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SOMETHING
ABOUT LIBRETTOS
By Douglas Moore
OPERA NEWS
Sept. 30th, 1961
There is a skit by William Saroyan
called Opera Opera, a piece full of silliness and ridiculous repetitions.
Many would agree that it is only a mild distortion of the real thing.
Much as the American public likes opera, it has little respect for the
libretto as a work of art or even as a theatrical piece. This is perhaps
natural. Granted that there are a number of librettos of quality in
the standard repertory, our audiences used to hear them either in a
foreign language or in translation so inept as to destroy their effectiveness.
The librettos written in English for the operas by American composers
produced at the Metropolitan during the Gatti-Gasazza regime were, with
one or two exceptions, pretentious and stuffy. At a time when the theater
was in a fresh and lively state, they took as their models the dramatic
ideas of nineteenth-century opera.
Edward Johnson once remarked that American
composers and their librettists approached their work with imaginations
paralyzed by the glamor of the past. It never seemed to occur to them
that there should be any relation to the living theater. What was right
for Rossini and Verdi would be right for them. They forgot that the
nineteenth-century composers were writing for the contemporary theater.
Today the situation is much better.
Skillful translators like the Martins, the Meads, Edward Dent, W.H.
Auden and John Gutman have made a part of the standard repertory available
in English. Although a large public seems to prefer opera in the original
language, translated operas are making headway and audiences are discovering
new satisfactions in the familiar repertory. This is particularly true
of the Mozart operas, such as Figaro and Cosi, where the subtle relationships
of the characters and the humor are lost when sung in an unfamiliar
language.
The American composer also is showing
better judgment in his selection of material to set. Menotti, who seems
to have the theater in his bones, has shown that opera can be understandable
and exciting to large audiences. Beyond the lyricism and singability
of his operas, he has a fine sense of what will work on the stage and
the ability to write in a literate and sometimes poetic style.
We now have operas, or operas in the
making, with librettos based upon plays by Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill,
Tennessee Williams, Archibald MacLeish, William Saroyan, Pirandello
and Brecht and new librettos by such men as Thornton Wilder, Stephen
Vincent Benet and Paul Horgan. Until recently it has been difficult
to persuade successful authors to collaborate or even to allow adaptations
of their works. The fact that they will do so now is an indication of
the increasing prestige of American opera. No one can say today that
our composers are out of touch with the contemporary theater.
Choosing a libretto is a ticklish thing
for a composer. Since an opera may take two years to write, and since
he must live with his characters and continue to believe in them through
the arduous months of planning, composing and scoring, the decision
is painful. It is hard to generalize on what makes a good opera subject.
We know from reading about the difficulties of Verdi and Puccini that
good stories are hard to find. In the first place, the subject must
lend itself to the inevitable distortion that comes from singing rather
than speaking the lines; that rules out the matter-of-fact and the everyday.
On the other hand, American audiences have shown little taste for fantasy.
The heroic figure from history is hard to humanize, and opera stories
(Wagner to the contrary) must above all be full of human feelings. When
a composer finds a story, it often happens that some other composer
has got there first. We all seem to be looking for the same qualities,
and they are rare. Even if he does find the story he likes, the rights
may be unobtainable.
I have been fortunate in my collaborators
and in the choice of our material, but there were eleven years when
I could not find a libretto that seemed to work. My first opera was
an adaptation of Philip Barry’s play White Wings. It was Barry’s
idea that it be turned into an opera, and he allowed me to cut and shape
the dialogue myself. The play was a fantastic satire on ritual and tradition
told in terms of a family of street cleaners. The prose style was beautifully
cadenced, and in spite of all the surface horseplay the story had a
real poignancy. One thing that Barry and I discovered to our surprise
was that so much dialogue could be omitted without harm to the play.
Music, although slowing up the pace, can provide many short cuts in
characterization and description. A play adapted for an opera naturally
does not offer many opportunities for set pieces or ensembles, but there
are advantages in the uninterrupted dramatic flow that results.
My second opera, which came three years
later, in 1938, was an adaptation of stephen Vincent Benet’s famous
short story The Devil and Daniel Webster. I had been urging Benet to
write a libretto for me, and we did collaborate on a high-school operetta,
The Headless Horseman. One day he asked me if I would like a libretto
on the Webster story. He was worried because dramatic versions were
beginning to appear and he wanted his own definitive one; he felt, however,
that it should be done with music. We discussed the way the story might
be treated so that there could be love interest, and so that everything
could happen on a single evening. Then he went ahead with the libretto.
Benet was not an opera lover. He may
have seen one or two, but when I showed him some libretto samples he
said he preferred to proceed in his own way. The result was a tight
dramatic story with fine characterization and some of his most beautiful
poetry. It would have been impossible to put the whole thing to music
without a great deal of change, and I thought it would be challenging
to see what could be done with the text as it was. What came of our
collaboration was a rather unusual combination of speech and song. There
are set pieces in Webster, but long stretches of dialogue set it apart
from traditional Singspiel or opera-comique. The most difficult problem
was the treatment of Webster’ great speech: I felt that it should
be spoken, but it was the high point of the opera and needed a musical
climax. This was provided by an orchestral background that mounted in
intensity with the oratory and was supplemented at its conclusion by
a choral outburst from the jury. Critics have sometimes pointed out
that the music of the opera is too self-effacing, but I still think
the values are right, and audiences are always moved by the work.
It was after Webster that the eleven
years went by. Not until I talked with Arnold Sundgaard, who suggested
an adaptation of Rolvaag’s novel Giants in the Earth, could I
find something that I really wanted to do. The story is a beautiful
and stirring episode in the lives of the Norwegian pioneers in Minnesota.
The two principal characters are a strong man, a natural land-settler,
and his wife, a sensitive, unhappy woman destroyed by the rigors of
the life.
This was my first experience with a
novel as the basis of an opera. Sundgaard and I found that there was
almost too much material for our own good; a short story is concentrated—you
can get it all in the action—but in a novel you run the danger
of omitting things that properly explain the dramatic sequence. In this
adaptation, however, we were able to provide strong dramatic action
and opportunities for short lyric solos. How successful we were cannot
be decided until there is another and better production than the one
at Columbia University in 1951. The critics did not like it, but the
audiences did.
The Ballad of Baby Doe was my first
experience with history. The story is hard to think of as history, however,
because it all happened so recently. In 1935 I read in the morning paper
of the death of an old woman who was found frozen in a miner’s
shack outside Leadville, Colorado. It appears that she was the widow
of one of Colorado’s richest mine owners, Horace Tabor, sometime
U.S. senator, and that she had been fabulously beautiful. This certainly
seemed like opera material, and the further I got into the story the
more fascinating it was. The woman had been thirty years Tabor’s
junior; there was a great scandal when, in order to marry her, he had
divorced his first wife, Augusta, whose indomitable courage had kept
him going through many lean years. A decade after the marriage his fortunes
took a bad turn, leaving him penniless. His young wife, who had been
suspected of being only a gold-digger, turned out to be his main reliance,
and after his death she took up her long vigil of thirty-six years beside
his abandoned mine in Leadville.
For some reason this opera never got
written in 1935,but I was overjoyed when in 1953 the Central City Opera
invited me to write it for them to produce. Baby Doe, before her marriage
to Tabor, had actually lived in Central City, so there was great local
interest in her story. I asked John Latouche, who had suggested some
sort of collaboration, if he would be interested in doing a libretto,
and soon he was as involved as I with those three fascinating characters.
Here again there was almost too much material. Three operas could be
written about this story: one on the early years, one (the one we wrote)
about the romance of Baby and Tabor and one about the tragic end of
their daughter, Silver Dollar, who was found scalded to death in a Chicago
rooming house. We did get a great deal of it in the opera, and in the
last scene, which had elements of memory and looking ahead, were able
to suggest some of the rest of it.
This time I hoped we could habve some
extended arias without slowing up the action; thanks to Latouche’s
remarkable theater sense, this was achieved. Baby Doe has five real
arias, Augusta two, Tabor two. We also managed to bring the flavorsome
William Jennings Bryan into the action with a speech which, in contrast
to Webster’s, the great man sang. The words, hoever, are not Bryan’s.
His speeches may have been good oratory, but they were prosy and cumbersome.
Bryan’s speech is partly Whitman, partly the Bible and the rest
vintage Latouche.
One question about writing a libretto:
shall it be prose or verse? In Baby Doe I asked Latouche, who was skillful
at rhyming, to stick to cadenced prose. Being unmetrical, prose is more
interesting for a composer. It leaves him freer with his rhythms, and
rhymes themselves can be very distracting when you hear them coming
out regularly.
The Baby Doe story has many assets.
It is full of the color of the vivid mining days in Colorado, it has
four scenes where a chorus may be employed naturally, and the tug and
pull between the three central characters gives it emotional depth and
dramatic interest. Although there are eleven scenes and it is difficult
to avoid short pauses between them, there seems to be no loss of momentum
as the story develops.
One year after the Central City production
of Baby Doe a wonderful idea came to me from a friend. Why not write
a real soap opera? The television soap opera is so much a part of American
civilization that a real one, complete with commercials and corn, might
hold great appeal for audiences. I asked Arnold Sundgaard again to collaborate
with me, and the whole venture was a delight to us both. In selecting
a typically sentimental and absurd episode in which a surgeon who has
been making unsuccessful advances to a pretty nurse finds himself about
to operate on her fiance, we found situations which, in the fervent
style of television, lent themselves admirably to operatic singing.
For the concluding commercial we were able to concoct a real quartet
in which the announcer joined with the principals in extolling the virtues
of the advertised product—naturally enough, soap. This kind of
fooling cannot be sustained very long, but Gallantry, which is what
we called our opera, does well in its half hour.
It is a long way from Baby Doe and
Gallantry to Henry James, and audiences who have liked them may be surprised
at my new opera, based upon one of his greatest novels, The Wings of
the Dove. There are good reasons why this subject should not be chosen.
There have been several stage versions, one by James himself, and they
have all been failures. The plot itself—a triangle in which a
young woman, desperately in love with a poor man whom she is not allowed
to marry, involves him in a relationship with an heiress who is about
to die—is strong theatrically, but much of the quality of the
novel comes from James’ literary style. This style is definitely
not of the theater. It is opaque and involved: points are suggested
rather than stated. The reader is kept on pints and needles wondering
what has really happened or is going to happen. Things seldom happen
in the present. Apart from this cryptic quality of the storytelling,
a great deal of the fascination lies in the Jamesian vocabulary and
phrase, both of which are impressive and much admired.
James Thurber, in an article in The
New York, referred to The Wings of the Dove is a sort of Lorelei rock
for dramatists who think they can make it work on the stage. He did
admit, perhaps jocosely, that the solution might lie in a soap opera
or in a grand opera. At any rate, the story lends itself to such effective
scenes, the characters are so strong, particularly the two women, that
it seemed well worth trying. It is also the kind of story, with its
psychological subtleties, that interests audiences today. If we could
slant it toward rather than away from its audiences without sacrificing
its quality, Ethan Ayer, my collaborator, thought it might work.
Just s in Giants kin the Earth, the
initial difficulty was to explain the story fully enough to be understood
by those who have not read the novel. After we decided how to handle
the exposition the details of retailing the plot were not hard, because
the scenes are all understandable and exciting. Before the libretto
was in its final shape we tried it out with people unfamiliar with the
novel to make sure that nothing essential was being left out.
One thing we had to do was to change
the name of the impecunious young man from Merton Densher to Miles Dunster.
The name Densher could not be enunciated today without a ribald response,
and while it will undoubtedly offend the faithful it had to be done.
In other respects we have tried to adhere to the characters and events
as James presented them.
The question of the language and its
suitability for singing is another matter. In my opinion, Mr. Ayer has
been singularly successful in reproducing the flavor of the James dialogue
without mystifying the listener. He underlined every speech recorded
in the novel, and when we came to the pertinent situation he would use
as much of the original as seemed possible. Here is an example of what
he has done. It deals with the first meeting between Kate and Dunster.
Kate is the scheming young woman. This is James:
She had observed a ladder against a
garden wall, andhad trusted herself to climb it as to be able to see
over into the probable garden on the other side. On reaching the top
she had found herself face to face with a gentleman engaged in a like
calculation at the same moment, and the two inquirers had remained confronted
on their ladders. The great point was that for the rest of that evening
they had been perched—they had not climbed down….And without
a happy hazard six months later the incident would have closed in that
account of it….Kate had one afternoon found herself opposite [Merton
Densher] on the underground railway. She had entered the train at Sloane
Square. Densher was already in it, on the other bench, and at the farthest
angle….Kate was in fact sure that the very next station was the
young man’s true goal—which made it clear that he was going
on only from the wish to speak to her. He had to go on, for this purpose,
to High Street, Kensington, as it was not till then that the exit of
a passenger gave him his chance…
This passage was the basis for a love
duet in the first scne in the opera, as follows:
MILES: Do you remember meeting face
to face with me at somebody’s party.
Across
a garden wall?
We
climbed a ladder, each
From
opposite sides.
KATE: And the garden you were in was mine.
MILES: And mine was yours.
KATE: Do you remember meeting on the udnerground
And
on the other bench
You
sat and at my stop
You
still were there?
MILES: And at my step
BOTH: And at your stop from High Street, Kensington
To
Lancaster Gate
You
still were there?
Milly (the heiress) in her attitude
toward her illness is described by James as follows:
The beauty of the bloom had gone from
the old sense of safety—that was distinct: she had left it behind
her forever. But the beauty of the idea of a great adventure, a big
dim experiement or struggle in which she might, more responsibly than
ever before, take a hand, had been offered her instead. It was as if
she had to pluck off her breast, to throw away, some friendly ornament,
a familiar flower, a little old jewel that was part of her daily dress;
to take up and shoulder as a substitute some queer defensive weapon,
a musket, a spear, a battle axe—conducive possibly in a high degree
to a striking appearance, but demanding all the effort of the military
posture.
This passage is the basis for Milly’s
final song in the opera:
The
beauty of the bloom
Has
gone from safety,
But
the beauty of struggle
And
experiment
Has
been offered me instead
I
must throw away the friendly flower
And
take up the spear!
Devotees of the novel will be interested
to know what happens to the famous last sentence, after Kate askes (Densher)
if he loves her. He says he will marry her. “As we were?”
asks Kate, and he says “Yes,” only to have her turn to the
door, “and her head shake was now the end” as she says,
“We shall never again be as we were!”
This, with apologies to the master,
has been changed. When Kate demands that he tell her he still loves
her, and he hedges, she says:
We’re
always honest with each other.
Do
you love me now?
Now
The
way things are
Miles, goaded beyond endurance, says “No” and goes out.
As Ethan Ayer wrote me in a letter
that included some of the material quoted above, “First, Henry
James’ story must be told, then it must be told dramatically,
then it must be told musically.” We can only hope that what we
have done is in some small measure worthy of this great story.
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