What can be said about the music that the music can’t say better? Only how it came to be written.
Prior to Our Town I composed seven operas (or twelve, if you count all of Fables). These are:
- A Childhood Miracle (1951), libretto by Elliott Stein after Hawthorne’s Snow Image, for six singers and thirteen instruments, 33 minutes.
- The Robbers (1956), melodrama in one scene, for three male singers and eight instruments, libretto by me after Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale.
- Miss Julie (1965), libretto by Kenward Elmslie after Strindberg, for four solo singers, chorus, and full orchestra, two acts, two hours. Later changed to one act, 90 minutes. (This was my only full-length opera—though what does “full-length” mean? Can not a 10-minute work be full-length?)
- Fables (1970), five very short operas on poems of Jean de la Fontaine, translated by Marianne Moore. The Lion in Love, Bird Wounded by an Arrow, Fox and the Grapes, Sun and the Frogs, and The Animals Sick of the Plague. 22-28 minutes.
- Bertha (1968), on Kenneth Koch’s play, for mezzo-soprano, chorus, a “cast of thousands”, piano accompaniment, 25 minutes.
- Three Sisters Who are not Sisters (1968), on a play in three scenes by Gertrude Stein, five solo singers, piano accompaniment, 35 minutes.
- Hearing (1976), libretto a dramatization by James Holmes of Kenneth Koch’s poems, drawn from the 1966 sing cycle.
Beyond this are unpublished juvenilia: Cain and Abel with Paul Goodman, 1946; Last Day, a nine-minute monodrama with Jay Harrison, 1959; an incomplete 2-acter called The Anniversary with Jascha Kessler, 1961; and Four Dialogues with Frank O’Hara, 1954. (“Juvenilia” does not mean amateurish as much as just early.)
The Dialogues, like all the other works are published by Boosey & Hawkes, except for A Childhood Miracle which is with Peer-Southern.
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). Besides the operas, there are perhaps five-hundred songs including several cycles, some with small ensembles.
It does not follow that “vocal” composers are equally comfortable in both song and opera. Puccini, Verdi, and even Wagner are not known for their songs; Fauré, Duparc, and even Brahms are not known for their operas. Some are at home in each medium: Richard Strauss, Poulenc, and even Virgil Thomson.
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.
Do I set my own words to music—for I am an author too? No. If Ned-the-writer were good enough to please Ned-the-composer, the text would be self-sufficient, and hence untouchable.
Our Town by Thornton Wilder is internationally the best known play of the 20th century. The 1940 movie version had a heartbreakingly simple background score by Aaron Copland. Since then, many a musician, including Copland, has applied in vain for operatic rights. Did Wilder feel that the play contained its own “music”, and that real music would be gilding a very fragile lily?
The idea of my doing it was not my own, but that of Sandy McClatchy. Sandy, with Wilder’s nephew Tappan, of Thorton’s estate, procured the rights and wrote the libretto. The libretto, pared down a little, and with a few set pieces, is otherwise faithful to the original.
Does it need to be sung? Am I the one to make it singable? And is it Ned-the-songwriter or Ned-the-operawriter who makes it work? As of this day, January 8, 2006, I have not heard it. Nor have you. In a month we will see—or hear—and then decide.
© 2005 Ned Rorem
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Electronic reproduction of any kind forbidden without written consent.
Composer's Notes | Librettist's Notes | Note by a Nephew | Program Notes
 NOTES BY LIBRETTIST J.D. MCCLATCHY
January 2006
A NOTE BY THE LIBRETTIST
Music was an essential part of Thornton Wilder’s life. He played it, he studied it, he wrote about it. In fact, as he reported in a 1926 letter to his sister, when he got to the end of writing The Bridge of San Luis Rey and felt himself frozen, unable to write the book’s final pages, he attended by chance a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and was so moved, so charged, that he went home and immediately sat down and finished his novel.
But when it came to composers who wrote to him for permission to make his major plays into operas, it was a different story. He famously turned down requests from both Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. (As a matter of fact, back in 1961, Ned Rorem had written to Wilder about setting one of his short plays—a request that led nowhere.) Wilder’s reasoning seems to have been that his plays were conceived in a specific genre, and to adapt them into another would compromise their integrity. That didn’t stop him, however, from fashioning librettos out of two of his own plays, The Long Christmas Dinner for Paul Hindemith, and The Alcestiad for Louise Talma. But during his lifetime, and for long afterwards, and despite the enormous success of Broadway and television adaptations, his important plays were off limits to operatic composers.
In 2001, I brought the matter up again with Wilder’s nephew, my friend Tappan Wilder, the thoughtful and energetic literary executor of the Wilder Estate. Though there was pressure on him at the time to approve a Broadway musical version of Our Town, he could see that opera was indeed an appropriate medium to preserve the play’s dramatic intimacy and emotional force, and thereby extend the play’s reach across time. Once he agreed to my proposal, it was obvious that Ned Rorem had to be convinced to undertake the music. As a master of vocal writing, with a passion for classic American texts, he was a natural fit. And indeed his music, while giving the orchestra the melodic lead in the score, cannily preserves for the vocal lines a theatrical openness and spontaneity that “translate” the original play’s nuances and pathos.
My task, as librettist, was to condense the play’s length while preserving its shape and tone. Because musical time is so much longer than dramatic time, many of the play’s scenes had to be shortened and characters eliminated. In the play, both Emily and George have a sibling, but not in the opera. Many of the play’s minor characters--the townsfolk of Grover’s Corners--have been combined into one, Mrs. Soames, who functions as both busybody and chorus. The play’s most intriguing innovation, of course, was the Stage Manager and the way he comments on the action, bringing forward various “experts” to fill us in on the town’s history. Again, this would have slowed down our opera intolerably. This is why I thought to make use of another theatrical innovation—at least in the opera house. Supertitles are used as captions to enhance the audience’s understanding of what’s transpiring on stage. But what if the device were also used as a character in the opera itself . . . . I have, in a sense, split the Stage Manager into a singer and a screen. I should note too that the play and the opera open differently. For the sake of dramatic continuity, I wanted the opera to open with a funeral, just as it closes with one—in this case, the very same funeral. And I thought it best to open with a hymn, one beloved and familiar. Once the composer agreed to this idea, he wanted to make his own setting of the hymn, but I insisted that the traditional one would be best, that the sound of the familiar, communal hymn would set the right tone for what follows. Indeed, that hymn’s words go right to the heart of the story:
A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
When, in 1939, the film version of the play was being prepared, a conventional Hollywood ending was imposed: our heroine dies at the end of the play, but lives in the movie. What seems odd is that when the nervous producer wrote to Wilder about this idea, babbling on about the innocent public and better reviews and the like, Wilder casually accepted the change. It suited, he said, the naturalism of film. Besides, it was a play not about individuals and their fates but about relationships and time and about the texture of a community. Interestingly, from the start Wilder had been most engaged by the form of Our Town, its unconventional narrative and expressionistic staging. Nearly seventy years after its premiere, though, the experimental nature of the play no longer seems radical, and it is the human stuff of the play that excites and moves us. Don’t we see it now as a memory play? In the 1960’s Wilder wrote a note about Our Town, his final word on the subject. It ends with his description of Emily in the last act:
In the last act of “Our Town” the author places upon the stage a character who—like the member of the audience—partakes of “the smallest events of our daily life” and is also a spectator of them.
She learns that each life—though it appears to be a repetition among millions—can be felt to be inestimably precious. Though the realization of it is present to us seldom, briefly, and incommunicably. At that moment there are no walls, no chairs, no tables: all is inward. Our true life is the imagination and in the memory.
It is, in other words, a play not about the past but about the way we think of the past: our own pasts and that of this country. More than any other art, music works on our memories, and its evocative power brings to Wilder’s work an added dimension.
There is a certain risk—one accepted by Mozart and Verdi and Puccini—when adapting any famous play into an opera. Audiences familiar with the original arrive at the theater with certain preconceptions and expectations. Lines that have passed into legend have to be preserved, beloved moments can’t be omitted. One wants to keep the filigree of daily life that Wilder so carefully concocted—from the fussy coziness of family routines to the small-town philistinism—and still drive towards the loneliness that underlies all the chatter, the mortality the haunts nostalgia. Wilder once said that his play set out to capture “not verisimilitude but reality,” and it seemed to me, while working on this libretto, that I could afford to trim and re-arrange some text if I could maintain the play’s “reality”—its exuberant claims on small moments, its wise allegory of experience and isolation, its heartbreaking portrayal of our life on earth. As an opera, Our Town can again instill in an audience the wonder of watching the human dilemma unfold, now set to a music that so beautifully carries its transcendent joy and grief.
© 2005 J.D. McClatchy
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Electronic reproduction of any kind forbidden without written consent.
Composer's Notes | Librettist's Notes | Note by a Nephew | Program Notes
 A NOTE BY A NEPHEW
I had my first highly personal encounter with Our Town in the winter of 1955 when I played the part of Professor Willard in a high school production situated on planet earth in Dedham, Massachusetts, latitude 42 degrees 14.5 minutes North; longitude 71 degrees 10.0 minutes West. I was a ninth grader, frozen with fright that I would mispronounce the word “Pleistocene." Of course, I did, in a never-forgotten low point of my life.
The 1955 production did not mark the end of my connection with Our Town. In the intervening half-century, now always (and happily) situated on the other side of the non-curtain, I have attended many memorable amateur and professional productions of the play. But that's not all; eleven years ago, in 1995, I became the manager of my uncle’s intellectual property. Where Our Town is concerned this has meant almost daily encounters with the many “actors” involved with this play. Here I speak of dramatic and literary agents, translators, attorneys, publicists, producers, directors, actors, students of Thornton Wilder's life and work of all ages, conservators and collectors of its many and varied pieces -- and now a librettist and a composer.
Since my unpleasant run-in with Professor Willard, I have never failed to feel my heart stop as the play draws to a close and the Stage Manager, now in total command of the stage -- it seems like the whole world to me -- wishes the audience good night.
The test of a good play, Wilder said in 1940, is one “at which the audience don’t cough.” But what about sniffles, a quiet cry even weeping? (Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn wept publicly after Our Town's Broadway world premiere on February 4, 1938.) I have seldom attended a performance of Our Town where some sounds of this nature were not present in the house. And it is no surprise to me that some lovers of the play cannot return a second time. Why? Because they cannot endure the emotional reverberations set off in head and heart by Emily and the Stage Manager's dialogue about the meaning and missed opportunities of life.
As the playwright reminded fans over and over, Our Town is not about small town life but Life itself – “it’s about everywhere.” And “everywhere” would certainly seem to describe the rich diversity of the play’s sources, as well as the variety of locations where the playwright did his work. Wilder was an artist with a command of several foreign languages and an intimate knowledge of the literary treasures of several cultures. As he wrote Our Town he drew on the Bible, the classics, Dante, Shakespeare, post World War I avant-garde drama and literature, and certain Chinese and Japanese theatrical traditions.
Wilder tells us that his play “is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village,” although he knew that life well. He observes further that he “set the village against the largest dimensions of time and place.” As he wrote his play about “everywhere,” he worked in Peterborough, New Hampshire; New Haven, Connecticut; Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island; St. Moritz, Sils-Maria, Ascona and Ruschlikon in Switzerland; on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, and on ships at sea.
With all these places in mind, it seems appropriate that Thornton Wilder said of himself in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s: "I think of my work as being French in form and manners (Saint-Simon and La Bruyére); German in feeling (Bach and Beethoven); and American in eagerness.”
And so it is that when I step into a theater with Our Town on the marquée, I sense a world-in-the-making. And I always recall with a smile and a tug at the heart, even before the show begins, the memory of an uncle who was a playwright laughingly instructing a crowd of family and friends rushing from the table to get to the theater in time: "Take your handkerchiefs, take your handkerchiefs . . .”
Tappan Wilder, January 2006.
© Tappan Wilder
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Electronic reproduction of any kind forbidden without written consent.
Composer's Notes | Librettist's Notes | Note by a Nephew | Program Notes
ABOUT THE OPERA
by Katherine Baber
Concerning American opera, Ned Rorem has said that “the game on our shores requires three considerations: the composer’s style, his nationality, his subject.” Thus, by his own standards, Rorem’s musical adaptation of the Thornton Wilder play Our Town is the quintessential American opera.
Born in Richmond, Indiana, Rorem’s nationality is rooted in the small-town America that Wilder’s Our Town encapsulates. Moreover, his compositional style has developed in close association with the American idiom – its language and music. A country’s music, even its non-vocal music, is influenced by the language of that country; in the composer’s own words, “we are what we speak” and “we are what we sing.” This is particularly true for Rorem, who has composed over four hundred songs and eight other operas in English, including many based on texts by prominent American writers such as Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Also a great admirer of Billie Holiday’s style and George Gershwin’s music, Rorem displays not only a familiarity with setting English text, but a tunefulness reminiscent of American popular song.
Rorem’s style is effective in a way similar to Wilder’s spare staging of Our Town. Though his works display a mastery of modernist techniques in his occasional use of polytonality and serialism, he more often explores the richness and potential complexity of traditional harmony, achieving a direct and elegant expression of a given text. Similarly, the lack of scenery or props and the breaking of the wall between actor and audience in Our Town, which contributed to the development of American drama in the twentieth century, served primarily to focus attention on the deeper meaning of the play’s deceptively simple narrative. Rorem has described himself with regards to vocal music as “less drawn to singing than to what was being sung, less drawn to what was being sung than to what the poetry imparted.” In this sense his style is well-suited to Wilder’s vision of Our Town, which focuses not on the surface of the story, but on the hidden truths revealed through the daily life of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.
While the choice of Wilder’s play as the subject is what most obviously defines Our Town as an American opera, its significance is ultimately more universal. Indeed, Our Town is ubiquitous in American theatre and literary education. Its central character, the omniscient Stage Manager, embodied for Wilder a “stoic, New England irony,” and the other residents of Grover’s Corners face life, both “awful and wonderful,” with a liberal dose of Yankee pragmatism. On the surface, Wilder presents idealized vignettes of American rural life. The events that take place in Our Town, however, carry meaning that extends beyond place and time. The play, for all its brevity, encompasses the most significant aspects of human life in any society: childhood, courtship and marriage, death and mourning. Confronting the harsh reality of war, the Stage Manager tells us about the paperboy who, after attending college, will die in the Great War – “a waste of education.” He also contemplates the graves of New Hampshire’s Civil War soldiers who, on their conviction that the United States should remain undivided, “went and died about it.” In these two examples we see both the unambiguous costs and the uncertain value of war, and in this way the play resonates with both Wilder’s time (between two world wars) and our own. Our Town is also about appreciating life to its fullest and the importance of human connections, represented in part by the hymn “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds,” which reappears throughout the work.
Life in Grover’s Corners is a microcosm of human existence. The Stage Manager proclaims, as he offers the play he inhabits to posterity, that “this is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.” When he says “we,” though, he speaks not only as a resident of a small American town, but as a member of humanity. Rorem has predicted that opera of the future will be a kind of “cultured Esperanto,” of the highest literary quality but belonging to no particular country or language. There can be no better starting place than Wilder’s play to create such a work: both American and, as the composer succinctly puts it, “just plain opera.” The spirit of this work is universal, but it is born in Our Town.
© 2005 IU Jacobs School of Music
No reproduction without written consent.
Electronic reproduction of any kind forbidden without written consent.
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