Click here for article PDF from IUMusic Magazine
IU Opera Theater presents the world premiere of the first opera ever made of Our Town
by Liz Rosdeitcher

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ned Rorem at Indiana University’s Musical Arts Center

No curtain. No scenery. That is how Thornton Wilder opens his monumentally famous 1938 play Our Town. And in doing so, he leaves his audience to fill in the details of the play’s invisible world: milk bottles and schoolbooks, morning newspapers and baseballs, doctors’ bags and soda fountains, Main Street, and a cemetery.

As the place of our own imagining, Grover’s Corners, NH, literally belongs to us. As we watch, it becomes our town.

And yet, in a sense, even before we take our seats, Grover’s Corners already belongs to us, or perhaps more accurately,we belong to it. As poet and librettist J.D.McClatchy suggests, those things we summon up so readily are part of a familiar world, “part of an American past the way we need and want to remember it: village life in a small, self-contained community with traditional values and expectations.”

However, he continues,“while the play presents this kind of Norman Rockwell America, an image of an innocent and God-given past, it simultaneously pulls the rug out from under it and becomes much darker, much eerier than that, particularly in the final act.

“We suddenly realize that the past is always something other than what it seems, that beneath the amiable surface of life and its routines lies a shadow life filled with disappointment and finally, with death.” This explains why the last scene of the play is so heartbreaking. “To watch a young woman come to that realization, as we watch Emily at the end, is an extremely wrenching, but necessary, experience,” says McClatchy.

A NEW LIFE,WITH MUSIC

On February 24, 2006, IU Opera Theater presents the world premiere of Ned Rorem’s Our Town, the first opera ever made of Thornton Wilder’s classic American drama. Because of its first-rate opera program and its renown as one of the world’s leading music schools, the IU Jacobs School of Music was chosen as the best place for Our Town to begin its new life as an opera.

While IU stands as the opera’s lead commissioner, five co-commissioners will present the work soon after the IU production: Opera Boston, the Aspen Music Festival, North Carolina School for the Arts, Lake George Opera in Saratoga Springs, NY, and Festival Opera in Walnut Creek, CA. The idea is to bring the new work into different regions across the U.S., to follow the path the play has taken.

McClatchy explains,“When Ned and I discussed what kind of product we wanted to have in the end, we realized it was an opera that was small enough to embody the intimacy and immediacy of the play and to be performed in small theatres around the country, just as the play has been.”

McClatchy is the man behind the opera’s nonexistent curtain. It was at his suggestion that the Wilder estate, under the aegis of Thornton’s nephew Tappan Wilder, became convinced of the value of making Our Town into an opera, with McClatchy as librettist and Ned Rorem as composer.

McClatchy is a longtime Wilder scholar, founder and former board president of the Wilder Society, and editor of the upcoming Library of America edition of Wilder’s work. It was McClatchy who chose Ned Rorem as the best composer for the task. Rorem’s long and distinguished career reflects his devotion to literature and to capturing the subtleties of a text in music. “When I first started writing songs, it was because I wanted to conjoin my two great loves, which were music and poetry,” says Rorem. His success in this genre has led Opera News to call him “the unofficial dean of American composers.”

To Rorem, McClatchy’s offer was “in every respect attractive, too good an idea to turn down. Our Town ,” Rorem observes, “is the ultimate American play and theatrically very successful. It is also singable, unlike some literature. The danger, of course, is (that) it’s terribly famous.”

Rorem himself, now 82, has led an illustrious life, vividly recorded in his many books, published letters, and diaries. He has met most, if not all, of the world’s major living writers, artists, and composers, including Wilder. “I met Thornton Wilder once in the early 1960s in Paris.We corresponded a little bit. I had asked him if I could set some of his words to music and he was very acquiescent, saying that he would like me to do some of his short plays.”

THE SPIRIT OF DRAMA IN SONG

Thornton Wilder

The setting of Our Town to music, however, has been a long time coming. During Wilder’s lifetime, many composers saw this beloved play as prime material for opera and he was anything but acquiescent.

Aaron Copland was refused, although he had written the haunting music for the film version. Many other composers have wanted to as well, but Wilder’s resistance eventually discouraged them from even trying. And so the situation remained after Wilder’s death in 1975.

Tappan Wilder, executor of the Wilder estate, is sensitive to the issue, and yet he remains confident that the decision to grant the operatic rights is the right one. “While my uncle wrote two librettos for two of his own dramas, he nevertheless believed that Our Town could never work as an opera. He simply could not envisage it on the stage in a different live art form. ”

McClatchy, as a poet and student of Wilder, puts it this way: “Wilder thought Our Town was too prosy to be an opera. But this is not true either. The play is inordinately poetic.”

“But the point, I think, is this,” says Tappan.“The reach and scope of opera has grown enormously in the quarter century since Thornton’s death. And the play, which was adapted successfully for radio and film, and as a ballet and a televised musical (with Frank Sinatra) during my uncle’s lifetime, now deserves its chance to be interpreted as an opera. I could not be more thrilled at the prospect.”

A playwright’s resistance is nothing new to McClatchy, who persuaded the estate of Tennessee Williams to allow him to turn the play Orpheus Descending into an opera in 1994, even though the playwright had left specific instructions in his will not to set his plays to music.

As with the Williams estate, McClatchy says, “I was able to convince the Wilder estate first that the work would benefit, and secondly, that I would keep the spirit and texture of the original on the operatic stage where time moves more slowly.”

A SPECTACLE OF SPARSENESS

C. David Higgins' new set design

No curtain. No scenery. Can an operatic stage accommodate such sparseness?

To some degree, yes. On entering the theater, the audience will encounter a bare, open stage with exposed lighting. Yet opera, as stage designer David Higgins points out,“is a different animal than theater.

Audiences have different expectations, in part because the spectacle is a greater part of the experience. Minimalist staging works for drama, but for the audience to appreciate what’s happening on the stage, they need visual support.”

Visual support in this instance will take the form of a simple wooden platform, a “raked stage,” that is gradually transformed into a projection screen. As the action plays itself out on stage, sepia-toned photographs of life in a New England village will appear on the screen. The performers’ costumes will echo the colors of the photographs—a reminder that an image of the past, memory itself, is the true locus of Our Town, the place where its action transpires.

Drawing of Emily by C. David Higgins

To stage director Vincent Liotta, the greatest challenge will be “bridging the gap between the transparency and simplicity of the play and a genre in which everything is heightened. How do you create an intimate atmosphere and still account for the fact that you have an orchestra in the pit and 1,400 people in the audience? The way we’ll approach it is, in part, by making the opera more conversational, with less emphasis on big arias.”

To adapt the play for the operatic stage, McClatchy and Rorem made several other changes. As Rorem explains, “Singing takes a long time by definition. A lot had to be cut to create some set pieces and arias for the main characters.”

McClatchy reduced the work by combining several of the town’s citizens into a single figure, who acts much like a Greek chorus in representing the whole town. He also shortened the Stage Manager’s speeches by displacing some of his lines onto the supertitles above the stage.“ In that way,” says McClatchy, “we could include important material without taking up musical time.”

Drawing of George by C. David Higgins

The opera begins where the play ends—with a funeral, which opens with a traditional hymn. “As something they've been listening to all their lives, the hymn gets the audience into a certain mood, the familiar, reassuring world of memory and the past,” McClatchy says.

The lyrics of the hymn also strikingly echo the play’s perspective on everyday life against the backdrop of eternity. “The hymn struck me as absolutely spot on with Our Town,” McClatchy remarks.

More so than he imagined. As Tappan Wilder explains,“Though McClatchy could not have known, the Wilder family sang that same hymn on many occasions. It was an integral part of our traditions.”

THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

Last spring, IU Opera Theater engaged in a weekend-long workshop to see how the work unfolds on the stage. McClatchy and Rorem were there, along with Higgins and Liotta. By all accounts it was a great success— the test audience felt the opera was emotional and very moving.

The music, says McClatchy, was especially powerful. “The melodic lines are very strong. The singers are sustained and carried by these beautiful melodic surges in the orchestra, which enables them to speak their lines and sound more dramatic.”

McClatchy also attributes the new work’s success to “the vitality of the original, the dramatic vision of the play and eloquence of its language.” Our Town is sometimes considered provincial or quaint because of the image of America it represents.

But Wilder views this American spectacle through a cosmopolitan lens.Written mostly in Switzerland, steeped in German Expressionism, the play draws on a transatlantic modernism and the techniques of Asian drama, including those of Japanese Noh theatre. And it brings this material to bear on his American subject in a novel and chilling way, to expose the cracks in the facade. “A meditation on memory,” McClatchy reflects, “Our Town shows us that we can never own the past, that it is always something other than we thought.”

---

Ned Rorem

Ned Rorem

Words and music are inextricably linked for Ned Rorem. Time magazine has called him “the world’s best composer of art songs,” yet his musical and literary ventures extend far beyond this field. Rorem has composed three symphonies, four piano concertos, an array of other orchestral and chamber works, nine operas, choral works of every description, ballets, and other music for the theater.

He is the author of 16 books, including five volumes of diaries, and collections of lectures and criticism. Rorem has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship (1951), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1957), an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1968), and other awards for his many books.

In 1998, he was chosen Composer of the Year by Musical America. Among his many commissions for new works are those from the Ford Foundation, the Lincoln Center Foundation, the Chicago Symphony, and Carnegie Hall.His suite Air Music won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize in music. The Atlanta Symphony’s recording of his work received a Grammy Award in 1989. In January 2000, he was elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

J.D.McClatchy

J.D. McClatchy

J. D.McClatchy is the author of five collections of poems, the most recent of which is Hazmat, a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. He has also written three volumes of essays and edited a dozen other books and the acclaimed series The Voice of the Poet for Random House Audiobooks.

His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, and The New Republic, among other publications. McClatchy has taught at Princeton, Columbia,UCLA, and Johns Hopkins, and he is currently a professor of English at Yale University.

Since 1991, he has served as editor of The Yale Review.McClatchy has risen to an increasingly prominent role in the opera house as a librettist; writing for William Schuman’s A Question of Taste , Francis Thorne’s Mario and the Magician, Bruce Saylor’s Orpheus Descending, Tobias Picker’s Emmeline, and (with Thomas Meehan) Loren Maazel’s 1984. This spring will see the premieres of two other operas for which he has written libretti: Lowell Liebermann’s Miss Lonelyhearts and (with Julie Taymor) Elliot Goldenthal’s Grendel. He has also written a new singing translation of The Magic Flute, set to debut at the Metropolitan Opera in January.

He is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among other honors, he has received grants from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

A 1991 award citation states, “McClatchy writes with an authentic blend of cognitive force and savage emotional intensity. His complex sense of our historical overdetermination is complemented by his concern for adjusting the balance between his own poems and tradition. It may be that no more eloquent poet will emerge in his American generation.