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NOW-I-AM Wallace Brindle's New Opera Workshop
August 4, 1999
'A View From the Bridge' Shoots for a
Place in the Operatic Canon
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By BRUCE WEBER
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- The musical seeds for the latest American
opera to bid for a place in the repertory are kept in a plastic tub
here, in the home of composer William Bolcom. It's a file cabinet of
sorts, a catch-basket for ideas that emerged over nearly four years of
writing.
On a recent afternoon, Bolcom fished in the
tub among myriad scraps of paper and
extracted one. On it were a few bars of
notes and the scribbled title "Eddie's Pride."
Eddie is the stevedore from Red Hook,
Brooklyn, who is Arthur Miller's anguished
Everyman in the 1955 play "A View From
the Bridge." Eddie Carbone's illicit passion
for his niece moves him to a cruel act of
betrayal.
Bolcom and his librettist, Arnold Weinstein,
have just finished adapting Miller's play,
which had a successful Broadway revival a
year ago, for Lyric Opera of Chicago. A
major work for 13 soloists, a 48-member
chorus and an orchestra of 75, the opera is
directed by Frank Galati and features Kim
Josephson, Catherine Malfitano and
Timothy Nolen. It is to have its world premiere Oct. 9.
"Eddie's Pride" is the galvanizing element of Bolcom's score, which is
itself the central element of a a collaboration that also brings together
such high-profile artists as set and costume designer Santo Loquasto,
projection artist Wendall K. Harrington, conductor Dennis Russell
Davies and Miller himself, who contributed an aria to the libretto. The
$1.4 million production will have just nine performances in four weeks to
prove that the play has been transmuted into an opera of equal stature.
But beyond that goal lies the more formidable aim of producing the first
American opera in decades with enough lift to win a place in the canon.
"I feel like I'm showing my underwear," said Bolcom, settling at the piano
and playing the original scrawled idea for "Eddie's Pride," then the
second, slightly altered version that found its way to the final score. In
both was a repeated chord figure, bitonal and grating, rising and falling
with a harsh beat; the difference was a suggestion of a pop ballad's
sentimental melody beneath the chords of the second version.
"To me, it's a picture of Eddie's intransigence," Bolcom said. "That's his
sound, that clomping; he's sort of a stupid man. But the right hand has
almost a pop feeling, which I was interested in because these are modern
characters, guys off the street. It has a tune, which gives you something to
hang onto, but the harmony tells you how screwed up he is."
As the production integrates Bolcom's ideas, time is growing short.
Before the premiere, the sets must be completed, the technical and
performance elements choreographed, the principals, orchestra and
chorus familiarized with a new score and some 4,000 more tickets sold.
The activity comes at an important if paradoxical moment for the opera
world, a time when audiences are growing nationwide but new American
operas, even with lavish productions at the most prestigious opera
houses, continue to die on the vine. And Lyric, the nation's third largest
opera company (behind the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the
San Francisco Opera, which are also involved in new American operas),
provides the starkest illustration. "A View From the Bridge" is the third
and final commission from the company's 10-year commitment to
producing new American work.
Yet neither of the other two works -- Bolcom's "McTeague," which
opened in 1994, and "Amistad" by Anthony Davis, from 1997 -- has had
a second production. Still, said Lyric general director William Mason,
"the reason we do this, the objective, is that we hope it will enter the
repertory."
In the realm of the performing arts, opera may be the toughest repertory
to crack. Of the 10 most frequently produced operas last season, none
were composed after 1920 and none were American. It is a state of
affairs that threatens to turn opera companies into museums of a sort,
with more need for curators than composers.
"How relevant can an art form be to society if, in the 21st century, it is
living off 19th-century work?" said Marc Scorca, the executive director
of Opera America, an administrative and advocacy group for North
American companies.
The lack of a recognizable American operatic repertory beyond, say,
Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" and Virgil Thomson's "Four Saints in Three
Acts" is not for want of effort; in the last decade there has been a
free-flowing stream of world premieres.
Among other new projects, Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y.,
just held a successful premiere of "Central Park," a triptych of new
works; Houston Grand Opera is to stage Carlisle Floyd's adaptation of
the Olive Ann Burns novel "Cold Sassy Tree" next spring; the San
Francisco Opera is developing "Dead Man Walking" from Helen
Prejean's book about her work as a spiritual adviser to a death-row
inmate, and the Met will hold a world premiere of John Harbison's
adaptation of "The Great Gatsby." in December.
But that only accentuates the difficulties facing a work like "A View From
the Bridge." Unless it receives exuberant admiration, it is unlikely to have
a significant life beyond its run in Chicago. Even if it does, longevity is
unlikely. Of the 125 works that had their world premieres in the United
States in the 1990s, only about a dozen have been produced again.
"A View From the Bridge" follows Andre Previn's "Streetcar Named
Desire" in San Francisco last year and precedes "Gatsby" at the Met.
Taken together, the works amount almost to a marketing experiment. All
are new works by American composers, all make use of American
musical influences, and perhaps most important, all are adapted from
important and familiar works of American literature. It is a hopeful sign
that San Diego Opera has already announced its plan to stage "Streetcar"
next spring, and there is talk between the Met and Lyric that they will
trade productions of "View" and "Gatsby" in the near future.
In an interview, Arthur Miller said that unlike "Death of a Salesman," with
its nuanced portrayal of a man's psychological dissolution, "View" "was
always a very operatic play, anyway."
"Opera needs very direct, fundamental passions, and the play always had
that by design," Miller said. "I wrote it as a modern-day replication of the
Greek tragedies." Nonetheless, he added, he does not assume that his
story will draw people to the opera. "For me, it's been kind of a lark," he
said. "After all, we go to the opera to hear the music."
Bolcom, 61, who wrote music for an onstage cellist in Miller's play
"Broken Glass," would seem particularly suited to creating a popular
American opera. A Pulitzer Prize winner for a solo piano composition in
1988 and chairman of the composition department at the University of
Michigan, he is known for his versatility, having composed in forms
ranging from symphonies to piano rags. He has written musical revues
and cabaret songs.
"This opera, it's Puccini, but it's also Harry Warren," Bolcom said,
referring to the composer of Italian-American melodies like "That's
Amore." "It's the Americanization-of-the-Italian thing. That's the basic
neighborhood, after all."
Bolcom also has a demonstrated sensitivity to the connection between
words and music, having interpreted the poems of Whitman, Roethke
and others; it was his treatment of Blake's "Songs of Innocence and
Experience" that prompted Lyric's previous general director, Ardis
Krainik, to commission "McTeague."
Round and amiable, Bolcom is a talker with a tendency to digress, often
entertainingly. At the piano, playing "Eddie's Pride" and the Harry
Warren-esque duet between Catherine, Eddie's niece, and Rodolpho,
the immigrant who wins her heart to Eddie's tragic dismay, Bolcom
delighted himself with a free-associative trip through the centuries.
"See? There are bits of 50's doo-wop in there," he said. "I can't sing it, I
have to play it, because I can't remember how it sounds. I don't work at
the piano. Some people don't, some do. It's about half and half.
Stravinsky used to work at the keyboard but he would mute it so it didn't
sound like a piano. Ravel, I think, always worked at the piano. I think
Mozart never did; Haydn did, though."
When he returned to the subject at hand, Bolcom said it made no sense
to make entering the repertory an objective. "That's probably the one
way to assure it doesn't happen," he said, though he added that he was
going to reorchestrate the piece for fewer musicians so that modest-size
companies could present it.
The choice of the play as the subject for the commission came about
somewhat serendipitously, after Bruno Bartoletti, Lyric's former artistic
director, and Weinstein, with whom Bolcom has worked on many
projects over nearly 40 years, both suggested it at the same time. On a
visit to Italy, Bartoletti had run across a previous adaptation in Italian;
Weinstein had run across an old acquaintance, Miller, who encouraged a
new adaptation.
The words, the text, came first, Weinstein and Bolcom explained. The
music, they said, provided subtext: that is, in Bolcom's explanation, that
emotion and integrity of character that doesn't need definition so much as
reinforcement.
"Opera is blood, guts, sinew; if that isn't in the material somewhere,
there's no point in making it into an opera," Bolcom said. And in "View,"
he added, each character speaks in a way that suggested music.
"You can imagine each character's voice, the way the voice would move
when he or she talked," he said. "There's a musical line that comes out of
such a picture." Hence "Eddie's Pride," for example.
For his part, Weinstein spoke about preparing the play for what the
music can add to it. "I like to think of an opera libretto as a way of finding
out what should be pointed up, accented, driven, hidden," he said,
speaking from New York. (The two men sent their work back and forth
via fax; a downstairs neighbor of Weinstein, who doesn't play the piano,
would come up occasionally and render the composer's work for the
librettist.)
Among other things, he cut drastically, created a chorus where there had
been none (Alfieri, the neighborhood lawyer who serves as a narrator in
the play, leads the chorus) and rewrote dialogue to complement the
musical poetics. After the first draft, he and Bolcom continually traded
ideas, editing and accommodating each other. Even Miller's aria was
tinkered with for musical purposes.
"You're not just rendering it," Weinstein said. "If that's all you do, the
playwright loses. He loses his nuances of language and he doesn't have
the fun of discovering anything new about the piece. That was the fun of
working with Miller. He didn't see the point of doing the play set to
music, like a long song cycle. I said to him, 'This play is strong enough to
take a lot of kicking around, and I think it wants the exercise.' I ran
through the thing like a mad dog, biting it up and then sticking in the
mouthfuls where they would make an aria."
"The idea," he continued, "is redistribution, winnowing some scenes, filling
out others, so that one scene in the opera contains the elements of many
scenes in the play."
The most striking change from the play is in the character of Marco, the
Italian immigrant who finally causes Eddie's demise. In the play he is
mostly a quiet presence; in the opera he has a major aria, a lament for the
immigrant's powerlessness and frustration. Bolcom initiated the aria and
Miller wrote it: "To America I sailed on a ship called Hunger," it begins.
"I thought we needed to hear from Marco, an explanation about how he
got into this whole thing," Bolcom said. "Plus, if you're going to have a
good singer do Marco, you better have something for him to do other
than eventually knife the guy at the end." (Marco will be sung in Chicago
by the bass baritone Mark McCrory.)
Bolcom played a few bars, enough to show off a heart-rending melodic
line. "Can you imagine that Arthur wrote this whole aria for this character
for me?" he said. "After 40 years of this play being on the boards, he was
flexible enough to do this."
Good karma, perhaps.
"What always manages to astound me is that all this work goes into
something, and they're going to play it half a dozen or a dozen times and
that's it," Miller said. It's an astounding devotion these people have for it.
I just hope it goes to a 13th performance."
Birth of an Opera
This is the first in a series of articles on the making of "A View From the
Bridge," an opera adapted from Arthur Miller's 1955 play. Lyric Opera
of Chicago is to present its world premiere Oct. 9.
Second New Opera Article of Five
