the aid” across the passaggio to intensify them through physical challenge, separating off the head and the tail of the line in a way that accentuate the importance of the central climax.

Combining all the effects discussed above, one final result is a “highly-elevated” parlando setting of the text. It would be impossible for a singer not to sound entirely energized singing it unless they were told by their coach to ignore the many articulations, rhythmic nuances, and other effects arrayed by the composer in an effort to help them shine. I haven’t talked about the crucial matter of articulations. I have elsewhere, and I will do so in another essay. But, for now, I will only encourage any young composer to look at the way that Benjamin Britten uses articulations in his music—and, particularly, in the way that Peter Pears executed them. They constitute an astonishingly varied and specific collection of colors, effects, and techniques.

Having now created really exciting dialogue and recitative for your opera, you can sit down and write the excellent tunes that are opera’s true heart and soul. Nothing is more revealing and inspiring than when a composer throws themselves over the parapet of song; nothing is safer and more disheartening (and frustrating) than a well-intentioned opera filled with nothing more than the sort of highly-effective, honorable, ultimately forgettable vocal writing described above.

Opera Saratoga Rocks Blitzstein's Cradle

Ginger Costa-Jackson is Moll in Opera Saratoga's production. Photo Credit: Gary David Gold.

Opera Saratoga opened a brilliant staging by Lawrence Edelson of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock on 9 July 2017 in Saratoga Springs. The production alone is reason enough to go. But the chance to be a part of the show’s inspiring, fascinating, distillation of American Music Theater History is something that anyone who loves either music theater or opera (or, like me both—and especially the intersection between the two) should witness. For the first time since 1960, the show made famous by being shut down temporarily by the Feds and performed from the house with the composer onstage at the piano is being performed with the composer’s own orchestrations. If the media can be the message, sometimes the venue is the vision.

At the age of seven, small and awestruck in a plush red velvet seat in Uiehlein Concert Hall in Milwaukee, I was mesmerized by the conductor, Kenneth Schermerhorn. He was strikingly handsome, and athletic. He was charismatic, and when he raised his arms it was easy to imagine that he was celebrating the Eucharist. In fact, he radiated the authority of a minister, but his back was to us, and there was sensuality in his movements when he cued the glittering array of brass instruments, sumptuous strings, and bird-like woodwinds that stirred me. But he was more than a shepherd guiding a flock; he was the orchestra’s sovereign—he was the only one who literally knew the score, and the congregation read only their assigned lines. I didn’t possess then the language to put words to what I was thinking and feeling, but I understand now that what I was experiencing was the intersection of aesthetic, political, psychological, and spiritual forces that constitute performance at the highest level. It blew my mind. The concert hall was like a cathedral, the audience like a congregation, and the communion—for me, at least—entirely spiritual.

In retrospect, I’m not surprised that—sitting there trying to decide which of the many instruments on stage I would most like to play—I decided to become a composer first and a performer second. It was because my father had unintentionally taught me that although Power can compel, it does not last; my mother had by example taught me that Authority can inspire, and therefore last forever. Like Love, Authority must be earned. Every time a new piece of music is read for the first time the composer starts with all the Power and no Authority. If the music inspires and moves the performers, then the composer’s Authority grows. If it does not, well, as Virgil Thomson, whose game-changing Four Saints in Three Acts premiered in 1927, once told me, “Don’t worry about withdrawing pieces, baby; they have a way of withdrawing themselves.”

Never has there been a composer who so comprehensively manifested both in life and work the ironic union of opposites than Marc Blitzstein. Son of a wealthy banker, he received a full scholarship to study piano at no less than the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music; but he wanted to compose. Believing in “art for art’s sake,” this tonal composer traveled to Europe and studied with Arnold Schoenberg, dean of modernist atonal composers. Homosexual, he married a woman whose translations of Brecht introduced him to not just his theories on theater, but his politics, and the socially conscious Weimar Composers—Hans Eisler, Kurt Weill, and Paul Hindemith. By 1938, his first “commercial” music-theater work, which was really a numbers opera, The Cradle Will Rock’s "second act" opener was a self-lacerating duet called “Art for Art’s Sake” in which a painter and musician do, well, what Blitzstein was taught to do during Tea Time at Curtis. The apotheosis of this transit? Composing, for the Metropolitan Opera Sacco and Vanzetti, a grand opera about two humble immigrant anarchists convicted and executed for a crime for a crime they may not have committed. Had there been no Blitzstein, there would have been no “radical chic” at the Dakota for Bernstein, no link from Eisler to Bernstein, by way of Boulanger. And we’d all be deprived of the most vital branch of the American lyric theater’s stream.

When Olive Stanton (who was not the neophyte that myth and Tim Robbins in his lovely film paint her as having been) stood up on cue in the audience in 1937 there was Method (though Welles famously hated the Method) in the madness, magic in the moment. “I’m checkin’ home now,” she sang, and our hearts are meant to rush to her, knowing full well that she’s all artifice, Blitzstein’s throaty Lenya. The sarcastic earnestness of Blitzstein’s lyrics embodies his own inner-conflicts. For example, instead of allowing us to really care for Moll when she asks Andy behind the lunch counter for “Coffee and” Blitzstein crafted a joke: “Coffee and … Andy.” His come-hither dramaturgy is smacked down by a Brechtian, distance-making pun. (Similarly, when Paul Muldoon and I wrote the opera Bandanna together, I encouraged him to indulge his penchant for Oxonian wordplay, even though the characters would, by and large, not have expressed themselves thus, and his hand, as an author, would constantly push the audience away as the music pulled them in.) Blitzstein penned broad caricatures not meant to engage us emotionally, yet, in Moll—on whom I modelled the character of Doll in my own Vera of Las Vegas for this reason, and who is portrayed movingly by Ginger Costa-Jackson in this production—he created for the audience a compassionate avatar.

In the Druggist—evocatively sung with vocal slice and clear diction by Keith Jameson in this production—Blitzstein has clearly crafted a Lear figure, but gives his character no satisfactory payoff. We’re meant to be stirred by Larry Forman’s moral authority, yet we meet him two-thirds of the way through the show and, deprived of the personal magnetism of a Jerry Orbach, the role falls flat—Christopher Burchett is a forceful, slightly bemused, ultimately charismatic Larry in this production. Who do we hear about all night long? Mister Mister. He’s more fun to spend time with, after all. We’re not meant to care about Larry. As Everyman, he’s the manifestation of our righteous indignation. Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1933 Inaugural, had put it plainly: “The only thing we have to fear … is fear itself.” We don’t need to know Larry until he, by showing that he is not afraid of Mister Mister, deprives the Trump-ian Monster of his Power by revealing that he has no Authority.

Bernstein told me that Marc had intended to respect “the third wall” up until the offstage trumpets at the end. Only a year after that fateful night in 1937 when Welles and Blitzstein were compelled by circumstance to eliminate the third wall, Thornton Wilder would run with it, eliminating it without fuss entirely in the shape of Our Town’s Stage Manager. That in 1935-36 the season Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway, Blitzstein would compose an opera (that is a musical that is an opera—it all begins to feel a bit like the reveal in Chinatown: “My sister, my daughter”) that bites the hands of the people who most underwrite opera is unsurprising—I write operas to speak Truth to Power, too. But that he would score it for an orchestra in the pit and embrace the idea of the extravagant, Welles-designed crystal palace set for the 1937 staging is deeply ironic. The orchestra is, after all, an artistic manifestation of 18th century European society, everyone playing their part, only the benign tyrant on the podium knowing the score. Welles’ masterstroke of an insight (he was, above all, a genius of an editor, dramaturge, and adaptor of found material) was to understand that the Authority, the Authenticity, of the piece would be damn-near apotheotic if the composer was alone onstage at the piano, calling the scenes out as though at a backer’s audition—simultaneously the audience’s and backers’ supplicant and god.

In the theater, there are strict protocols for who may speak to whom during production. I’m well-versed in them and have, in the past, relied on them during moments of high-stress, when one is taking artistic risks and feeling particularly exposed. As a Curtis grad (and composer / conductor / librettist / director of nine operas) who, like fellow-alums Blitzstein and Bernstein, was presumeably schooled during weekly Tea Time on “how to behave” in a Green Room, and who “plays the clarinet in the room, not the one in his head,” I sat in the house during the orchestra dress rehearsal and took the piece’s temperature as a seasoned peer. The forces at play during the performance were absolutely incredible: I could feel the grinding of gears as the (decadent?) European Power Structure Paradigm of the Orchestra (with a capital “O” onstage, not nine feet below in a pit, because of the practicalities of this particular theater) and the Maestro both served and upstaged the document. I thought of the great actor / writer / director Howard Da Silva, veteran of the Blacklist and the original production of Cradle, director of several revivals, including the 1947 one conducted by Bernstein. Suspension of Disbelief was never in the cards, of course; but this was different.

When Bernstein conducted that 1948 revival—the first to use Blitzstein’s original orchestrations—he was given a few lines of dialogue, thereby creating what John Mauceri referred to as “provenance” for his own uttering of the same lines last night while conducting the orchestra dress rehearsal of Opera Saratoga’s production—the first to use Blitzstein’s orchestrations since the 1960 New York City Opera radio broadcast featuring Tammy Grimes conducted by Lehman Engel. When we discussed it, Opera Saratoga’s artistic and general director Larry Edelson elaborated,

“I wanted to give Cradle a fully staged presentation, as so often it is done semi-staged or in concert. My one nod to the original circumstances of the premiere is to have Maestro serve as the Clerk. This has become a part of the tradition of the piece, and with our theater and having the orchestra on stage behind the set, I felt we could honor that part of the piece’s history while still maintaining the through line of a fully staged production. (If our theater had a pit, I would likely have made a different choice.) In the libretto, it actually says that Blitzstein played the roles of Clerk, Reporter and Professor Mamie on Dec. 5, 1937 when it opened at the Mercury Theatre!”

Blitzstein, a man of the theater, would have known himself well-served by a maestro who respected and protected the integrity of his notated document as expertly as did Mauceri. (His Decca recording of Blitzstein’s Regina, with Angelina Reaux, Samuel Ramey, and Katherine Ciesinsky is one of my treasured touchstones as a composer.) But would Blitzstein have assigned Maestro lines of dialogue? Did he want to have that conversation? It’s a daring idea, and one I’ve seen put into play in a dozen black box operas and shows over the years. In the context of the Opera Saratoga production, the orchestra and Mauceri onstage, albeit behind the crafty single-piece set painted Rust-Oleum burnt red to match the interior of the theater, it strongly underscored the fascinating Power versus Authority dynamics at play between Maestro and Composer, Maestro and Director, Orchestra and Cast, Document and Production.

In fact, to my ears, the presence of the orchestra in Opera Saratoga’s production serves as the “dramaturgical nuclear reactor” that powered the document—not the least because Edelson’s staging expertly counterpoints with specific choreography and stage a dozen orchestrational flourishes. That Blitzstein’s orchestrations—suave European Weill-isms and an instrumentation similar to Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel—married to sure-fire American commercial-scoring tricks from the 30s by way of vaudeville (read: those wonderful Paramount circuit orchestras all playing Charlie Chaplin’s scores) and tartly Stravinsky-esque doublings by way of Boulanger and Copland. Indeed, biographer Howard Pollack (whose recent Blitzstein biography eclipses even Eric Gordon’s superb Mark the Music) underlined for me just why the orchestrational similarities between Blitzstein and the Brecht-collaborator Weill are so important: “the novel use of accordion, guitar, and Hawaiian guitar ... all enhance the Brechtian distancing effects found in the work proper.” The Eisler-iana is there, too, of course; but the effect is not as chiaroscuro as the European; Blitzstein’s scoring is more fun, and a bit sexier.

Maurice Abravanel told me at Tanglewood that, when he conducted the first Broadway production of Weill’s Street Scene in 1946, he agitated for a “scrappier” orchestral sound, but that Weill insisted that American Broadway audiences wanted “sumptuous strings, plush tuttis.” There are few of those in Blitzstein’s Cradle orchestration—it is quirky, original, edgy, and far more like Little Threepenny Music than a commercial score. Throughout, as one might expect, the effects that Hershey Kay and Sid Ramin would in a few years craft with Bernstein for On the Town, and West Side Story are nascent. In Blitzstein, however, they all are dropped within a few measures, the point having been made. During one sequence for Missus Mister, Blitzstein uses a single maraca to limn what Bernstein would have fleshed out into a fully-scored rhumba; during another, a tender duet for the doomed Polish couple, Blitzstein adroitly adds a dash of menace in a bass drum, stalking away below like a heavy; in another passage, scored for low brass, as Bugs threatens Druggist, Nino Rota’s “Corleone Theme” from his 70s score for The Godfather is thrillingly presaged.

“As the director,” pointed out Edelson, “I didn’t feel the impulse to update the piece or to view it through a particularly 2017 lens, because the piece, written as allegory, speaks to me as if it were written yesterday. I certainly added a few things in the staging to highlight themes that resonated strongly with me, but I also trust the audience. I wanted to set up Blitzstein’s ‘Steeltown, USA’ so that the audience could have their own response to the material—not to force a response on them.”

This is evident throughout the production. One of Edelson’s crucial, droll grace notes is the surprise appearance on the feet of the members of the Liberty Committee of stylish red pumps that perfectly draw a line from them to the prostitute Moll, who, of course, has had the fashion sense—not to mention the integrity—to sport them from the start.

The opera house is a secular cathedral, the audience a congregation, and the communion celebrated by the actors and audience, presided over by a trinity comprised of Author-Director-Conductor. There is no greater transposable story than that. There’s an old saying: “The ink’s not dry until you die.” At the beginning of the rehearsal, Mauceri, dressed in blazer and tie, about to give the opera’s downbeat, rose from his stool and, over his shoulder, drily announced to the production staff, “I’d like to point out that the paint on my stool is wet.” I cannot think of a better metaphor for “free, adult, uncensored” theater. Thanks to this production, I am ready, as a devotee of Blitzstein’s work, to let go of Marc on the piano stool and allow his authorial Authority to grow, to allow the ongoing struggle to reconcile Power, Authority, and Truth to be carried forward through the lens of a conductor’s vision. I encourage everyone else to witness as Blitzstein’s powerful orchestral Cradle at last begins to earn its rightful Authority by catching this production while the paint’s still wet.

This essay has appeared in the Huffington Post. You can read it there by clicking here.

I've also written about Marc Blitzstein here.