Archives for 2008

Last night I heard wild cheering and honking horns in the streets of the Upper West Side of New York City. For my part I found myself thinking not so much of the immediate moment as of the increasingly distant past. I was born in 1956 and grew up in a small town whose public schools were segregated well into the Sixties. My father witnessed a lynching in the streets of that same town a quarter-century earlier, one whose perpetrators were never brought to trial.
A few weeks ago I finished writing the biography of Louis Armstrong, who even at the height of his fame continued to be treated by some Americans not as the culture-changing genius that he was but as a menial–an inferior, if you will. Barrett Deems, who played in Armstrong’s band in the Fifties, spoke years later of one terrible episode that had burned itself into his memory:

The [road] manager and I were the only two white guys in the organization, and here’s Louis with five or ten grand in his pocket, his wife with a twenty thousand dollar mink coat, and they both had to sleep in a gymnasium in North Carolina because they couldn’t find any accommodations. That was a killer. It takes the heart out of a man.

Henry James said it: we shall never be again as we were.

I commend your attention to “Frankenthaler at 80: Six Decades,” which goes up at Knoedler & Company tomorrow and will be on view there through January 10. Here’s part of the press release:

Helen Frankenthaler, eminent among American abstract painters, will be eighty in December 2008. To celebrate her landmark birthday, Knoedler & Company is pleased to present this survey exhibition of major paintings spanning Frankenthaler’s entire career, from the 1950s to the 2000s. The show can be described as by, with, and from Frankenthaler. The selection has been made by the exhibition’s curator, Karen Wilkin, in consultation with the artist, from paintings that, until now, she has retained as part of her personal collection of her own work….

I got an advance peek at “Frankenthaler at 80” yesterday afternoon, and found it altogether remarkable. The show consists of nine works painted between 1957 and 2002, none of them small and one, “A Green Thought in a Green Shade,” very large. It isn’t easy to suggest Frankenthaler’s stylistic range in so compact an exhibition, but this one gets the job done with room to spare.
The accompanying catalogue, not at all surprisingly, is a superior piece of work. Karen Wilkin ranks very high on the short list of my favorite art critics, living or dead, and what she doesn’t know about Helen Frankenthaler probably isn’t so. Her essay makes a special point of praising Frankenthaler for her variety and unpredictability:

No matter what the mood, temperature, or even source of her paintings, she has never been a systematic explorer of material or formal possibilities. Unlike many of her colleagues, who habitually tested their ideas about chroma, interval, edge, and scale through intuition-driven themes and variations, she has never worked in series. There may be broad connections among groups of pictures made at about the same time, but each work has been “worried”–as Frankenthaler puts it–out of real experience….
We categorize Frankenthaler at our peril. Describe her as a master of radiant, uninhibited color relationships and she presents us with dark, brooding images, luminous monochromes, or pale, light-struck compositions devoid of chromatic color. Call her a radical innovator and we discover that, throughout her evolution, she has been engaged in a dialogue with the art of the past. Assign her to the ranks of uncompromising abstract painters and we notice that she is preternaturally attentive to the nuances of her surroundings, whether at home or abroad.

It happens that Helen Frankenthaler is my favorite living painter, and the passage quoted above goes a long way toward explaining why, though I’d add one thing: she is one of the most enjoyable of the great American modernists, a painter who is unafraid to give pleasure and secure in the knowledge that to do so is a legitimate goal of modern art. Her work has been giving me intense and lasting pleasure ever since I started looking at paintings, and I’d surely write about this gorgeous show in The Wall Street Journal were I not the fortunate owner of one of her prints, “Grey Fireworks,” which hangs over the couch in my Upper West Side living room and of which Mrs. T and I are sinfully proud.
Instead of holding forth at length about Frankenthaler’s virtues, I’ll simply urge you to go see “Frankenthaler at 80” for yourself. As for me, I can’t wait to see it again.

I ran across this Web page by chance when hunting down the original source of today’s almanac entry. It’s a complete listing of every time that H.L. Mencken is quoted in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The vast majority of the citations are usage-related excerpts from The American Language, but I did run across two Mencken quotes that had slipped my mind:
• “Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it?”
• “Is it hot in the rolling-mill? Are the hours long? Is $1.15 a day not enough? Then escape is very easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another ‘Rosenkavalier’.”
Many more Mencken quotes can be found here. No matter what you thought of the election results, you’ll almost certainly find one that suits your tastes.

UPA’s 1953 animated version of James Thurber’s “The Unicorn in the Garden,” with music by David Raksin:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

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.

By 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.”

What 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.

“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