An alternate dimension

This is surreal. And yet real. Let me take a step back, tell you what I’ve seen, what I’ve been part of, and then try and process the effect that it’s had.

So. I got back to Karlsruhe some days ago and that same evening I watched a fully-staged, fully-lit piano rehearsal. That means of course I saw the whole thing as it will be on opening night – right down to the singers’ make-up – except that there was no orchestra. Since then we’ve had lots of rehearsals with orchestra and singers, some of them fully staged, some not, but all without costumes. That means I’ve seen and heard all the constituent parts, just not at the same time. Tomorrow, there’s a full rehearsal with everything and then the final rehearsal the following day. At those two rehearsals, all changes will have been made and everything will be set in stone for opening night.

Now the processing part, and this bit is harder, because until you’ve written an opera and had this experience, it’s hard to describe. Look – when you write a big orchestral piece and the music has been playing around and around in your head for so long, when you finally get to the concert and hear actual musicians in an actual orchestra playing it, it’s a bit like an outer-body experience. This is like that, except multiplied by 1000 times!

I got here to find people walking around humming tunes that I’ve been thinking about for years now. And they’re on stage acting out this drama that I’ve lived with for a very long time. These are real people, with real faces and bodies and their own personalities and thoughts – and they all come up to me and talk to me about the opera. It feels a bit like a person who has had some kind of crazy episode and created an alternative world in his mind, and then suddenly he gets somewhere and that world exists! It’s all around him!

The other thing that took me by surprise, and I suppose it shouldn’t really have, is the stage. In my head, where anything can happen, I imagined the action as much more cinematic. I didn’t quite imagine it on a single stage the whole time. But when you’re presented with the size of the stage, of the props – and Keith Warner’s fantastic production (the main device of which is extremely clever but I don’t want to give away) uses a lot of Wagnerian props, the hat with the horns, the spears, the dragon – with it all being so outsize, it throws you into this fantastic and fantastical non-reality. In other words, that stylisation and the confines of the stage give it tremendous power.

And I’ve been thrilled to watch the different ways of working of the Music Director Justin Brown (about whom I wrote last time), still refining, still bringing out the musical details, and the director Keith Warner. I’ve missed the period of rehearsals where Keith built the production, but even now I watch him go on stage and work with the singers on placement and timing. And what I really like about his directing is that he somehow allows everybody to be themselves while bringing out their aspects natural personalities for the roles. He doesn’t force anything, but in a very gentle way he sees what is within them that they can use to live the story onstage. That’s a very special human interaction and it allows the singers to become involved with their characters in very meaningful ways.

Yesterday, for instance, we had the understudy for the role of Houston singing while the first-cast actor was onstage acting. And there was a moment where the first-cast actor just started to sing, without even realising it. He was so in the moment that he hadn’t even noticed that he was singing!

Other composers had warned me, “You don’t want the director to ruin your opera!” But that was never a question with Keith. He is such a fine musician, he understands music so deeply, that everything he has brought has just added dimensions. I suspect also that he has a tension within himself about who the Wagners actually were, though he adores Wagner’s music, and that this piece may have enabled him to work through some of that conflict! In any case, with Keith and Justin and the whole team, I couldn’t be happier. Roll on opening night!

When composing and teaching intersect

Since I began teaching at Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College in 2010, I've been lucky enough to both teach and to compose music at the same time.  While there's always a challenge balancing creative work with teaching, I've found the back-and-forth to keep me on my toes.  In the morning, I'll be teaching music theory to a class full of inquisitive students, and then in the afternoon I might work on a composition in my studio, incorporating all those same ideas from class into whatever piece I'm writing at the time.  

At no time in my career have I found this such relationship to be so complex, and so fruitful, than in the past two years as I was writing my first opera, Wahnfried.   While the libretto of the work is ripe for topics to discuss, my job was to bring these characters to life — and to compose nearly two hours of music.  As I began writing what would become the scenes of Wahnfried, I found myself looking more deeply into various parts of music scholarship.  I had never written an opera before, and in some ways I needed to become a student of the genre in order to write such a great deal of music in a relatively short period of time.   As a result, I also became a student once again of the material that I was teaching.  Wahnfried is a post-tonal piece, a topic that corresponds with our fourth-semester music theory course at the Sunderman Conservatory.  While I was teaching these concepts to students, I, too was revisiting them, delving deeper into scholarly articles, and applying them to the opera.  I can't overstate the benefits of working pedagogically with the same materials and ideas that make up the music in the opera.  The questions that students brought up in class often reoriented my thoughts and opened my eyes to different elements of the music that I was working with.  

On the flip side, writing the opera allowed me to bring new and refreshing ideas into the classroom, and to improve as an educator. Due to the nature of the schedule at the opera house in Germany, I actually first composed the entire piece with only the voices, piano, and some percussion.  This allowed the singers more time to learn their parts, which are memorized and put together with acting, staging and other elements of the theatre.  From that short score, I began orchestrating each scene — transforming piano lines into fully-scored orchestral music, with strings, winds, and percussion.  This process forced me to grow as a composer, and I can say with no doubt that my approach to teaching Orchestration class changed dramatically.  My methods of orchestrating became rather streamlined and better-honed, and this past fall in Orchestration, I used new resources to present a more practical approach to the craft.  The students ultimately wrote incredible orchestrations — working with the music of David Bowie — that are slated to be performed with the CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra this spring.  The ease with which our student orchestra was able to read the pieces and the full and balanced sounds of the end product confirm that our students are really applying the concepts they learn in class.  I look forward to conducting their orchestrations in March!

Now that I'm hearing the final staging rehearsals before Wahnfried's premiere, its rather surreal to hear and see it all come together.  I look forward to future semesters of teaching — and composing — and the fascinating intersections that occur.

When nerves are not solely your own, and understanding can come from others

Well, I was supposed to go to Karlsruhe for more Wahnfried rehearsals earlier than this, but even the demands of an opera can’t override an illness, and unfortunately I was laid low for a couple of weeks and unable to travel. But now the time has arrived for me to return, and I’m excited to be going back. I also always feel nervous, and there’s no telling which of those emotions I’ll feel more each time! The opera house has sent me video footage of the first-act run-through. It’s incredible to see it all coming together. When I get there we’ll go more or less straight into full rehearsal. We’re approaching the final ten days of the production process.

I may be grappling with my own emotions and feelings, but at least opera is a collaborative process. It’s very different to writing orchestral pieces or chamber works or even something choral. The first thing that’s different is that you get this long lead-in, where the libretto is being developed, and I was involved in that. The librettists, Lutz Hübner & Sarah Nemitz (about whom perhaps more in another entry) wrote a synopsis and made an outline of the acts and the scenes and we discussed it all quite extensively and I was able to voice my musical ideas – that doesn’t always happen in opera-writing. When a composer is suddenly presented with materials that actually don’t lend themselves well to musical drama, that’s when the challenges get really big!

But writing a symphony, for instance, is a very internal and even lonely process. This was collaborative right down to the choice of voice types for each character. That’s one of the many instances where the conductor Justin Brown – Karlsruhe’s Music Director – was invaluable. He knows the singers in Karlsruhe (and we only have one singer who’s not drawn from the house’s own ensemble), and he knows voice types and that’s vital because one lyric baritone, say, will be very different to another lyric baritone.

As I look ahead to the coming days, to the end of the beginning, you might say, I remember the beginning of the beginning. The beginning of my contribution. Once I had the words, for the first eight months I was writing, just writing in my studio and not sharing it with anyone. Early on I focussed on rhythm and the concourse of the melodic line, I didn’t even get into the area of pitch for a while; I just needed to get a sense of the rhythms of the libretto. As I was writing and experimenting with different ideas I got to know these characters. What else were they doing that day? What did each have for breakfast? Spending that time with them, I built up a more complete picture and that helps you to create believable characters.

I researched about vocal inflections ad emotional expression – what is it that a voice does that makes us understand that it’s expressing anger, or sadness? Through all of these techniques I started to build a universe.

After those eight months I had four or five scenes written, if unfinished and unorchestrated. And I tentatively contacted Justin Brown because I knew that I needed some input on vocal ranges and singers’ strengths. I had no idea, for instance, how long a tenor could sing a certain note, or how long they could sustain a certain range (especially with the main character on stage for almost every scene). To say that Justin was helpful is an understatement. Right from the start he was extremely practical in his help – he would steer me to look at examples. He’d show me how Wagner resolved a similar issue, or how Puccini did it, and he would cite specific passages in their operas where I could find ideas for solutions, or guidance.

Justin was so excited and enthusiastic, and right from the beginning he started giving me musical feedback as well; he would tell me what he really liked and places where he felt a certain section was perhaps not needed (often I’d take his ideas, sometimes I’d fight my corner). He became someone off of whom I could truly bounce ideas. He was so positive and so brilliant that I felt less nervous about showing him the next scenes, and the next. I knew that I had someone I could show things to who could give me good feedback. I deeply trust his judgement and his taste. And he’s such a fantastic conductor! So this became a much more involved process than I’ve ever experienced with any conductor.

Then Justin began to share materials with the choir director and with some of the singers, and of course the librettists and the director Keith Warner (more on him another time, too!). It became a very extensive, and very collaborative experience. So now I remember all of this, as I head back to Karlsruhe and grapple with excitement and nerves. I can remind myself – the excitement doesn’t only apply to me, the nerves are not mine alone. We’re all working on this project, and I have a musical family with whom to share the experience.

When an opera suddenly seems much more than an opera

I’ve been back at my desk, in my home in the United States, but work on my opera Wahnfried doesn’t stop. Ahead of my rejoining the conductor Justin Brown and our director Keith Warner back in Karlsruhe shortly, I have lots of work to do. Much of it in the light of what we learned from the recent batch of rehearsals.

More on the specifics of that process soon — especially my extensive musical collaboration with conductor Justin Brown. But things happen while one works, and we’ve recently gone through a rather gruelling election season here in the U.S. (you might have heard about it!) that has both reinforced and shed new light on the opera.

The type of rhetoric and ideas we have all been hearing in the past few months are very troubling and underscore certain aspects of human nature that Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the central character in Wahnfried, personifies. In the opera, Chamberlain casts out members of other religions, other social groups, and other sexual orientations from the “pure” world that he wants to create. A failed scientist himself, Chamberlain develops a pseudo-scientific theory that distinguishes people by their blood (as if people of different races are of different species). With the scientific knowledge we have today regarding human genetics, these ideas seem ridiculous. But somehow these misconceptions continue to live on in our society – even nearly a hundred years after Chamberlain’s death.

When I started working on Wahnfried, I read a paper that investigates how paranoid thoughts can run in families and how they can mimic the behaviour of a contagious illness. In the opera, Houston’s paranoia and disgust towards the “other” spreads rampant throughout his household and ultimately, infects the societal discourse in Germany at that time.  While Houston Chamberlain’s voice was not the only voice spreading these ideas in society, his words were clearly impactful; his seminal book outlining these racial theories was deeply influential in the development of Nazi ideology.

That’s an incredible, frightening idea. So thoughts of paranoia, if you are exposed to them on a regular basis, can become your own.  When I first began working on this opera, many of the ideas that Houston espouses — racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia — seemed like issues of our past, or at the very least, on their last legs.  Nazism hardly seemed a timely ideology to discuss.  As the past year’s events have shown us, the thoughts and ideas that underlie these dark and disturbing elements of society have not been eradicated at all — instead, they have been lying dormant, now again awakened by a new rush of paranoia and hatred.

With the perspective of the last century, it’s now easy to read the story of Houston Chamberlain and the Nazis today and acknowledge that the ensuing events were horrific.  In fact, the characters in Wahnfried are presented as grotesques — perhaps making even more clear their failures and the lessons we can learn from them.  I hope that we can turn this lens on our current society and recognise these same weaknesses, before they reach so far that we must again rebuild from the ashes.  While the spread of hatred and fear can mimic the spread of a virus, we are not helpless to resist this plague; we each have the power to promote peace, equality and justice no matter the voices surrounding us.

My first opera, in rehearsal

Not many people get to write an opera, I get that, and even those of us lucky enough to have that invitation don’t get to do it very often. You can’t, really, it’s such a mammoth task, involving every fibre of your being (it feels like that, anyway) for several years at a time. There’s a reason that composers like John Adams and Thomas Ades, for all their great success in their operas, only come back to the form after breaks of years at a time.

But the experience is so special, and so fulfilling, I still recommend it to everyone! But because not everyone gets the chance, and I want to share my experiences with others who might enjoy finding out what it’s like “from the inside”, I’m very grateful to Classical Music Magazine and to Opera Now for offering me this blog so that I can take you on the final leg of this journey with me.

“This journey” refers to the staging of my first opera, Wahnfried. It tells the story of the English failed scientist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a man obsessed by the late Richard Wagner – to the extent that he actually married one of Wagner’s daughters and want to live in Bayreuth where he became seen by Wagner’s widow Cosima as one of the true ‘keepers of the flame’ of her husband’s memory. More insidiously, he thought he should be one of the great thought-leaders of Europe and wrote a long book, published in 1899, The Foundations Of The Nineteenth Century, in which he codified for the first time the linked ideas of Aryan superiority and Jews being responsible for all the world’s ills. Chamberlain didn’t have the charisma or the intelligence to become what he wanted to become, but he found a willing protégé of sorts in Adolf Hitler, who regarded the older man as a mentor and often quoted his book. Which goes to show what can happen when mediocrity, ego and ambition come together in a person…

So. Blog one. The actual composing is done now and, although that’s collaborative at times – Justin Brown and Keith Warner, who will variously conduct and direct the world premiere at the Karlsruhe Staatstheatre in January, have both had helpful things to say – it is essentially a solitary thing. Where opera comes to life, I’m finding, is in the rehearsal, where music truly meets theatre.

In recent weeks I’ve been to three days of piano rehearsals with the principal cast and, most recently, I had two full two-and-a-half-hour rehearsals with the orchestra. And something hit me immediately that you don’t get in your composing studio – laughter. Plenty of it. And the relief of that swept over me like a wave.

Because I knew that I was writing absurdist opera, trying to portray Chamberlain in a grotesque way because he is so terrible and racist and hateful. Grotesquerie was my way of getting into the psychology of this, how he became this, how he was also simultaneously a failure, and how it becomes dangerous. And the singers often just broke out in laughter. Grotesqueness is, at least in this case, truly funny apparently! You don’t get to make people laugh out loud often as a composer.

At one point, the character of “the Kaiser” enters to a ridiculous march – I request that some of the instruments play out of tune, phrases just dribble out and so on. The orchestra burst out laughing and couldn’t go on playing, so we had to start that bit again. Soon afterwards when the character talks about a new car horn that plays the thunder motif from Das Rheingold and I’ve score that motif, clashing with another motif from Tristan und Isolde and yet another from Siegfried (all at the same time!) everyone laughed again. Me too this time. I hadn’t realised that it would be that kind of funny.

Something together different happens in piano rehearsal with Matthias Wohlbrecht, the excellent singer playing Chamberlain. He came to a line where the character talks about having been injured in the war and Matthias asked me to write him a bit more space in the transitional passage leading up to it. So we worked something out, and as he sang those notes it was so moving I could hardly believe this was the music I had written. Suddenly we were siding with him as a human being. At just that moment we don’t see him as a racist, or a bad guy, he’s just someone in real pain. And hearing that I knew that of course – of course – the moment needed the space. I knew also how important it was not to dehumanise Chamberlain. That people watching should never lose sight of the fact that this was a human being and to go in the dreadful direction he chose is a human instinct.

One last thought for now. This opera has been programmed alongside the new Karlsruhe Ringcycle, which Justin Brown is also conducting. And in the orchestral rehearsals for Wahnfried he brings a Wagnerian expansiveness to the orchestral fabric. Justin knows the score perhaps as well as I do at this point, down to the minute details, so I can already see that he knows just how to point the Wagnerian quotes in the piece, and beyond that how to find a richness and a transporting, cumulative power that is Wagnerian in feel. And that catches the charm of Houston, perhaps explaining why people followed him so much. Perhaps it even starts to give a sense of why people followed Hitler.

Not that the whole score is suffused in Wagnerian colours, this being satire after all, but I’m thrilled at the way that Justin brings out the moments where they are there and he knows how to make them so vivid as to overwhelm the senses (which is of course very Wagnerian).

I’ve come away from those rehearsals reeling, and finally perhaps understanding how an opera isn’t really an opera until you see it ‘on its feet’. What you write in the score is only part of the picture, and that’s as true for the composer as for anyone.

So – next rehearsal in Karlsruhe is in December, when Keith Warner will present his concept and we’ll have the whole ensemble including chorus. Lots of work to do before then though and I will report here on my progress! Thanks for joining me on this amazing journey.