Staged Workshop

There is nothing like a staged workshop in order to tell if something works. Standing with a score in hand makes everything seem like an oratorio, lecture, or sermon. In one week, the Center City Opera singers managed to put DRAGON on its feet. The workshop was staged by Leland Kimball, OperaDelaware's General Director. Lee will direct the piece in June. Jason Switzer, who will sing the leading baritone role, made a quick study. It was encouraging to have the show come to life (honestly, some of it had gotten a bit boring) and for some of it to be very emotional.  Time for gathering a few opinions for some small changes and then on to orchestration.     

On its feet at last

After a libretto reading and two music workshops, SLAYING THE DRAGON will at last be on its feet this weekend in Wilmington and PhIladelphia. Some of the scenes, frankly, were starting to go stale without staging. Others truly benefited from the extensive workshops. Although everything flows very well, there are always things to fix. The presentations are 8pm Saturday in Wilmington at OperaDelaware and 2pm Sunday at the Prince Music Theater's Black box.

WERTHER at Minnesota Opera

Jules Massenet's operas are not amongst the most performed in the repertoire, so it was a treat to go to St. Paul to catch Minnesota Opera's upcoming production of WERTHER.

Goethe's 1774 novel, although wildly popular in its day, is not much on the reading lists today, so in some ways the opera has outlived its source. As adapted in the opera, the plot is simple: Artist/writer loves girl, girl can't marry artist; artist is despondent and shoots himself, eventually dies. All remaining are sad or hurt.

As a character Werther is a self absorbed and the bourgeois grownup in us makes us want to say to him "Grow up!" or "Get a life!" But everybody is fascinated by the youthful idealistic flameout--the Jim Morrisons, Kurt Cobains, or Christopher McCandlesses (the Into the Wild guy) who refuse to conform. There really is no other character like Werther in all of opera.

I am doing lots of tweaks on my own opera right now, so dramaturgy is on my mind. There are some "rules" that WERTHER breaks. A couple of them are: don't take too long to die and don't take too long to get to the good stuff. But those who are willing to wade through a bit of exposition are richly rewarded by the opera's third act.

At that point, newly married Charlotte has realized that she loves Werther and not her husband, Albert. She frets about him in a beautiful aria (the "Letter" aria) and later sings one of the mezzo national anthems--"Va! Laissez coulez mes larmes" which has the extra treat of the most important saxophone solo in all opera. He also sings the unforgettable "Pourqoui me reveiller." And by this time in the show, you care about the characters, particularly Charlotte who has been trapped by a promise she made to her dying mother to marry the rather drab Albert. The payoff is worth the wait--I think the third act of Werther is one of the best acts in opera--right up there with the second act of CARMEN, or the last act of RIGOLETTO. And if the act is done well, as it was Thursday evening, Werther's very long death later is made more compelling.

Dale Johnson, the opera's Artistic Director, has assembled a strong company, especially Werther (James Valenti), Charlotte (Roxana Constantinescu ), and her sister Sophie (Angela Mortellaro, one of their fine resident artists), who are are able to look their parts, act their parts, and sing their parts. That's not an easy trifecta to pull off. 

Also hard to pull off is Massenet's music.  It is often so spare that it has almost Mozartean delicacy. Pit/stage coordination can be challenging because sometimes the only person on the beat is the singer on stage. Conductor Christoph Campestrini was particularly fearless in creating little sister Sophie's youthful fun, and act one had a fine and phat bassoon solo.

Scenically, the nineteenth century drawing room of Charlotte's house and her bucolic yard is contrasted with a large black bridge and a black and white backdrop of an industrial riverside. This show is not Emmeline, or Oliver, or any other about humanity in the grip of  the industrial revolution, so it seemed a tiny bit heavy handed, but the moving bridge certainly allowed for some quick scene changes and dramatic points of view.

Stick a fork in it (not quite)

On New Year's Eve, I finished the piano vocal score to SLAYING THE DRAGON. In my process, this means the show is over 50% complete. Next comes the orchestration. Since the plan is to keep the orchestra small, it is going to be flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, harp, percussion/timpani, piano and synthesizer, and string quintet. My friend and fellow composer Craig Bohmler is a big fan of tuba in a small orchestra, so I have thought I'd give it a try. Since there is likely to be some aggressive brass writing in the show, it will be good for the brass section to have a "big bottom."

The next workshop for DRAGON is Saturday January 14th. In general, I wrote the music for the characters first and their conflicts last, so the music written since the fall workshop is more strident, angular, and dramatic. Too much of this turns an audience off, but the less tuneful music actually sets up the melodic parts so they can be enjoyed, otherwise too much sweet music ends up being like a too-large chocolate sundae, lovely at first, but then boring, and perhaps even too much to digest.

The dragon is almost slain...

My opera with Ellen Frankel, SLAYING THE DRAGON, is 90% complete, at least according to the spreadsheet I am keeping on it. Center City Opera has taken great care of us, with a full music reading scheduled for January and a staged, off-book presentation in February. At least for me, operas get easier to complete as they move along. You already know your characters and you are filling in the large mural in the last few spots. The last challenging spot was a bit of "hate rock," something that sounds genuine and completely out of context. Hopefully it will not sound like a composer wrote it.

SILENT NIGHT at Minnesota Opera

Minnesota Opera has much to be proud of about for its premiere production of SILENT NIGHT which plays November 12, 15 ,17, 19, and 20 at the Ordway Theatre in downtown St. Paul. I attended their final dress on November 10th. Given the complexity and size of the production it went so smoothly that it seemed like it could have been opening night.

SILENT NIGHT is about the World War I Christmas truce of 1914, when the opposing sides briefly put their guns down and shared the holiday together. It is the last gasp of fin-de-siecle gallantry before the horrors of mechanized modern war bring humanity to a much crueler plane. It is a story that deserves to be better known and is ripe for opera.

Everything works in this production. The set--sort of LES MIS on steroids--uses a turntable to switch efficiently between the French, German, and English (Scottish) sides.  The no mans land in between is atop the turntable. The cast was uniformly compelling, and the orchestra played beautifully. Indeed, the orchestral interludes--of the opening battles of 1914 and the administering of last rites--were some of the high points of the show. Kevin Puts' magnificent music has the ability to move from prickly modern to beautiful tonal clouds that put me in mind of Ravel. Music and singing play a key role in bringing the sides together to celebrate Christmas and the emotional climax of the opera for me was the moment when a singer from the German side and a Scottish bagpiper come together for a musical entente that brings everyone out of the trenches. (I hope the bagpiper gets a bow!) Sometimes I wished Puts had paid a little less respect to librettist Mark Campbell's fine text and let the characters sing, but  Puts is young and talented and will learn to bend the text to the musical will.

One of the things I was dreading was the monochrome effect of operas that have one voice gender--Britten's all male BILLY BUDD comes most to mind. The effect can be of too much chocolate or too much heat in a curry. Fortunately, the character of Anna Sorensen, a Norwegian opera singer is threaded throughout the piece. She reminded me of a much more sober and thoughtful version of Marie in DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT. Her high notes provide a welcome balance to the otherwise all male cast--the olive in the martini.

The libretto is based on the screenplay for the recent French film, Joyeux Noel. I could have wished for some more operatic pathos than it provided at the end but that probably is just from having seen too much Puccini. I was reminded of this when my favorite character in the opera, Ponchel, the French lieutenant's aide-de-camp, was mistakenly shot. He is shot, he sings, and dies. In the next opera of their season, WERTHER, the title character sings for a whole act before he dies from his self inflicted gunshot. If you have a chance, go see BOTH of them.

photo of dress rehearsal by Michael Daniel

Carlisle Floyd

Florida State University celebrated Carlisle Floyd's 85th year with a concert of his works performed by faculty, students, and guest artists. George Darden, a former student of Mo. Floyd's tore up the piano in a wide range of excerpts, including pieces from most of Floyd's operas. I went down to see the concert with Craig Bohmler, an amazing composer and pianist who is a fellow student of Floyd. Craig studied both piano and composition with Carlisle.

I spent '80-'81 working with Floyd while at the Houston Opera Studio. At the time, I found it very trying. What he demanded was that one should find the most interesting part of a story, and not be afraid to manipulate it so that it is continually compelling. Otherwise, it should be abandoned. We spent most of the year creating synopses and adaptations of stories, abandoning one after another, so I wrote very little music that year. Although it took awhile to come to grips with this cycle of create/abandon/move on, in the end it turned me into a theatre composer.

Carlisle has a new project up his sleeve, which is great to see. 

A little excerpt beautifully sung by Center City Opera artist in residence Paul Corujo and pianist David Hsu from the first music workshop of our new opera, SLAYING THE DRAGON. From near the end of the show, when Rabbi Nathan Goodman tries to convince a skeptical crowd that Jerry, the Klan man, has truly renounced his path and deserves a fair hearing from the crowd. The setting is a Martin Luther King Day celebration at his synagogue. The musical references to the Berg Violin Concerto are intentional.

Ellen Frankel's paraphrase of the MLK words are: 

Darkness cannot banish darkness,

Hatred cannot banish hate,

Vengeance cannot cancel vengeance,

Only love avails.

Workshop progress

It's been an extremely productive few days in Philly. Because the singers at Crnter City Opera are so used to workshops and readings, they aren't afraid to make helpful suggestions.

Slaying the Dragon workshop in Philadelphia

Today, Center City Opera began rehearsing for its reading of SLAYING THE DRAGON. Over half the music has been drafted. They will present one reading in Philadelphia, and another down in nearby Wilmington. A fully staged workshop takes place in February and the premiere in June. In this show, it seems that the "good guys" have been written first. This coalition of characters--the Rabbi and his wife, the Episcopal Priest, the Asian leader, the African American Reverend, the holocaust survivor--have had to be made into a believable group who are far from monolithic in their attitudes.