Although the line between opera and Broadway has been blurring more than ever in recent years, precious few American musical-theater composers have "crossed over" to opera. One who is making the jump is composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz, whose credits include the long-running Broadway hit, Wicked, and who is now in the process of writing his first opera - Séance on a Wet Afternoon, based on a novel by Mark McShane and its 1964 British film adaptation (starring Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough). I asked Schwartz and six of his confreres for their thoughts on opera versus musicals.
STEPHEN SCHWARTZ (Wicked, Pippin, Godspell)
MP: What's the current status of Séance on a Wet Afternoon?
SS: We had a reading of it in New York in January, under the auspices of the American Opera Project. It was commissioned by Opera Santa Barbara, and there will be a full production there in September 2009, God help me.
MP: Is this your first opera?
SS: Oh, yes - and there's a very steep learning curve. One major challenge is the sung scenes, or the recitative. Writing those scenes is a very complex process because the musical themes under what people are singing should give you a lot of emotional information. A lot of times, the music tells you something different from what the person is saying. It takes me a lot longer to write a minute of the opera than a minute of a musical-theater piece.
MP: What's the main difference between musicals and opera?
SS: I think it's a little like the Supreme Court definition of pornography - you can't quite define it, but you know it when you see it. The main factor is the type of voices one is writing for. As a composer, you have to take into consideration where the voice breaks into the passaggio, how much time it takes to produce the sound, and so on.
Another thing - though I know this is no longer always true - is that opera is meant to be sung un-amplified. In musical-theater writing these days, you can have the orchestra or the band just play away and then put the voices on top of it, because you know everything will be miked and mixed, and you'll be able to hear the singers with no problem.
MP: What musicals do you think could be classified as American operas?
SS: I wouldn't feel it inappropriate to see West Side Story or Candide in an opera house. A Little Night Music has also been done by opera companies, and there's some justification for that. Sweeney Todd is an opera in just about every respect except the vocal writing for Mrs. Lovett. When opera singers play that part, it doesn't sound the way it was intended to sound. Why isn't Les Misérables an opera, or Dreamgirls, or any of Andrew Lloyd Webber's through-composed works? Again, it mostly has to do with the kind of voices they're written for.
MP: New York City Opera has commissioned Charles Wuorinen to write an opera based on "Brokeback Mountain." Does that strike you as a good idea?
SS: Here's what I think the problem is: much of what's powerful about "Brokeback Mountain" is what's not expressed. The two main characters almost never say what they're feeling. If someone gave me the assignment, I would try to put all of the emotion into the orchestra and then have the characters not sing anything that has to do with that. If it's done well, that could be extremely moving and effective. But not everything should be an opera, just as not everything should be a musical.
*
ADAM GUETTEL (The Light in the Piazza, Floyd Collins, Myths and Hymns)
MP: What are some of your favorite operas and opera composers?
AG: Verdi was a great dramatist who understood that a curse is a money note, that the intangible is what music is for. Rigoletto is an amazing musical. Puccini's melodies serve both character and situation, and his music can be heartbreaking. Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande is spooky and lyrical. It has the best "jealousy" music ever, and stunning orchestrations. Britten's Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw are so sure-footed, so original. His melodies ping with crystalline simplicity, or worm their way through the harmony like cancer. In Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, good and evil sing like crazy, and the recitative is innovative. I'd also like to mention Adam de la Halle - thirteenth century - specifically his Jeu de Robin et Marion, which is so sexy and melodic.
MP: What might you write about in your future musical theater and/or operatic works?
AG: I am open to everything, but I gravitate to subject matter that seems to require music to come to life. I want to continue to tell stories with music, through-sung or through-composed or not.
*
JASON ROBERT BROWN (Parade, The Last Five Years, Songs for a New World, 13)
MP: What are some of your favorite operas and composers?
JRB: This is a bizarre thing for someone who writes musicals to say, but opera generally strikes me as very artificial. I know people who begin crying the minute La Traviata starts, and I don't doubt their sincerity, but it just doesn't have that kind of an emotional effect on me.
That said, on a musical and dramatic level, there are several operas that I love and often listen to, chief among them Die Zauberflöte, Dialogues des Carmélites and Vanessa. I also think Britten had a marvelous facility for vocal and dramatic writing.
MP: What's the main difference between musicals and opera?
JRB: I think it's a question of priority. I know opera freaks will insist that the dramatic values in an opera are absolutely equal to the musical values, but it's just not true - and I don't say that in any pejorative sense. I think we can rely on Bernstein to demonstrate the difference between opera and musicals. There's West Side Story, and then there's A Quiet Place. Looking at those two pieces side by side is a clear demonstration of the distinctions between the two idiosyncratic art forms.
MP: What musicals do you feel could be classified as American operas?
JRB: You could certainly make a brief for Sweeney Todd and Candide, and I would also add Marie Christine and The Most Happy Fella. But I suspect that's mostly because the vocal styles required in all of these pieces are more operatic than in, say, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
It's important to point out that opera audiences don't expect to hear contemporary music when they go to the opera. I don't mean "contemporary" as in Thomas Adès or Lutoslawski - I mean the kind of groove-oriented pop, jazz and rock-influenced music that you might hear on radio or television. Ultimately, the venue is the determining factor.
MP: If you were to write an opera, what might be the subject matter?
JRB: Something grand, something magical, something that demands all the power that opera singers and a huge orchestra can summon up. Something that doesn't require a musical or linguistic vernacular that would be alien to the musicians. Hmm, that's a lot of restrictions. Maybe all the good operas have been written?
*
LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA (In the Heights)
MP: Are you into opera at all?
LM: Very little. My exposure to opera consists of two concerts, of Die Fledermaus and La Bohème, that I went to in first grade, and I assistant-directed a production of Tristan und Isolde when I was in college. That was really fun. The opera teacher at Wesleyan knew nothing about staging, so I basically got to stage the whole thing. It was a great experience but very different from musical theater.
MP: Would you ever write an opera?
LM: No, because I find that my ear needs a break. I need dialogue, I need dance breaks. Musical theater is more my wheelhouse. But I am a fan of what little opera I've heard. Certainly, I like La Bohème. And Tristan und Isolde has some really killer stuff in it!
MP: What's the main difference between musicals and opera?
LM: For me, the thing with musical theater is that it's really a mash-up of a lot of different disciplines. In opera, it's all about the singing and the melodies. The music is what you're there for, and the other elements hold it up, whereas I like it all in a big stew.
*
MICHAEL JOHN LACHIUSA (The Wild Party, Marie Christine)
MP: What's the main difference between musicals and opera?
MJL: In opera, you have classically trained voices, plus you have the audience expectation that an opera will be of a more serious, epic, spectacular nature than a musical. I've moved between both worlds, and I don't like to put too many labels on my own work.
MP: What has been the extent of your opera writing as of now?
MJL: I've written the librettos for two operas with Robert Moran, a wonderful composer. And when I was the resident composer at Lyric Opera of Chicago, I wrote an opera for them called Lovers and Friends. It had its premiere there in 2001. Then I did an opera for Audra McDonald, called Send (who are you? I love you). It was done at Houston Grand Opera in 2006, paired with Poulenc's La Voix Humaine.
MP: What musicals do you feel could be classified as American operas?
MJL: Show Boat comes precariously close. It's an operetta in a lot of respects. To me, much of Jerome Kern's work has a crossover feel. The same with The Most Happy Fella and Fanny. As for Sondheim, Sweeney Todd has operatic aspirations, and Passion to me is very much a chamber opera.
MP: What are some of your favorite operas?
MJL: Wozzeck would have to be at the top of the list, because of its daring, its beauty, its architecture and its subject matter. That one always packs a wallop for me. But I also love La Rondine. It's so beautiful, it always makes me cry. I love Satyagraha, which I think is a mesmerizing work of art. And I love Wagner's Ring cycle.
MP: Are there opera projects in your future?
MJL: Jon Butterell and I are doing an adaptation of Carmen for Audra McDonald, using Bizet's score.
*
STEPHEN FLAHERTY (Ragtime, Seussical, Once on This Island)
MP: What are some of your favorite operas and composers?
SF: My background was in pop and theater music, and I didn't really come to listen to opera until my college years. The first opera I ever saw was a college performance of La Bohème, which has remained one of my favorites over the years. I really admire the Benjamin Britten scores, and I love The Magic Flute. I should also mention Bernstein. I wish he had written more in his lifetime.
MP: What are the major differences between musicals and opera?
SF: Because the music is so much in the forefront in opera, the text has to be underwritten, in a way, as compared to a musical-theater piece. Also, most musicals use song forms with "buttons," whereas operas use larger musical and dramatic structures.
MP: Could you ever see yourself writing an opera?
SF: A lot of the work that [librettist] Lynn [Ahrens] and I do is through-composed or nearly through-composed. I think of Dessa Rose as sort of a folk opera, and I think we moved toward opera in Ragtime. I certainly would be open to the idea of writing a full-fledged opera.
*
STEW (Passing Strange)
MP: What are some of your favorite operas and opera composers?
STEW: Tristan und Isolde, Der Ring des Nibelungen, Parsifal. It must seem horribly dumb, pretentious or both that an opera know-nothing like me would be a Wagner freak. I was sucked in by the drama surrounding the man, I must admit, but I stayed for the music. At first, I tried not to let his life get in the way of my experience of his music. Fat chance. Like Mingus' work, Wagner's biography is in every bar. The trombones won't let you forget. His music is dangerous, political, radical. And if you listen to it while you sleep, as I did quite often last year in Berlin, you will have wonderfully troubling dreams and beautiful nightmares.
MP: What's the main difference between musicals and opera?
STEW: The ticket price? The jewelry? I think it's confidence - musicals lack the confidence that operas have in music's ability to get the job done alone and tell the story.
MP: Would you ever write an opera?
STEW: Certainly. Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk shtick has always been an attractive idea to me. I'd love to create a full-on aural/visual happening someday. It's quite exciting, just thinking about it! I should start tonight.
MP: If you were to write an opera, what might be the subject matter?
STEW: I don't want to give away any of my brilliant ideas, but it would not be about love or some noble historical figure. I'd lean towards writing about a very small human subject, with the goal being to show how expansive such a small thing can be - an opera about a rock-and-roller who wins a Tony, for instance.
(L-R: Stew, Adam Guettel. below: Michael John LaChiusa)
