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Frank Corsaro's Life in the Theater

By Robert Wilder Blue

Frank Corsaro

Actor, director, writer, and teacher, Frank Corsaro was born a self-described "theatrical personality." His career began in 1948 when he appeared as an actor in his first off-Broadway play. His Broadway debut (1952) was as a replacement in Mary Chase's successful comedy/fantasy Mrs. McThing (with Helen Hayes, Ernest Borgnine and Fred Gwynne). Broadway would get to know him far better as a director, however; his second debut was staging Roald Dahl's farce The Honeys (with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy), which was followed by Michael V. Gazzo's Hatful of Rain (with Anthony Franciosa, Ben Gazzara and Shelley Winters) and Tennessee Williams's Night of the Iguana (with Bette Davis and James Farentino). In 1958 Julius Rudel invited Mr. Corsaro to direct Carlisle Floyd's Susannah at the New York City Opera, marking the beginning of a long association with the company. He has worked with almost every major opera company in the U.S. directing numerous world and American premieres as well as most of the operas from the standard repertory. He has written several books (including Maverick: A Director's Personal Experience in Opera and Theater) and libretti (Thomas Pasatieri's one-act opera Before Breakfast) and has been on the faculty at The Juilliard School since 1987.

On April 24, 2002, Juilliard will present the world premiere of Heloise and Abelard, composed by Stephen Paulus to Mr. Corsaro's libretto; Corsaro will also direct. Heloise and Abelard were twelfth century lovers who met with tragic ends; thus far, however, their story has failed to inspire a successful opera. How did Mr. Corsaro's interest evolve? "I was approached by Ruth Warrick, the actress, who was interested in having a new piece done at St. John the Divine. She had been interested in Heloise and Abelard, whose story is certainly one of the most incredible and cruel love stories ever written. She had found a composer already - he was a Swedish man - and I must confess that I can't recall his name because the poor man wrote about twelve pages and then passed away. So there I was with my libretto and no one to write the music. It became difficult for Ruth to locate another composer and she gave up on the project. But I had done my initial research and the text was written.

"When Stephen Paulus and I met by chance a few years ago we talked about subjects that he was interested in setting to music and one of them was this story. I immediately thought it was a bit of serendipity and suggested I would be more than interested in transforming the materials I had and carrying my research further in order to make a full-length opera. In its original form as an oratorio it was limited in terms of dramatic confrontations and therefore it did not really develop dramatically as an opera needed to. And that's how the project was born. (Ruth has been very happy to learn that the subject is finally coming to some kind of fruition and intends to come to the opening.)

"To attempt a sort of a logical and linear drama about what occurred in their lives was incredibly complicated. The source material was the letters, which are intrinsic to the story; without them there would be very little knowledge of the existence of these two people. And while the letters are exquisite beyond belief, they occur after all of the mayhem preceding them had taken its toll on both people and so I had to work backwards in terms of constructing their story. My other sources were varied and many. Ruth had given me quite a lot of material she had gathered over the years and there were several very cunning books written on the subject, including a novel by a woman named Marion Meade called Stealing Heaven. A film was released here around 1989 and although it's perfectly decent, it is really based on the novel and Meade's interpretation of their story.

"I was primarily concerned about the love story - the transformation of this very brilliant young lady and this so-called theological rock star into two passionate lovers who then, of course, have the moment of disaster that is caused by her uncle, Canon Fulbert. He is one of the so-called villains and the other is Abelard's former teacher, William of Champeaux, who was losing ground among young students in Paris because of the rising star of Abelard. I added elements that are suggested in the material - Fulbert's secret lechery for Heloise, for example - and I left out the material concerning Abelard's coming to live in the household with the Canon Fulbert, even though I suspect their love affair occurred right under the Canon's nose. I used the idea of Fulbert currying favor by asking Abelard to instruct his brilliant niece, to the detriment of Champeaux who was considered the more established if not the more successful teacher. The result is that Champeaux seeks his revenge by helping to expose the trysts between the two lovers."

A shocking revenge

Trennung von Heloïsa und Abaelard (Meeting of Heloise and Abelard), Angelica Kauffmann, Musée de l'Hermitage, Saint-Petersbourg (Photo AKG Paris).

"The great question was posed by Stephen, who asked, 'After the castration, then what? Where do you go from there? How do you top that?' The answer was right there clearly in Abelard's letter to Heloise - and I utilize elements of the letters in dialogue form - which is the extraordinary discovery on Heloise's part that after the castration Abelard had forcibly had her admitted into the convent. Years passed before he even attempted to go see her and he only did so because he had heard that she had tried to commit suicide (although I don't use that episode). The reason for his going, of course, was that he had suspected her of getting involved with another man. This brings about his confession that if God were his only rival then he felt Heloise was safe and thereby kept away from other men. He could not bear the thought that she would turn to someone else. The final act is based on that revelation and the fact that they had not seen each other for over twenty years when they finally meet for this confrontation.

"The scene in which their son Astrolabe appears is entirely made up from an implication that a young lad who was being taken care of by Abelard's sister was about to enter the novitiate. In the penultimate scene Abelard and Heloise come to this ceremony and the boy does not know who they are (although the audience knows they are his mother and father) which gives this scene enormous poignancy. I bookend the entire opera with an event that actually occurred. It begins with Heloise, now the aging prioress, having heard of Abelard's death and forcibly having his body exhumed and brought to her convent to be buried. The opera ends with the arrival of the body on Easter morning; once again, she is alone with him.

"That's the general scheme of the libretto. I chose certain things that I wanted to see happen in the opera, certain musical forms, and gradually the pieces just logically came together. I had no detailed outline until I had written the opening and the closing and had decided which letters I wanted to include. I tried to write as the action unfolded and I looked for set pieces throughout, so there are a number of arias of varying lengths. The use of Latin suggests the nature of their work together and was a way to establish the brilliance and knowledge of this sixteen-year-old girl. I decided that given the nature of Heloise's character it would be wonderful to have a aria in which she parodies the sort of knowledge needed to make one a complete scholar. There were other elements I wanted to include also, for instance, finding out what happened to Fulbert after the castration and how it was that Abelard got back to the Paraclete which he turned his own monastery. But the composer felt these two scenes were holding up the movement of the opera, so I was perfectly willing to let them go. We had very little trouble in shaping the libretto to his needs. I encouraged Stephen to find the subtextual elements in the material and I gave him a sort of carte blanche to do what he felt necessary. He consulted with me about the changes he made and I felt he chose very wisely. Only toward the end was there the slightest bit of difference which we ameliorated."

We wondered if writing the libretto and directing the finished piece were two different hats? "I think it's the inside and outside of the same hat, really. As the director, there are things I am able to do that are not necessarily spelled out in the libretto. In the past when I've worked on new operas, I've made the composers promise that whatever the result was on stage, it was be considered my own view of the opera and was not to represent the last word. Often now when we get piano-vocal scores of operas they contain all of the tired old directions that usually were the result of the opening performances, so that when it is published it reads like a play. Whenever I read a play I hardly read the directions; if I'm interested enough I will go back to see really what the author (and the original director) had in mind and even then I never will take them literally."

Class Clown

Frank Corsaro was born and raised in New York City, "on December 22, 1924 to be exact. Right from the get-go I was the class clown. I always interested in the theater. I made scrapbooks of all the plays on Broadway - without knowing what they were really about - sort of imagining what they were like. Often I even composed music in my head for some of the musicals that later in life I came to know. As a result of some zoning problems I was transferred from a Catholic school to DeWitt Clinton High School where I landed in a class headed by a woman who was very much invested in the theater. She always directed the class plays and I appeared in every one of them. I was the star of DeWitt Clinton and I loved it.

"I started my professional life as an actor and worked off Broadway and in lots of television and radio. Finally as a result of my early work under the auspices of Herbert Fields, the librettist and a friend of this lady from DeWitt Clinton, I managed to get into the Drama Department at Yale University. From then on it just simply followed that I came to New York and got involved with the Actors Studio. Out of that came the opportunity to direct several productions, so I gave up acting primarily and evolved into a director because somehow it gave me greater latitude in terms of subject and the needs of my imagination. As a result of my involvement with the Studio I helped create one of the first examples of the real work that came from that place, Mike Gazzo's A Hatful of Rain, which was a huge success for everyone concerned. I became a teacher of acting there and developing various projects at the studio, including Joyce Carol Oates's first play, The Sweet Enemy. Eventually, of course, the Actors Studio Theater failed to continue which was a real loss.

"Opera came about in 1957-58 when Julius Rudel recruited a group of New York directors from on and off-Broadway to do a season of American operas. He asked me to do Susannah and it turned out so well that it was taken to the Edinburgh Festival. After that there was a lapse of almost ten years before I did another opera. One night I noticed that my production of Susannah was being given what turned out to be its last performance after umpteen years and I went to it. I was so taken by the fact that this production had lasted for over ten years in and out of the repertoire and it looked exactly as I had originally envisioned it. The next day I called Rudel who, as it turned out, was looking for a director for Shostokovich's Katerina Ismaylova. He said they had been looking for me, and I responded, 'Here I am!' That brought me back into opera and since then I've done many, many productions for them. Probably the most important was La Traviata that created a whole new way of looking at opera production. I brought a level of reality to it, which created great problems and consternation and exhilaration and was a very special success for them. It was treating opera as theater, which now, of course, has gone overboard in so many directions. So I always considered myself the Grandpa Moses of opera."

Two operas of particular interest to us were directed in their world premieres by Mr. Corsaro: Lee Hoiby's Summer and Smoke and Carlisle Floyd's Of Mice and Men. "Lee has an intrinsic theater sense. I've been trying for several years now to get that piece revived here at Juilliard. Whenever we give one of our concerts in which we combine excerpts from various and sundry works I always put in Summer and Smoke. Getting two people who are right for the roles of John and Alma becomes problematic though. It was so right when we originally produced it. Lee and I also talked about the possibility of doing The Glass Menagerie, but it never came about for a number of complicated reasons - as always.

"Of Mice and Men had probably the most dramatic incident that has ever occurred between myself and a librettist - in this case, Carlisle. For a long time I was not really pleased with a particular scene he'd written which occurs in the book when George goes with a buddy to a brothel. I think Carlisle felt that because of the nature of the opera it could use a rousing big chorus scene with lots of women flying around and all of that. Elaine Bonazzi had been hired to sing the role of the madam and the set was already being built. We were in my apartment and I said to Carlisle, 'You've got to understand one thing, Carlisle. There's one scene in this opera that I really don't think works and you will find that out when we put it on because it simply holds up the action and does not add any new information.' He looked at me with big, wide-open eyes and we discussed it a bit. He said, 'Give me a minute,' and went into the bathroom. He came out five minutes later and said, 'You're right, let's cut it.' It was a dramatic moment because we were just about to go into a rehearsal in which an entire scene with a large chorus of men and women and the leading lady was all going to be struck. But, I think it really helped the opera ultimately. Poor Elaine was sent packing, although I'm sure she was paid."

In the 1950s and '60s the New York City Opera boasted a company of the fine singing actors, many who are little known today for lack of becoming international stars and/or having recording contracts. Frances Bible, Walter Cassel, Phyllis Curtin, Brenda Lewis, Julian Patrick and Norman Triegle were only a few of the wonderful singers who created roles in American operas. "What about Pat Brooks? I was doing Rigoletto in Texas with this young lady who reminded me of Pat Brooks and her performance was a stunning example of the kind of approach that Pat took in her roles. And I told her later how she reminded me of Pat and she said, 'I'm afraid I don't know who that is.' And my heart sank."

We wondered how the great singing actors of that period compare to those Mr. Corsaro works with today. "I would say that the really good actors in every era resemble one another. There have been, of course, some extraordinary performers - Teresa Stratas, Jon Vickers, and to some degree Maria Callas - people who stand out as remarkable acting singers and the equals of their counterparts in the theater. That is why I am most annoyed by productions that don't bother with the actor in the singer. I try to approach opera and theater in the same way. They're both plays, one with music one without. I try to bring a kind of reality to opera that one would find in a play and I approach the singers as I would the actors in a play.

"My classes are always based on trying to get the singers to own the music. By that I mean bringing to it all their own experience and their values. It is that element of the work, the personal work that has to do with uncovering these materials, that the singer is often not utilizing to their best advantage. It is their own personal sense of what inspired them to become singers and what they need to get into that voice that allows for a larger range of expression."

Do the limitations of some opera singers ever frustrate you? "Oh yes, of course. Very often I have not done something because I knew I couldn't get the singers I wanted and felt there wasn't any point in working on it. You have so little time for rehearsals in opera. Often, even in a new production, the leading singer will not appear until a few days before opening night. That's the sort of thing, frankly, that I have nothing to do with and as such I haven't worked with certain people.

"I just had a roaring good time doing an interesting Rigoletto in Houston with Dmitri Hvorostovsky whom I thought was quite marvelous. I'll be doing Traviata there next year with Renée Fleming - her first attempt at the role. I did a new Tosca for Plácido Domingo that he's taking to Tokyo this summer. So I continue to work in traditional opera. I'm getting more and more interested in my latter years in exploring the theater again. I've written some plays that are being considered and movie scripts that are being more than considered. But I will continue going back and forth between opera and theater when the occasion allows me to."

The 411 on Heloise and Abelard

The story
http://historymedren.about.com/library/weekly/aa020500a.htm?once=true&

The letters
http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/heloise.html
http://student.maxwell.syr.edu/anderson/heloise.htm

… in Latin
http://www.georgetown.edu/irvinemj/classics203/texts/abelard.html

The other operas
http://www.ecspublishing.com/opera/opcat38.htm
http://www.opera-opera.com.au/plott.htm#tahohelo

The musicals
http://www.fiddeslaw.com.au/ah/summary.htm
http://abelard.freeservers.com/
http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Strasse/7628/abelard.html

The film
http://www.execpc.com/~pewter/Derek_de_Lint/stealingheaven.htm
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilm/product/film_info/0,3699,2328624,00.html

The animated film
http://www.abelard-and-heloise.com/

Heloise
http://historymedren.about.com/library/who/blwwheloise.htm?once=true&
http://home.infi.net/~ddisse/heloise.html

Peter
http://www.avsands.com/abelard-av.htm
http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/abelard_b.html

The Pen(is), Castration and Identity
http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/conf/cs95/papers/irvine.html

Gender, longing and so forth
http://mtprof.msun.edu/Fall2000/Gonrev.html

The tomb
http://www.library.nwu.edu/spec/siege/images/PAR00056.JPG

The art
http://home.t-online.de/home/werner.robl/catalogue/_0001.html
http://home.t-online.de/home/werner.robl/catalogue/catalogue.htm

Lots more links
http://www.execpc.com/~pewter/Derek_de_Lint/film_tv/stealing_heaven/links.htm#About

The films of Ruth Warrick
http://www.filmsandtv.com/search.asp?ms=2&uq=Ruth%20Warrick

See also the interview with Stephen Paulus