Librettist Gene Scheer and 'Thérèse Raquin'

Gene Scheer

Thérèse Raquin librettist Gene Scheer has led a few lives. Born in New York and raised in New Jersey, he trained at the Eastman School of Music as an opera singer and went on to Vienna to pursue further study. There, he realized his voice wasn't completely suited to opera and began to work in musical theater and film; but he didn't find that entirely satisfying either. So he began to write music. "It started as a hobby, something to keep my soul alive while I was doing these long runs of musicals. I was writing cabaret songs, and slowly, it became the focus of my life. I wouldn't call myself a composer - I don't orchestrate, for example. I consider myself a songwriter." A number of American singers, including Renée Fleming, Sylvia McNair and Nathan Gunn, have sung Gene's songs in recital and on recordings. Denyce Graves sang his song, American Anthem, for President and Mrs. Clinton at the millennium celebration in Washington, DC and recently on Oprah.

How did you get the call for Thérèse Raquin? "Francesca Zambello was the one who brought Tobias [Picker] and me together. Honestly, I didn't have a long resume as a librettist, so I had work my way into this job. Tobias asked me to read the book and tell him what I thought. I would not call it a great novel, but there were a lot of very compelling aspects to it. The whole naturalism movement that Zola championed lends itself to opera. I couldn't believe it hadn't been done before as an opera because it is such an operatic story. When I had finished the book, I wrote Tobias a long e-mail with my thoughts on how it would work and then I wrote about 30 percent of the libretto as sort of an audition. He liked it and I was hired and we proceeded.

"In turning the novel into a libretto, my task was to imagine this material as an opera; that is to say, not to worry about changing things, adding things, even going in different directions if it seemed more operatic, but to leave the guts of the piece well represented. Tobias gave me an enormous amount of freedom to tell the story as I saw it and to come up with something that appealed to my own imagination. The point of departure was to be faithful to the spirit of the piece but not necessarily to the letter of it. I think you can get in trouble just cutting up a book and setting it to music. When I finally handed Tobias a version that sparked his imagination, the collaboration began." That collaboration included Zambello and Dallas Opera also, with adjustments and refinements being made up to and even through the rehearsal period.

We asked Gene to elaborate a little on exactly how a novel is turned into words that get set to music and sung on stage.

"The operatic experience is different than real life. First of all, people don't sing when they are walking down the street. The characters speak in a rather flat way in the book; the naturalist dialogue is not very lyrical. When it's too naturalistic it seems out of place and I think that is what happens in a lot of modern opera. 'Pass the butter' can work occasionally, but you have to find some sort of poetry. Opera is lyrical but there's also an abstract quality to it. You have to hook into the spirit of what the people are feeling and try to write that. Ultimately, the music is the poetry that matters most, but you want the text to be poetic enough that the text is credibly sown to the music. I made these characters a little more 19th century romantic rather than 19th century naturalistic in order to allow the music work.

"In reimagining it as an opera, I didn't create any character traits, but there were certain elements of the story I highlighted because they seemed to lend themselves to music. For example, I have given Camille more of a sense of optimism when the story begins. He was sick for many years, but he is finally getting better. He has a job and he is optimistic that his life is going to improve. That is something that can lend itself to music. He is still a weak character in the opera in terms of his power and masculinity and general appeal, but in order to give him something to sing about, I highlighted that optimism he is feeling.

"There is no chorus in the opera and with such a small cast, we didn't really want any small characters who just come on and say 'dinner is served' and exit. We eliminated the actual character of Olivier and changed Michaud's name to Olivier. He is married to Suzanne, who is a very small character in the novel. In the opera, I was able to establish a character for her that was different and which helped to support the principal story."

Toward the end of Zola's novel, Thérèse has a scene that immediately strikes the reader who is also an opera-goer as a perfect mad scene for an opera. "There is a mad scene in the opera. It actually does not occur at the same moment as it does in the book; it takes place after the scene in which Madame Raquin writes on the table during the dominos game. After the guests leave, Laurent and Thérèse have a very violent fight and Laurent hits her to the floor and leaves to get the poison. And Thérèse has her mad scene at this point."

Another significant problem in adapting the book for the opera stage is that Madame Raquin is speechless for half of the book. "The magic of theater is that once it's been clearly established that she is incapacitated, with lighting and staging and so forth, she can sing, and I think it's pretty believable. It was important to keep her present in the opera and not just sitting silent in the chair. In the opera, she's actually not speechless for as long as in the book.

"Several years ago, there was a Bonnard exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and as you were leaving the exhibit there was a quote from Bonnard painted on the wall that said, 'painting is lots of little lies for the sake of one big truth.' The interesting thing about opera, the most challenging and wonderful thing also, is that what is truthful on stage is often achieved through abstraction. An abstract idea in the text can often reveal what is in a person's heart much more than them trying to sing about it descriptively and directly. So one of the challenges is to make it personal and intimate and real, but to understand that to get there you have to use different forms of abstraction.

"I think there are so many traps in writing American opera. That's why, for me, the process has been to distill the story to its essential elements and to craft the story in a way that gets the audience to care deeply about the fates of the characters on stage. I tried to write something that appealed to me in the hope that it would appeal to others as well. What I don't worry about when I'm writing it is where the piece fits, in other words, whether it will be viewed as too modern or not modern enough or old-fashioned or particularly original or derivative. I'm concerned with what is happening in the scene and how the characters relate to each other and how the principal theme of the story is being advanced, and with keeping it simple and honest.

"It is significant that there is again an acceptance of tonality as a viable scheme for writing modern music. You can try to blame the audience for not liking certain things, but nevertheless, they are the audience. There's a reason Carlisle Floyd's operas have had an audience. Susannah is one of the most frequently performed operas of any written in the past 50 years, and regardless of what the critics say, people love it, especially Susannah's two arias, 'Ain't it a pretty night' and 'The trees on the mountains.' I think that matters and we're fooling ourselves it we say it doesn't. Composers like Jake Heggie and Mark Adamo are getting their operas performed because they're accessible, and I can say that because I'm not a classical composer. You want to be feeling a piece in your gut and not sitting there thinking, 'oh isn't this beautiful or clever,' or 'it's too dissonant.'

"Certainly, I hope Thérèse Raquin gets more productions, because it's a beautiful score, but also because new pieces need to breathe and grow. Sometimes, we have to learn how to do a new opera. There are many works from the 19th and early 20th centuries that weren't successful when they were first done and have gone on to be war-horses of the repertoire."

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