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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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DVD

November 4, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Budd Boetticher: The Collector’s Choice (Sony, five discs). At long last, the five Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott Westerns made between 1957 and 1960 have made it to DVD. (Seven Men From Now, the first film in the series, was released in 2005.) Three of these stark, laconic moral tales, The Tall T, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station, rank high on the short list of great postwar Westerns, while Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone, though not in the same league, are definitely worth seeing. Also included is A Man Can Do That, Bruce Ricker’s Boetticher documentary. Essential viewing for film buffs (TT).

TT: By the clock

November 4, 2008 by Terry Teachout

One of the other things I did during last week’s trip to Washington, D.C., was attend a reception for Richard Gaddes, the Santa Fe Opera’s recently retired general director, who was in town to receive an NEA Opera Honor. I chatted with several members of the Santa Fe Opera board about The Letter, which Richard commissioned. All were amazed and delighted when I told them that The Letter is only ninety minutes long. One of the men to whom I spoke didn’t know that our opera is based on the same Somerset Maugham play that William Wyler filmed in 1940. “A Bette Davis opera?” he said. “And it’s only an hour and a half long? You can’t miss!”

Needless to say, there’s no such thing as a can’t-miss opera, but I knew what he meant, as well I should have: we planned it that way, right from the start.

In August of 2006, a few days after I first suggested that Paul Moravec, my collaborator-to-be, read “The Letter,” the short story that Maugham later adapted for the stage, with an eye to turning it into an opera, Paul wrote back to me as follows:

First impression: top-drawer, rattling good stuff, ripping yarn. I see it as a 90-minute, no-intermission opera (à la Wozzeck).

Later that day he sent me a second e-mail:

Further ramblings on why an opera plot should just go as inevitably and irresistably as a locomotive: in the absence of such a plot, it seems that the composer has to work too hard just to make his music overcome natural inertia. Dramatic music requires the vehicle of such a plot to ride on and through from beginning to end. It involves the nature of time itself: if the time-sense is thick and viscous and boring, so is the effect of the music, no matter how brilliant it may be. As the time-sense of the narrative goes, so goes the time-sense of the music. It is a deeply poetic medium, not at all prosaic, and, for example, the dragging effect of too much detailed prosaic exposition, too much contemplative commentary, too much character elaboration, etc., is just death.

davis045.jpgBy then it was already clear that we were thinking along the same lines, if from slightly different angles: Paul was thinking like a poet, I like a craftsman. (That sums us both up pretty well.)

The next day I replied:

Here’s the opening: house to black. The orchestra plays three or four Tosca-like prefatory chords. Then, in total silence, we hear six gunshots in the darkness. Lights up fast on Leslie standing over the dead body of her lover, holding a smoking revolver.

BOOOOOOOM!! Is that an opera, or what?

And yes, you’re totally right—the model is Wozzeck and it should play without an intermission.

Within a few days I’d refined the opening gambit—the gunshots now came first, followed by the music—and shortly thereafter the two of us started talking face to face and in detail about we wanted to do.

Three months later we sent an outline of The Letter to Richard Gaddes, accompanied by a letter in which we jointly explained what we had in mind:

We see The Letter as a cross between a musical film noir and a verismo opera, smaller in physical scale than Tosca but similar in weight and intensity. We want it to feel like a movie, which is why we plan for it to run roughly ninety minutes without an intermission, with orchestral interludes bridging the scene breaks. Our goal is to write an opera whose casting and scenic requirements are compatible with the needs of medium-sized regional houses but which is musically “big” enough to work just as well in large houses.

Ten days after that, Gaddes sent us the simplest and most thrilling of replies: “We are planning to proceed with the commission of The Letter for 2009.”

salome.jpgWhat this correspondence makes clear is that from the very outset of our collaboration, we knew exactly what kind of opera we wanted to write. In addition to Tosca, Paul had in mind Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, while I was thinking more of Richard Strauss’ Salome, Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, and Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium, but all of these works are concise, fast-moving, and melodramatic in the best sense of the word.

At the same time, the initial conception of The Letter was influenced as much by cinematic models as by operatic ones. We had talked early on about the possibility of writing a Raymond Chandler opera, and Paul also suggested that Casablanca would make a perfect libretto. I nipped those ideas in the bud, knowing that we could never get the rights to adapt Casablanca or any of the Chandler novels that have been filmed (i.e., most of them). But the idea of writing a film-noir opera was still very much in our minds when I suggested “The Letter” to Paul.

That’s why we decided to stick with Paul’s initial impulse and write a ninety-minute opera with no intermission.

No doubt certain spinach-pushing critics will jump from there to the conclusion that The Letter is unserious, but that’s their problem, not ours. Paul and I believe that it’s possible for an opera to be both popular and serious, like Tosca or Salome or Rigoletto. Or Sweeney Todd, for that matter.

In the ever-relevant words of Louis Armstrong, “Showmanship does not mean you’re not serious.” We’re dead serious—but The Letter is still a show.

TT: Almanac

November 4, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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