Archives for 2007

• Kevin Kinsella’s interview with Anya Ulinich. I hope to pick up her novel Petropolis this week; you can read the first chapter here.
• Beckett for Babies. (O Aulenback! how I have missed thee.)

This week I’ve been rereading Possession, which is up there with Middlemarch for great novels to read when you’re snarled, low and the sleeves of your cardigan are stuffed with Kleenex (suck it, ragweed season). I’ve been reading Madwoman in the Attic, too, and Byatt’s novel makes a satisfying counterpoint.
The New York Times has a nice page devoted to A.S. Byatt, which includes these tidbits:
• When the book became an unlikely bestseller in the United States, in the winter of 1990, Byatt was asked to speculate on the reason for its popularity. She responded, “It’s like the books people used to enjoy reading when they enjoyed reading … It has a universal plot, a classic romantic plot and a classic detective plot. And the plot was more important than anything else in it. People can get the sort of pleasure out of it they got out of the old romantic novel.”
• In another interview, Byatt described the spark for the novel:

Sometime in the early 1970’s, Ms. Byatt recalled, she spotted a well-known Coleridge scholar in the British Museum Library and mused that much of what she knew of Coleridge had been filtered through that individual, who had devoted a lifetime to her study of the Romantic poet. ”I thought, it’s almost like a case of demonic possession, and I wondered – has she eaten up his life or has he eaten up hers?”

• Also worth a read, this lengthy but fascinating interview with Éditions Paradigme. In it, Byatt notes, “I think there are a lot of rather romantic novels rather like Possession that believe themselves to be influenced by Possession and rather depress me,” which made me laugh.
RELATED:
• Byatt’s ode to Middlemarch.

Every now and then I like to check in and see what the English naturalist Gilbert White was noticing this time of year. So many of his journal entries, their language sparing and concise, amount to a sort of accidental poetry. Here are his reports on a stretch of September days in 1777:

Sept. 14. Black cluster-grapes begin to turn color. A tremendous & awful earthquake at Manchester, & the district round. The earthquake happened a little before eleven o’ the clock in the forenoon, when many of the inhabitants were assembled at their respective places of worship.
Sept. 17. The sky this evening, being what they call a mackerel sky, was most beautiful, & much admired in many parts of the country. Footnote. As the beautiful mackerel sky was remarked & admired at Ringmer, near Lewes, London, & Selborne at the same time; it is a plain proof that those fleecy clouds were very high in the atmosphere. These places lie in a triangle whose shortest base is more than 50 miles. Italian skies! Full moon. The creeping fogs in the pastures are very picturesque & amusing [interesting] & represent arms of the sea, rivers, & lakes.
Sept. 18. [Findon] Deep, wet fog. Sweet day.
Sept. 19. [Chilgrove] Ring-ousels on the downs on their autumnal visit. Lapwings about on the downs attended by starlings; few stone-curlews. Sweet Italian skies. The foliage of the beeches remarkably decayed & rusty.
Sept. 20. Some corn abroad: a vast burden of straw, & many ricks.
Sept. 24. The walks begin to be strewed with leaves. Vivid Northern Aurora.

I previously blogged White last August, here.

“Artists are simple-hearted souls. Today they sign this, tomorrow that; they don’t even look to see what it is, so long as it seems to them well-meaning.”
Adolf Hitler (quoted in Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics)

Last year I wrote a “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal about how the Atlanta Opera decided to shutter its downtown headquarters and move to the suburbs:

Not surprisingly, arts-savvy Atlantans are divided over whether the move to the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre will prove smart or suicidal. Other local arts organizations with a midtown presence, such as the High Museum of Art and the Atlanta Symphony, are firmly committed to staying where they are. Can an opera company that relocates to the suburbs maintain its cachet among the cognoscenti? No one knows–yet everyone agrees that the Atlanta Opera, which is $2.85 million in the red, had to do something drastic. Subscriptions have been plummeting, in part because the 4,500-seat civic center where the company now performs is too large for comfortable viewing of normal-size theatrical productions. (The new theater at the Cobb Centre has only 2,750 seats.) “If we stay at the civic center, I don’t know if we can continue to survive,” Dennis Hanthorn, general manager of the Atlanta Opera, recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
All politics–including the politics of art–is local, and it’s anything but certain that local operagoers will follow the Atlanta Opera to Cobb County. From a distance, though, the move looks to me to be both adventurous and prescient, especially since most demographers agree that the future of middle-class urban life in America belongs to the suburbs. Rightly or wrongly, the Atlanta Opera is taking a leap into that unpredictable but promising future….
In fact, many American cities are sprawling megalopolises made up of middle-class commuters who don’t care to drive back into midtown on weekends if they can help it. The Atlanta Opera is betting that enough such people will embrace a suburban-based opera company to make its move to Cobb County worthwhile. If I had to choose, I’d make the same bet.

Now the Atlanta Opera is in the news again. In preparation for the move, which takes place later this month. the company conducted a Gallup poll asking its subscribers whether they’d be willing to attend performances in the suburbs. According to the Atlanta Constitution, the answer was yes–so long as there were good restaurants close to the new theater. Another finding was equally striking. As part of its investigation of what made the company’s patrons choose to go to specific performances, the pollsters discovered that “[f]amous opera stars from New York’s Metropolitan Opera–singers of the stature of soprano Deborah Voigt–draw almost no recognition. Nor do singers who performed recently with the Atlanta Opera trigger any memories.”
It will be interesting to see how the company responds to these fascinating findings. Speaking as the librettist of a new opera in the making, I wonder whether it might want to consider teaming up with local restaurants to offer dinner-and-an-opera package deals designed to lure Georgians to its more adventurous bills.
I suggest this in all seriousness, by the way. For those of us who spend our lives immersed in the fine arts, the reults of the Atlanta Opera’s survey should be instructive, not to mention humbling. Nor do they inspire me to condescend to the company’s patrons. The fact is that a decision to go to the opera–or to an orchestral concert, a nightclub, or a museum–is perceived by most people as a choice among competing forms of entertainment, and not all of the factors that enter into it are necessarily simon-pure. Moreover, as every opera administrator knows perfectly well, there aren’t nearly enough fanatical opera buffs in the world, much less in Atlanta, to fill the seats of a theater night after night.
For this reason, it strikes me that arts administrators throughout the country should be conducting similar research into the vexing question of audience motivation. How do you fill an opera house with people who don’t know who Deborah Voigt is–and is it possible to do so without diluting your programming beyond the point of recognition?
As they say down in the land of serious barbecue, there’s the rub.

“The idea of writing ‘for everyone’ flirts with utopianism, but I feel distrust for whoever is a poet for the few, or for himself alone. To write is to transmit; what can you say if the message is coded and no one has the key? You can say that to transmit this particular message, in this specific way, was necessary to the author, but with the rider that it is also useless to the rest of the world.”
Primo Levi, The Need for Roots: A Personal Anthology (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

A month has gone by since I last reported on the progress of The Letter, the musical version of Somerset Maugham’s play that Paul Moravec and I are writing for Santa Fe Opera. During that time Paul paid his first visit to Santa Fe, and came back mightily impressed by the company and its staff. “It’s like an American Bayreuth,” he said, referring to the theater in Germany where the operas of Richard Wagner are performed each summer. He was told that The Letter is already the subject of considerable buzz, both in Santa Fe and in New York, and that the company now expects that tickets for the opera’s first performances, which will take place in August of 2009, will be a hot commodity. He also brought back a copy of this season’s souvenir program, in which a full page is devoted to The Letter. Whew!

In other news, five of the six principal roles in The Letter have been cast. For the moment I can’t be any more specific, but I can say that our number-one-with-a-bullet choice for the starring role of Leslie Crosbie–the part played by Bette Davis in the 1940 film version–has signed on with enthusiasm, and that all the other singers lined up by Santa Fe to date look and sound eerily like what Paul and I had in mind going in. With Jonathan Kent in the director’s chair, I’d say we’ve got ourselves a damned impressive roster.

On Thursday Paul and I will be sitting down for the latest of our face-to-face work sessions. He’ll play me the music he’s composed since our last get-together, then we’ll go through it bar by bar, putting words and music through the critical wringer and making changes on the spot as needed. Each time we do this, I find myself freshly amazed–as well as humbled–to think that the two of us should be writing an opera for a major company. It’s sort of like the way I feel about living in New York: I’m used to it, but I still have to pinch myself every once in a while.

Paul has now written the first three scenes of the opera, plus an aria from Scene 6. That’s the one for which I knocked out a dummy lyric back in July. Since then I’ve finished the real thing, a nineteen-line haiku-style pastiche modeled after the translations included in Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. This is the first thing I’ve ever written that can properly be called a poem. It even rhymes!

The singer of the aria in question is a Chinese woman whose lover has been shot to death by the Bette Davis character. (That’s how the opera starts.) I usually write the words first, but this time Paul beat me to the punch, meaning that I had to fit my text to his melodic line syllable by syllable. Here’s how the aria ends:

Hear the chime of the clock:
Midnight.
A land beyond the horizon:
The stars above.

Morning will come again–
But not
My love.

Needless to say, I’m no Keats, but I think the results came out sounding more or less plausible, or at least singable.

* * *

So what does The Letter sound like so far? I don’t want to be too specific about a work that’s still very much in progress, but perhaps it will help if I tell you that I sent Paul a quote from George Bernard Shaw the other day. Shaw started out as a music critic, and the quote is from a piece he wrote abut Verdi’s Il Trovatore:

It has tragic power, poignant melancholy, impetuous vigour, and a sweet and intense pathos that never loses its dignity. It is swift in action, and perfectly homogenous in atmosphere and feeling. It is absolutely void of intellectual interest: the appeal is to the instincts and the senses all through.

To which Paul succinctly replied, “Yeah, that’s about right.” And that, if I may make so bold as to say, is what his music for the first three scenes sounds like. The Letter is in no way an opera for eggheads, even though the two of us are both fairly chrome-domed.

As I’ve said before, we’re trying to write a cross between a verismo opera like Tosca and a film noir like Double Indemnity or Out of the Past. We don’t want The Letter to sound old-fashioned–Paul’s musical language is in no way derivative of Verdi or Puccini–but we do want it to move fast and hit hard. Ida Lupino once directed a movie called Hard, Fast and Beautiful. O.K. by me!

In the immortal words of Raymond Chandler:

She reached a quick arm around my neck and started to pull. So I kissed her. It was either that or slug her.

That’s about right, too.

“Only an idiot would ask Wolfie to work on that stuff–twelve foot snakes, magic flutes.”
Peter Shaffer, Amadeus