A composer invents his own rules.
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“The composer’s success lies less in comprehending the words he is setting than in feeling them musically, and in being able to convince us of the necessity of his feeling.”

— Ned Rorem in Pure Contraption (1974)

EARLIER THIS YEAR, composer Ned Rorem’s opera version of the great American play Our Town, all about the beloved denizens of Grover’s Corners, was unveiled to the public. It was an important moment both for opera and for Ned Rorem, the culmination of years of business negotiations and artistic collaborations bent on producing an opera worthy of the American classic.”

It was back in the early 1960’s that Ned Rorem, like many serious composers before him, succumbed to the Siren call of operatic music. Thanks to a Ford Foundation commission engineered by New York City Opera’s director Julius Rudel, he began work on his first full-length opera based on a notoriously “difficult play,” that intractable virago and Strindbergian cock-tease, Miss Julie. In collaboration with librettist Kenward Elmslie, Rorem completed this work in August 1965. Despite a tough deadline and endless backstage woes—bleak lighting, cheesy scenery, frozen vocal chords—the opera was mounted in time for the autumn season, premiering in a less than ideal production. Although Jack Beeson’s Lizzie Borden (another woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown!) premiered within eight months of Miss Julie, it was Rorem’s opera that got the critical hatchet job at the hands of possibly homophobic critics. Time magazine did, however, muster the following praise: “Ned Rorem is undoubtedly the best composer of art songs now living.”

Reflecting in his journal upon the previous eighteen months of Sturm und Drang over his two-act opera, Rorem was able to declare optimistically: “Bitterness abates. I’m interested (somewhat) in opera again,” and recalls a story by “the all-knowing Colette” concerning “an old lady lamenting her young lover’s disappearance: When a still older lady consolingly suggests ‘Why not take another lover?’, she dries her eyes and smiles: ‘Another lover? I never thought of that!’ … A new-lover-as-opera can be in every manner bankrupting, and by definition a bastard who usually brings along no dowry. Yet, it is tempting once more to think of re-shaping another form into one’s own image.”

Flash forward to January 2006: in the intervening years, Rorem has been amazingly prolific, composing many concert pieces (Day Music / Night Music in 1971); chamber music (Winter Pages, Bright Music, and String Symphony in 1987); choral works (including the unrecorded Goodbye, My Fancy); song cycles, including the ambitious Evidence of Things Not Seen (1998), which played to a sold-out house at Carnegie Hall. His Aftermath is an impassioned response to the attacks and losses of 9/11. Since Miss Julie’s first, awkward introduction to the public, it has received a revised one-act performance (and recording) at the Manhattan School of Music and a critically successful Curtis Institute of Music Opera Theater production in November 2004, innovatively directed by Chas Rader-Shieber. The latter was part of a “Roremania” festival held to celebrate the composer’s eightieth birthday.

Descending from Quaker stock, the pragmatic Rorem is hardly one to rest on his Orphic laurels: an avowed atheist, he maintains a Calvinist work ethic. A prolific writer, he’s just finished work on a new collection, Facing the Night: A Diary & Collected Writings (Shoemaker & Hoard). His latest recording, Nine Episodes for Four Players, with the Contrasts Quartet (Phoenix) was nominated for the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. (Commissioned years ago, the work was interrupted when his long-time partner and help-meet, James Holmes, became sick with AIDS, and eventually succumbed in 1999.) While words like “reactionary” and “Frenchified” have been applied to his work, Rorem’s corpus defies simple epithets and reveals a wide-ranging eclecticism over the decades.

Having composed six one-act operas along the way, Rorem’s new “lover as opera” tackles the quintessential American stage piece, Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play. Not to be accused of hubris for taking on such a colossal play, he hastens to add: “The idea of my doing it was not my own, but that of poet-librettist J. D. McClatchy. McClatchy, co-executor, along with Wilder’s nephew Tappan, of Thornton’s estate, procured the rights and wrote the libretto. The libretto, pared down from three to two acts, and with a few set pieces, is otherwise faithful to the original.”

Wilder (1897–1975) is of course known internationally for Our Town, a staple of community and school drama clubs, so the stakes for the opera version were very high indeed. Grover’s Corners, the nostalgic Everytown where every quotidian detail is redolent of love and loss, has become an archetype for the ineluctable cycle of life. Wilder’s comedic The Matchmaker was made into the highly successful 1964 musical Hello Dolly (and the less successful Streisand film). “Yet, in his lifetime,” Rorem points out, “Louise Talma was the only composer ever to have obtained a libretto from Wilder, the important Alcestiad, an opera that was very successful in Germany in 1965, and yet to be heard in American opera houses.” (Wilder’s one-act, “The Long Christmas Dinner,” was produced as an opera by Paul Hindemith—also only in Germany.) “Then, of course, there’s Aaron Copland’s score of the [1940] movie Our Town, which is very good, and heartbreakingly simple. Since then, many a musician, including Copland, has applied in vain for operatic rights.”

Opera is far from the only or even the major genre of vocal music to which Rorem has devoted his talents. “Such as it is, my reputation seems to center around vocal music, although the 1976 Pulitzer Prize was for a straight orchestra piece [Air Music],” he muses. “Besides Miss Julie, there are perhaps 500 songs, including several cycles, with small ensembles.” But writing opera is another matter, he adds: “It does not follow that vocal composers are equally comfortable in both song and opera. Puccini, Verdi, and Wagner aren’t not known for their songs; [Félix] Fauré, [Henri] Duparc, and even Brahms are not known for opera. Some are at home in each medium: Richard Strauss, [Francis] Poulenc and even Virgil Thomson.”

Almost as well known for his memoirs and other writings as for his musical compositions, Rorem’s commitment to vocal music has strongly literary origins. “It was not the human voice that first drew me towards song,” he observes. “I am not obsessed with the voice, much less am I an opera buff, but poetry as expressed through the voice.” As for his penchant for spanning genres both within music and beyond: “I am un-American by not being a specialist. Music is song, and inside all composers lurks a singer striving to get out.”

Rorem the memoirist, the philosopher of his own life, is anything but cavalier when reflecting on the project of setting Our Town to music, but questions the whole enterprise: “Did Wilder feel that the play contained its own ‘music,’ and that real music would be gilding the lily? … Does it need to be sung? Am I the one to make it singable? … Myself, I’m more at ease with song. Opera is prose and spins a yarn, while song is poetry and depicts a state of mind. With a song on a pre-existing text I know the end before I begin. … Whatever my songs may be worth, I flatter myself that my choice of texts is first rate.”

Following Rorem into a Socratic dialogue is like trying to keep up with a mountain goat leaping from perch to perch. (At a youthful 82, he can still perform a yogic headstand, and is happy to demonstrate!) Years ago, Jean Cocteau sketched him as Orpheus brandishing a lute, mouth agape with song. A restless thinker, his ideas bubble to the surface from some deep Orphic spring, ideas that he works out in his voluminous diary entries. It’s an exercise that keeps him humming, one suspects, in more ways than one. He is often troubled by insomnia, exacerbated by a different kind of siren, that of Manhattan’s streets at night, so writing in his diary is a way to placate the Furies of modern life.

Of course, it’s the great open secret that the author of the classic play about “family values,” that staple of high school drama clubs, was gay. Playwright Paula Vogel contends that Thornton Wilder “is the last private writer of the 20th century … and was the last writer not subjected to the analytic couch of theater critics. How fascinating that his two towering works, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, take place in the two locations in American life where there is neither privacy nor acceptance from deviance from the norm—the small town or the suburban tract—places where almost everybody in the world gets married—you know what I mean? In Our Town there aren’t any exceptions.” Therefore, it seems poetic justice that in a time of Republican-fueled culture wars, Ned Rorem, our most unapologetically gay composer, should be the one to set the venerable Our Town to music, and to do it in the effusive, elegiac, open-hearted—American—style for which he is famous.

Michael Ehrhardt: You’ve expressed discouragement over the general dumbing down of the media, and you’ve talked about the dearth of serious arts columns in the press.
Ned Rorem: First let me say that The Gay & Lesbian Review does intelligent and necessary articles, and I admire the work Richard Schneider puts out. There’s hardly any coverage of classical music in America these days; even The Village Voice fired their music critic. They’ve got six or seven rock, rap, hip-hop critics, but none for so-called serious music, let alone serious contemporary music. The New Yorker sort of does, occasionally; Harpers, The Atlantic magazine don’t. The Nation, which I used to write for, The New Republic don’t. I think there are about a hundred serious music critics (or less) who are paid a salary in America today, as opposed to several thousand pop music critics of one sort or another. And the literary magazines don’t review music, since Robert Craft stopped writing. There are just the three critics of The New York Times: Anthony Tommasini, Anne Midgette, and Bernard Holland. That’s pretty much it, apart from record reviewers.

ME: What did you think of An American Tragedy? You once posed the question in your diary whether you can make “the Great American Opera” from a great American novel. Did you think it was a successful translation of Dreiser into opera?
NR: That depends on the composer. A composer invents his own rules, and he should be enthusiastic about the job. For instance, I assume the Met presented John Harbison with a commission and said, “We want a very American subject for an opera,” and he would have said to himself in all his heterosexuality, “the Great American novel is The Great Gatsby, therefore I’ll do it.” But it doesn’t follow that it’s a good subject for an opera. It fact, it was quite wrong-headed when the leading man was killed off in the first act. However, it’s to the Met’s credit that they revived it the following year after the composer made some changes. I think [Tobias Pickins’] American Tragedy was very professional, but I don’t remember too much about it. I think Nathan Gunn was sexy.

ME: He’s known as the “Loaded Gunn,” since he’s always directed to sing with his torso bare. He was a good Tarquinius in The Rape of Lucrezia, and was a notable Billy Budd. He’d be perfect for John in Miss Julie.
NR: Yes, he would be.

ME: And Susan Graham as Julie.
NR: Susan Graham’s the only soprano I know. I don’t meet many of the big name opera singers. She recorded a series of my songs. They don’t whip up a recording unless the work is being produced someplace. It would cost a million dollars, so they need a production to make it worthwhile.

ME: Tell me more about the production of Our Town that opened last winter.
NR: It was co-commissioned by Bloomington [the University of Indiana], which has one of the best opera departments in America. The good thing about Our Town is that, unlike the old movie version with Copland’s very beautiful score, in which the parts of Emily and George are done by William Holden and Martha Scott, who were too old to play the young lovers, now the roles are played by age-appropriate, younger singers. However, I was appalled when the director claimed it dragged, so he sped up the slow, touching parts. So, we had a long conference with everybody, and the following day the tempos were just right. I feel that, as the composer, I’m the one who should decide on that, and if the director’s bored, things should be cut rather than sped up. In opera writing, as opposed to non-theatrical music writing, there are a lot of decisions that get made that are extra-musical decisions.

ME: Modern opera seems to be getting away from the versimo tradition, at least the way it’s directed, into director-driven “re-imagined,” often gimmicky, productions (Aida set in a supermarket!), or mounted as almost an abstract ritual.
NR: I think someone like Peter Sellars is a disgrace, taking Mozart and putting him in Trump Tower to make it socially relevant. Then let him take Marriage of Figaro and add bongo drums to it. His Nixon in China I admired. But as for his approach to other things, I’m not even contemptuous towards him. He doesn’t exist for me. There are so many ways a director can ruin a piece.

ME: It must be hard for a composer to see his work damaged that way. But there’s only so much you can control. Just think of what Puccini went through with Madame Butterfly. You say in your essay that Poulenc developed stigmata and had to be hospitalized while writing Dialogues when the rights to Bernano’s play were delayed. You write that he made a pilgrimage to the Black Virgin of Rocamadour!
NR: He was very religious. A boulevardier surrealist who wrote Les Mamelles as well as the deeply religious Stabat Mater and the a cappella Figure Humaine.

ME: He seems a mass of contradictions.
NR: They may seem like contradictions to other people. He was very Catholic, he was queer, and he had a relationship with his chauffeur, who was straight, and who I met once or twice. His other successful opera, Les Mamelles des Tiresias, was very different from Dialogues, but it contained a lot of the same elements, chords, and textures that were his signature, just differently arranged. Every opera makes its own rules. Dialogues started as a Bernanos screenplay. It opened at La Scala, which commissioned it, and it was sung in Italian. After that it was done in Paris, in French. In a way, some of the best parts of the opera are the choruses, and the “Salve Regina.” Poulenc added that at the end, it wasn’t part of his first version. It’s still one of my favorites of all time. And I heard Denise Duval sing “La Voix humaine” and she was remarkable. She had to stop singing when she took an antibiotic which she was allergic to. Poulenc taught me more than anyone long before I even dreamed of knowing him.

ME: Is Our Town set for a full orchestra?
NR: It depends on what you call “full.” There’s no percussion in it at all; I morally disapprove of percussion, as I’m always quick to say. There are about six woodwinds, two brass—one horn and a trumpet. There’s a piano and strings, and the strings can be as few as fifteen, or a lot more, depending on the venue. But it’s for a small orchestra and it can be done with as few musicians as twenty or 25. As for the cast, there are three big roles, and the others are the mother and father and villagers. There’s a church chorus, a chorus of the dead. I met Wilder once in Paris; in those days society women would have “Thursdays,” and he and I met at one of those. We chatted. He was with a young man who I had an affair with. Later I wrote Wilder, asking for permission to set one of his plays, and he responded that only the one-acts were not already spoken for—and suggested I use one of those.

ME: Our Town is an icon of American theatre; and you are considered to be a composer with a quintessentially American sound. Is that a lot of hooey? Do you believe there is such a thing as an “American” sound? If so, how would you define it?
NR: I’m not sure I know what an American sound is. But, I must quote Virgil Thomson, who was asked, “How do you define American music?” and he answered: “It’s music by someone who has an American passport.” They can write any kind of music you want. I think there is a French sound, and if there is, I’d make it, as opposed to a German sound. The French sound is lean and economical, and the German sound is heavy and overdone. I like to say that the French sound is superficial in the deepest sense, like Impressionism, while German music can be profound in the shallowest sense.

ME: Do you use American idioms in Our Town?
NR: There are a few hymns for the church choir; one is based on a hymn I’ve written and is already published, and a couple of others that Wilder specified in the play, so I set them. The music is, to me, extremely accessible, and sometimes rather plain, not overdone. This is an opera about ordinary people living ordinary lives. The extraordinary part will be the otherworldly scenes, like the dead in the graveyard. But mostly it’s about unextraodinary people who aren’t so ordinary after all. An American Tragedy has a sensational crime in it that is very dramatic, but Our Town is small-town life, people are born and people die.

Michael Ehrhardt is a writer living in New York City. [/groups_member]