In 1989 I began composing my first opera. "Shining Brow," by relating the story of Frank Lloyd Wright's disastrous relationship with Mamah Cheney, explored the intersection of Life and Art, self-actuation and selfishness. At the time, I asked my librettist to make this conundrum one of Wright's foremost concerns. Consequently, our Wright asks a question that the actual Wright may never have asked himself: "Can a man be a faithful husband and father," asks Wright, "and still remain true to his art?"
My librettist Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. The "Times Literary Supplement" described him as "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War." From 1973 to 1986, he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1987, he has lived in the States.
I met Paul at the Saratoga Springs artist retreat Yaddo during summer 1988. He was brilliant, ambitious, quick to skewer pretension, and impatient with mediocrity. Already it was obvious that he had every intention of becoming a celebrity poet. His hair back then looked as though it were trying to escape. He did not speak English; he produced it. You could practically hear him listening to himself as he talked. Paul was and is a virtuoso performer of his own poetry. He could read a list of names, or ingredients, and, through line readings alone, move an audience in any direction he pleased.
In summer 1989 I received a call on one of MacDowell's Colony Hall pay phones from conductor and artistic director of the Madison Opera Roland Johnson asking whether I might consider composing an opera about the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Paul was reading the newspaper a few feet away. Without thinking, I leaned out of the booth and quipped, "Say, Paul, do you want to write an opera?" A beat later, he replied, "Sure."
When Paul and I began "Shining Brow," we first read everything we could lay hands on about Wright. We reconvened a few months later to co-author at his home in Amherst, Massachusetts a filmic treatment consisting of a dozen pages describing what would happen in each scene.
I then planned how long each scene (and each section of each scene) would last, and the sort of musical form I would use to underpin the action of that scene. Giving the outline to Paul, I asked him to create a number of core images and literary motifs that I could then graft to musical ideas, along with some "parallel" poems for related characters, so that when I shared their music, the words would be easier to adapt. At one point I needed a straightforward hymn, and he responded by creating his beautiful Goethe gloss, "Hymn to Nature."
Over the course of eight weeks that winter at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I composed the music for the first act. I wrote the most important sections first, beginning with the last three minutes; then the music that would be associated with the four or five most important dramatic spots (what I call the "emotional nuclear reactors") in the act; after that, I wrote the connective sections, which could and should be the least musically interesting. Each character existed in a "home" key: Wright in B-flat major; Mamah in E major; Edwin and Sullivan in A minor; Catherine in C major. The lovers' keys were associated, of course, by the tritone, the "forbidden" interval, and the harmonic fulcrum on which modulation depends.
The most affecting, emotionally expressive tool in an opera composer's kit is the ability to modulate. Aside from being crucial to maintaining large formal structures, it unlocks "gateways" to new emotional states and signals emotional evolution. I did not really learn how to modulate fluidly until I composed "Brow," each of whose characters needed to interact with one another harmonically. I have used the modulatory practices used by Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner in their operas ever since I realized just how eloquent they really are, no matter what the surface style of the piece.
When composing opera, my compositional process has changed little since the early 80s. I retype and reformat the libretto to reflect the underlying musical form in which it will be carried, storyboard it on the wall, and illuminate it with various colored pens and pencils--say, red for one character, blue for another, orange for another; musical / poetic themes and motives that I want to "track" also get colors. Standing before the entire opera tacked up on the wall and dreaming on its entirety is as close as I'm likely ever get to understanding how a painter must feel working on a mural. A real sense of the pallet of ideas at hand is literally rendered in the colors arrayed on the storyboard.
Once the entire opera is "on the wall" I decide what the most important dramatic moments (the "emotional nuclear reactors") are in each scene; I specify what the climactic moment of the opera is, work downwards in triage fashion to the least important moment. I do not compose "from left to right." I compose the music for the most important half dozen moments in the opera first. The music for the rest of the piece then spreads outwards from these key moments like concentric ripples.
Paul and I accepted an invitation from Richard (Dick) Carney, Wright protégé and managing trustee of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, to stay at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a few days. After lunch with members of the Fellowship (during which Wright's recorded lunchtime conversation from decades previous played on a boom box), Paul and I settled into the little house Wright built for his daughter. The sun set as we traded impressions and prepared for a formal dinner at which I sat beside architect and Wright protégé Wes Peters, with whom I had a long, intense conversation about Wright's relationship with Olgivanna. "Was Mamah Cheney the love of his life?" I asked Wes. "She must have been," he replied, "but I can only say that after her death, for the rest of his life, he never allowed her to be discussed in his presence."
After dinner, Dick and I took a long walk together in the desert and discussed the sort of opera I intended to compose. A fatherly bear of a man, he gestured to me to sit down on a boulder with him. Sighing, he said, "Well, Daron, I don't think any of us here want you to compose a dishonest piece. Mr. Wright could be a bastard. Promise me you'll try to convey his essential 'greatness' along with the rest." I didn't tell Dick that anybody who sings is rendered sympathetic. Instead, I shook his hand. "A promise, Dick." He picked up some dirt and threw it. "Fine. Come and stay with us as long as you want to. Soak up the feel of the place. Make Mister Wright sing. I promise you that we'll not stand in your way."
Shortly before Christmas, I finished the vocal score of the first act. I needed a "green light" from the board before beginning the second. The next step was to present it to the commissioners in Madison. "Just two hours ago," President Bush began, "allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. These attacks continue as I speak. Ground forces are not engaged." It was 16 January. The United States had just invaded Iraq. In a huge rehearsal hall customarily used for symphony rehearsals, halfway through playing and singing the first act of Brow for the members of the Taliesin Fellowship and the board of Madison Opera, conductor Roland Johnson asked me to stop at 5:45 so that we could all gather around a portable radio to listen to our President address the nation. "Tonight, as our forces fight, they and their families are in our prayers."
"Shall we continue this another time?" I asked Ann Stanke. She looked to Richard Carney, who asked me, "Do you have a problem with moving ahead with this presentation?" It seemed absurd to me, under the circumstances, but I needed the money, and would not get paid unless, by pulling off this presentation, I fulfilled the terms of the commissioning contract. "No," I lied, resuming my seat at the piano and picking up where I had left off.
Dick then pledged that the Fellowship would support my creation of the opera, and Roland "green lit" my moving on to the second act. It was my first taste, at twenty-nine, of what the life of a viable opera composer might be like, and I relished it.
I spent some time at Taliesin, in Spring Green. Edgar Tafel, the best known of Wright's disciples, decided that he was going to see to it personally that I experienced what it was like "really to live in a Wright House -- to duck when you pass through doorways, discover your feet hanging over the bottom of the bed at night, feel the rooms flowing from one to the next in the dark." He really conjured for me the poetry that Wright seems to have been able to spin for clients. His impersonations of Wright's speaking voice were -- aside from being incredibly funny -- crucial to shaping my vocal characterization -- particularly Wright's stilted line readings, and what David Diamond, in a letter to me described as "...the pontification, the affected dress-ugh-y, like Stieglitz."
My friend photographer Pedro Guerrero's reminiscences of Wright's gentler moments also helped me to firm up the conviction that part of his appeal must have been the ability to project great vulnerability in private. Richard Carney's descriptions of the tenderness that Wright could display in private informed my decision to create the gentle music that underpins Wright's soliloquies. Dick was a humane and generous man. My treasured former pupil and copyist Christopher Hume had a degenerative spinal condition that required his settling in a town with excellent medical facilities. I suggested Madison. I asked Dick to look out for Chris. He took him under his wing. They remained close for the rest of their lives.
The following autumn, in a tiny efficiency apartment at the corner of Amsterdam and 74th Street just off Verdi Square, over the course of a few months, I wrote in one long delicious stretch the second act. Darynn Zimmer, the soprano who years later recorded the role of Mona in Bandanna under my baton for Albany records, was kind enough to sing through the role of Mamah for me as I composed it.
I've written elsewhere about what it was like to consult with Leonard Bernstein while I composed parts of Brow. One example of how he "got" the musical rhetoric of the opera merits repetition, I think. During Wright's Act 1, scene one pitch to his future mistress, I quoted the "New York, New York" rising fourths motive that he had first used in "Trouble in Tahiti," and then in "On the Town," on the word, "suburbia." Bernstein chuckled appreciatively. "Nice lift," he said, "very Strauss. But you followed it up with stuff that sounds like Ned's [Ned Rorem] little Frank O'Hara opera. Did I steal that from him for Tahiti or did he steal that from me? I can't remember. In any event, I know you're talking about theft by putting stolen music in his mouth, so you should come up with something else there."
At some point, I pointed out that I had been modeling the character of Wright musically on him, and the relationship between Wright and Sullivan on him and Blitzstein. He got it: "That's Maria. No, it's the orchestral play-in to the first scene of Marc's 'Regina'," he mused aloud. "Well, yes, I stole it from Marc." Silence. Sudden grin: "But he stole it from Aaron!"
The Madison Opera had asked me to suggest a stage director for Shining Brow. I asked Bernstein to suggest one. He suggested Stephen Wadsworth, with whom he had just written an opera called "A Quiet Place."
"I've written an opera about Frank Lloyd Wright," I told Stephen on the phone. "I'm looking for someone to bring it to life on the stage. Lenny says that you're that person. Would you like to come over for coffee and talk about it?" I knew that would get his attention.
That April, we sat cross-legged on the floor of my tiny studio on Amsterdam Avenue more or less under the piano and in front of the six linear feet of opera scores on the bookshelves and began sounding one another out by pulling scores at random from the shelf and discussing them.
It helped that we both had been compelled to figure out how to work with Bernstein--Stephen as collaborator, me as pupil. Stephen could survive (even enjoy) his intellectual death marches; I thrived on his musical pop quizzes. We shared an appetite for conversations that functioned on multiple levels.
I know now that our first meeting was typical of Stephen's special way with everyone--warm, clever, completely at ease, and intellectually competitive. His probing eyes habitually sought out mine; his compassionate face was extraordinarily expressive. His long fingers moved restlessly when he spoke. I found charming his ability to italicize what he was saying by giving you a hard, quick stare, and then releasing you. He was fun.
At first, it was the confidence and maturity of his opinions as we stuck our thumbs into scores and played "what's the most important moment in this scene" that impressed me most. In time, as we grew to know one another better, I realized that what I had interpreted as competitiveness was instead an urgent desire to understand: if an idea intrigued him, he reflexively craved an explanation.
The talents that have served him so well in his illustrious career were already in full play as, over the course of six very long work sessions at the apartment in the Village he shared with baritone Kurt Ollmann, I played and sang through "Brow's" score. I was defensive, and needed to be "sold" on every one of the dozen or so alterations to words and music (I had to my mind "finished" the score months previously) that he suggested. I'm not certain now why I fought him so hard--especially since I knew even then that his criticisms were always spot on. Possibly, it was because I wanted to see just how right he thought he was.
Like baseball pitchers, most composers have rituals. Mine consisted then of making my world very small and simple when I was writing so that I could keep all of the various motives and ideas suspended in my mind. My scrupulously maintained routine began with morning coffee and a chocolate chip scone from the Korean Market just below my apartment at 303 Amsterdam while reading the "New York Times" seated on a particular bench in Strawberry Fields. While composing--for exactly four hours by the stopwatch--I drank two bottles of San Pellegrino. Then I would run around the Central Park reservoir (twice: 3.2 miles), and then drink a bottle of San Pellegrino afterwards while walking home. I'd devour two slices of Freddy and Pepper's pizza (an excellent joint in the basement which is still in business) sitting in Verdi Square, and then spend the evening making a fair copy of the sketches I had made during the day.
For the workshop, the cast and company of "Brow" gathered at the Bernstein family's apartment at the Dakota to give for Madison Opera's donors and staff a workshop performance (piano and two dozen singers) of the complete score. Ann Stanke, Madison Opera's founder and the driving force behind the commission, worked the room as Roland powwowed with the singers.
At my suggestion, the company had capitalized upon the New York press' interest in visiting the apartment one more time to fill the room with eyes and ears (particularly the national press) that might not otherwise have had any interest in a commission, however laudable, of an unknown composer by a small Midwestern company.
The boundary between life and death blurred in a familiar--even comforting--fashion as I listened to the music I had provided for the character of Wright--consciously referring as it did to Bernstein's music at key points--was performed in the Bernstein family's home. It had been impossible, strolling around Taliesin with Dick Carney (like me, an insomniac) in the wee hours, not to feel Wright's presence. It had been impossible at Yaddo not to feel the Trask family's. It had impossible to walk through the Common Room at The Curtis Institute without feeling the benevolent spirit of Mary Louise Curtis Bok. And it still felt, at the Dakota, as though Bernstein slouched still in the chair in the den, sipping a scotch, pulling on his plastic cigarette holder, growling one of the last things he said to me: "Play and sing that part again, baby--the part that sounds like Marc.".
Everyone involved with the April 1993 opening night of The opera knew that it was going to be a success. 25 years and 7 operas later, I now am acutely aware of how rare that is. That night, at "the rail" of the house, behind the audience, where authors traditionally are allowed to pace, fret, enjoy, and suffer, performances of their work, with Stephen Wadsworth, as the tragic ending of Madison Opera's première production unfolded.
Stephen said, "Look!" "Eh?" I said. "Look at them," he said, sweeping a hand over the audience, who were experiencing the last few minutes of the opera. "They're all weeping."
"Yes, that's where we want them," I said. "No," he said. "That's where they want to be. You did it. I did it. Paul did it. The performers did it. Communion. We all did it. Together."
The next morning a telegram from Ned Rorem arrived at my hotel, saying, "I always said that you would arrive at twenty." The reviews were strong, and the consensus was that my career had begun.
"Can a man be a faithful husband and father and still be true to his Art?" In the years since I've come to my own conclusion about the Life vs Art paradigm. Art is to my Life as the MacGuffin is to a Hitchcock movie. While I have become music, my family is my Life. So much so, that I've experienced a parting of ways with most of my colleagues who've concluded otherwise. Perhaps Wright came to that conclusion sometime after the point at which our opera left him, pledging to rebuild Taliesin in Mamah Cheney's memory. Perhaps not. In the long run, it shall probably only have mattered to the people he loved and who loved him.
("Shining Brow" has been recorded by the Buffalo Philharmonic and is available on the Naxos label.)