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By Robert Wilder Blue

Jerry Hadley

Take any ten American singers today and odds are that seven come from the Midwest. While the promise, hope and spirit that built America’s so-called heartland are less evident today than a century ago, it is still the land of church choirs and marching bands - two institutions that have spawned many a professional musician. What is perhaps unique about Jerry Hadley's story is that after enjoying a career singing many of the most well-known tenor roles on the world’s grandest opera stages, he has come home to play the one role he might have been destined for: Jay Gatsby. John Harbison's opera The Great Gatsby, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, had its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in December 1999, has played Chicago and is now coming back to the Met. Jerry spoke with USOPERAWEB about Gatsby, and other things.

“I felt it was a logical choice to be the last new American opera of the 20th century because it is one of the seminal American works of the 20th century, although it’s more about people with 19th century attitudes coming into the 20th century. It’s about embracing the possibilities of the 20th century and the pursuit of the American dream. One of the things that resonated with me is that all the protagonists, with the exception of Jordan Baker, are Midwesterners. These Midwesterners come to the East thinking they can conquer it but end up being conquered instead. It’s the legacy of our frontier experience, the idea that we can conquer anything. Something that is crucial to the understanding of the story is something Fitzgerald did not have to articulate to the generation that was reading the book for the first time and that was the effect the horrors of World War I had on the psyches of that generation. One of the things we know about Jay Gatsby is that he was decorated for valor by every allied government. That means he was in the thick of the fighting, that he saw some really bad things. If you know anything about the war, you know that it was just mass slaughter by the time we got into it. After reading the book for the fourth time that finally dawned on me.

“For me, Jay Gatsby’s journey is not difficult to understand because it seems very logical. A kid from the Midwest who feels inferior creates a different persona for himself. He goes to Louisville as a young, just-out-of-training officer and falls in love with a fairytale princess debutante. Then he’s plucked out of this idyllic setting and thrown into the middle of hell. While he’s at war he receives a letter from Daisy telling him that she’s marrying Tom Buchanan. Not only is he in the middle of hell, but his fairytale princess is gone. How do you deal with that contrast? We know how a lot of Vietnam vets have dealt with it. They came back from this commuter war and found a society that was going along as if the war had never happened. Gatsby comes back after the war, after witnessing these horrors, and he’s on the streets of New York in his uniform with all his medals and he has no money to eat. So he falls under Wolfsheim’s sway in the big bad city and finds out that money talks. Money becomes the means for him to create a world in which he can never see anything bad again. It’s a world that is hermetically sealed, in which he’s surrounded with luxury and comfort. I think he is simply trying never to be hurt again and he wants to recreate the time of his life when he thought he was the happiest. But unfortunately once he finds Daisy again and, in a way, wins her back, his life is over because he discovers the reality of the situation.”

The Premiere

Jerry Hadley as Jay Gatsby and Dawn Upshaw as Daisy Buchanan in the Metropolitan Opera's world premiere production of John Harbison's The Great Gatsby (1999). Photo by Winnie Klotz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera.

“The first run of a new opera is fraught with concerns that are not part of subsequent performances. It was a grueling rehearsal period. We were doing a piece based on an iconic American novel, a story which had never successfully been brought into any other medium. Even if people haven’t read The Great Gatsby they think they have. It had been tried four or five times on film and never translated successfully, because part of the genius of the work is the way Fitzgerald allows the reader to conjure in his/her imagination the world in which those people exist. We all knew going into the project that there were going to be people coming to the theater expecting to see Robert Redford and Mia Farrow singing. John Harbison said, ‘Look, I know there are going to be a lot of people who are going to be pissed off because I have chosen to tell the story this way, but I had to select the elements of the story that spoke to me.’ If you read any of the press from the premiere, there was no middle ground in that piece. We either got crucified or praised to high heaven. I think that means that we did our job as well as we possibly could have and made the choices that needed to be made for the first time out of the gate. I happen to think it’s a magnificent piece. It’s a very difficult story to tell. None of those characters are particularly good people. They’re all people that are weak or delusional or flawed in some way. Two of them find a kind of redemption - Myrtle’s husband finds his own sense of justice by shooting Gatsby and, in a strange way, Gatsby finds his redemption by being killed. His whole life has been about the pursuit of something that he couldn’t have and once he discovers that, his life is over.”

A year after the premiere, Hadley had the opportunity to sing Gatsby at Lyric Opera of Chicago. How was it the second time around? “There’s a gestation period that takes place with the piece itself. I know that the opera I sang in Chicago was a different opera than the one I sang at the Met and it was because it was no longer a new piece. The notes and words had been played and sung before. I think the overture had been shortened three minutes, but aside from that it was note-for-note exactly what we did in New York. I was the only holdover from the premiere; we had five new people in the cast. Even so, the piece felt different because it wasn’t being invented for the first time.

“If there was a mistake I made in the first run of the performances, it was that I tried too hard. I was thinking about all those things we just talked about and, as a result, I don’t think I allowed the music to do its work. So in the performances in Chicago I backed off to the extent that I was able to get over myself and not be impressed with all the thinking I had done about Jay Gatsby and was able to simply sing the words and the notes that John had written. I realized it doesn’t matter if the audience understands my past or not. What is important is that the audience sees me in the moment saying the things that I’m given to say. I’ll never be Jay Gatsby. I’ll be Jerry given Jay Gatsby’s life before the opera starts and Jay Gatsby’s psychological mindset. But it’s still me because the only reference points are my own feelings and my own life. I can’t think of a single successful portrayal that I’ve done of a character where ultimately I didn’t allowed myself to be myself in that situation. And I’ll tell you, one of the things that’s so interesting to me now is doing characters that aren’t always likable. It’s so interesting to be able to explore those feelings and responses that we all have.”

A Farm in Illinois

Where did the real-life Midwesterner’s tale begin? “I grew up on a real working farm in Illinois. On my mother’s side of the family we had a bunch of very colorful first-generation, Italian immigrants. My mother’s generation was the first that was born here. It was on the knee of my one of my Italian great-grandfathers that I first heard Tita Ruffo and Beniamino Gigli and people like that. At the same time, my mom and dad were listening to big band music, Sinatra and Bing Crosby and all those people and as a child of the ‘50s and ‘60s I was listening to Elvis and the Beatles, so I was exposed to a pretty mixed bag of music. My mom saw to it that I had piano lessons starting when I was five or six. There was a nice spinster lady in a little town not far from us who taught piano lessons to all the kids, just like in The Waltons. When I was twelve, I taught myself how to play the guitar and I was in a bunch of really bad rock-and-roll and country-western bands.

“I went to your typical Midwestern rural township high school; even though it was fed into by several grade schools from throughout that part of the county, there were never more than 150 kids in the whole school. One thing I remember vividly was watching Leonard Bernstein’s Young Peoples’ Concerts on Sunday afternoons. Years later, when I finally got to work with him, I told him, ‘You know, as far as I was concerned as a kid, you had invented classical music.’ He laughed about that and made me repeat it often.

“When I was about fifteen or so I rediscovered opera quite by chance when I heard a Met radio broadcast one Saturday afternoon. Well, I was bitten by the bug and decided that I wanted to be a singer. When I graduated from high school, I trudged off to Bradley University, a little, private liberal arts college in Peoria, Illinois. My very first voice teacher was a man named John Davis who had studied with Giuseppe De Luca and Paul Althouse. I always felt he was good teacher but it wasn’t until I had started my career that I realized what a good teacher he had been because he really gave me a wonderfully firm foundation. Sometimes when you’re young, you hear what people say to you but it doesn’t quite sink in and you don’t understand the significance of it until much later.

“I was never the person who got singled out or told that I had what it takes to be a singer. I was as surprised as anybody else to achieve this success. It had more to do with ignorance and blind optimism than anything else. I didn’t realize how difficult it could be to get started in the business. When I look back on it now I think, ‘My God, I was really lucky.’ It just never occurred to me that I wouldn’t get to do what I wanted if I was willing to work hard enough. You know that Midwestern work ethic. I was a voracious listener; I still listen to all of my great predecessors. There are a lot of modern vocal pedagogues who don’t want their students to listen to the great singers of the past, which I find really ludicrous. I understand that mimicry is not what we’re after, but certainly all great singing starts by emulating great singing. There’s no teacher on the face of the earth that can give you everything you need if you don’t have a frame of reference.”

Between 1979 and 1987, Mr. Hadley made all of the important debuts - the New York City Opera, the great European houses and, finally, the Met. “By the time I made my Met debut in 1987, I wasn’t as freaked out about it as I might have been because I had already sung in all of the big European houses. It was an unscheduled debut. I was supposed to make my debut the following season in Eugene Onegin, but Neil Shicoff had fallen ill and they asked me to come in to do three performances of Manon.”

It was also a time when no new tenor could escape the expectation that he had to be the next Pavarotti, Domingo or Carreras. “That was a fact all of us had to accept. I don’t think that it’s been a liability necessarily. Those three particular gentlemen have proven themselves time and time again on the great opera stages of the world. Each one has his detractors, as we all do; the bigger one’s success, the louder one’s detractors are. But I certainly emulated those guys when I was starting out. Luciano was extremely kind to me when he did his first Pavarotti Plus broadcast. I was the only other tenor that was invited to be a part of it.

“I ran into Plácido in the hall at the Met two days before my debut. He asked what I was doing there and we had a thirty-second conversation. When I walked into the dressing room the night of my debut, there was a magnum of Dom Perignon sitting on my dressing table with a handwritten note from Plácido. I’ve never forgotten that. It was such a generous gesture and a wonderful show of support for another tenor. Of the three of them I know José Carreras least well, but the couple of times I’ve been around him, he’s always been wonderfully sweet and gracious and open. My point is that those guys have made an imprint in the minds of the public and have so satisfied the public perception of what an Italian operatic tenor ought to be that all of us who have followed in their wake have had to deal with it. If we consciously try to say, ‘I’ll be the next whatever,’ we are going to fail. It’s like trying to be the next John Wayne - it’s just not possible.

“One of the things that I’ve enjoyed about the career I’ve had is that I’ve done such a wide variety of things. The first ten years or so I did a lot of Mozart and the French and Italian repertoire, but I also was singing a lot of American music and doing the so-called crossover things, all of which is part of who I am as an American. What I’m finding now is that I have the opportunity to start examining some repertoire options that I would never have thought possible ten or fifteen years ago. As we get older, we all go through processes of having to reexamine and reinvent ourselves. Over the last three or four years my voice has changed a bit. It’s gotten a little darker and there are roles that don’t really fit me as well as they did ten or twelve years ago. But, there are roles that now at my age I can sing that I didn’t ever think that I could before. Everybody has to go through a period of reassessing and asking themselves, ‘where am I vocally, where am I psychologically, where am I spiritually and where am I emotionally?’

“Last summer I sang Laca in Jenufa in Salzburg, which is a role I would never have imagined I would sing, to be quite honest with you. If I had tried it fifteen years ago, I think I would have crashed and burned big time. But Gerard Mortier wanted me to sing it, so I studied it and found that it fit me like a glove. Later I sang the other part, Steva, at Covent Garden and even though it fit fine from a vocal standpoint, I found it totally uninteresting psychologically. It’s not a bad role and if someone had asked me to sing Steva fifteen years ago I would have jumped and said, ‘yes that’s my part.’ So, many of the roles that are now presenting themselves to me aren’t so much about vocal weight as they are about having lived on this earth for a certain amount of time. Even though Laca is supposed to be a young man, the journey he takes is a lifetime’s journey compressed into two and a half hours of opera. It was interesting that my initial perception of which of those two roles would have been more suited to me couldn’t have been more wrong.

“I just did Achenbach in Death in Venice for the first time. A friend of mine asked how I felt about the role and I responded that Achenbach might turn out to be for me what Tom Rakewell was in the first half of my career. Because in a way it’s the same kind of internal journey. I also did my first Captain Veer in Billy Budd this year. That’s not to say that I’m going to abandon other roles, but some of those ingénue roles that I was associated with earlier in my life just aren’t psychologically appropriate for me anymore. That’s the only way I can describe it.”

This generation of singers, perhaps more than any previous, assumes as a matter of course the necessity of preparing the character as well as the music. The stereotypical view of opera singers from other eras is that they planted themselves on stage and just sang. “The term ‘stand-and-sing’ is a much-maligned term. Listen to the way Caruso sang. Was he a ‘stand-and-sing’ singer? There was so much dramatic nuance in the sound of his voice; a lot of the singers of the golden age were like that. I think our perceptions of singers of another age are based on our expectations today. I imagine singers from the past thought about these things but they didn’t talk about it all the time. My generation has a vocabulary about the psyche that perhaps singers of another age didn’t have. The land of psychoanalysis was traversed very gingerly fifty years ago; today it is common parlance. Look, I got a lot of mileage out of singing Nemerino. In a way, Nemerino was who I was when I was younger. The thing I loved about him, that I still love about him is the fact that he’s still got a little manure on his boots. He’s gullible and maybe a little stupid, but he’s a good, decent, optimistic person. One of the reasons I was successful at singing that part was not just because of the way I sang it but because I could identify with that character.

“We’re in a very interesting time in the opera world because we have a whole bunch of smart people out there singing and I think sometimes we have to learn to turn down the pilot light a bit on our logical, analytical brains that we use so magnificently in exploring the psyches of the characters and let that other part, that spontaneous part, that cry of the soul part, come through. One of the pitfalls of exploring all the facets of being on stage is that you can allow yourself to get pulled away from the essence of the opera, which is singing. I have been as guilty as anybody of getting wound up trying to enter the psyche of the character and going too far away from the singing. When you do that, there’s a danger of letting the audience see your homework instead of the finished product. Ultimately all that stuff ought to inform what you do as a singer, but it ought not to dominate. We are up there to use our voices as expressive tools to touch people. And I hear so often that so-and-so is a wonderful actress or actor; but if you’re doing all that wonderful acting without also singing well, you lose something in the process. It’s all a question of finding the right balance. You have to do what I learned from Leonard Bernstein, which is to do it as though you’ve never seen it before. He was probably the most prepared musician I have ever worked with - and certainly one of the most scholarly, intelligent, articulate people I have ever met in my life. But when he walked on the stage it was spontaneous and completely in the moment. He told me that your intelligence and preparation will never leave you if you allow yourself to sing from your heart. It’s so bloody simple that therein lies the complicated part because it requires a leap of faith.”

Lucia as Camille Paglia?

“We’re living in a very cynical age and the way I think it’s translated itself to the opera stage is that we can’t just tell story of people who good guys and bad guys or people who fall in love. For the last twenty years we have sought after the real meaning of these pieces to the point that we don’t even know what the pieces are about anymore. I think it’s possible to tell the stories of these operas without deconstructing them or taking a revisionist approach. It’s possible to tell the story of Violetta and Alfredo [in La Traviata] in the time and in the place where Verdi and Dumas set it. It’s possible to tell the story of Madame Butterfly without reference to the bomb in Hiroshima. It takes more talent and sensitivity on the part of the director, the conductor and the singers to do it that way than it does to foist a cheap gimmick on the piece. There are few insights that haven’t been explored in the standard repertory. I don’t think that operas written in the 19th century are served by putting post-World War II values on them. Putting 20th century feminist values on those operas, for example, does nothing but make the female characters look stupid. Most operatic heroines are interesting is because they are feminists already. Tosca is interesting and courageous because she’s doing what she isn’t allowed to do. Lucia is a feminist because she’s trying desperately to maintain her identity and she’s got these two awful men who both profess to love her, but instead they drive her mad because they impose the rules of society on her. It’s too easy for directors to simply take a piece and say they’ll find a way to make it work, thinking they can ‘improve’ it.

“Opera has come to the point that we are continuing to retell the same story over and over again, trying to put a new spin on them, as opposed to allowing the world of opera to be a true reflection of where we are now as a society. It’s a terrible dilemma for the opera world because opera is so expensive to produce; companies that do take chances on new works really need to be applauded. I don’t know what the solution is, but we have to somehow find a way to let new works get more than just one run of performances. I did a wonderful new piece in 1997 in San Diego called The Conquistador by Myron Fink. I think it was one of the finest American operas of the last half century and I’ve been lobbying all over the place to get it produced again. But the other factor that enters into the mix with new operas is that once the publicity of the premiere has been garnered the work becomes less attractive to other companies because there is nothing to be gained by producing.

“Over the Met’s history, it has commissioned a lot of new works by American composers, particularly between 1910-1930. But because the Met is the flagship opera in this country there are expectations placed on the it that might not be placed on San Francisco or Chicago, for example. There’s a mystique about the Met and I’m not sure that people go there to see new works; they go to see the warhorses. I don’t think it was a bold or risky step for the Met do to Susannah in 1999. As welcome and as praiseworthy as it was to finally produce it there, it was a work that had already proven itself on practically every other American opera stage. It was, if anything, a long overdue inclusion in the Met’s repertoire.”

Final thoughts as you prepare for your third incarnation as Gatsby? “It’s going to be interesting to see what happens in its second run at the Met. With one or two exceptions, most of the original cast is coming back to do it. It will be my third run of the piece. I know that my attitude has changed tremendously and I have embarked a campaign to try and be as absolutely skinny as I can to wear that damn pink suit!”

More on F. Scott
http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/fsfitzg.htm
http://members.aol.com/balm120623/page2/

Fitzgerald chat
http://www.killdevilhill.com/fitzgeraldchat/wwwboard.html

Gatsby, the Novel
http://gatsby.cjb.net/
http://www.geocities.com/andrew_dilling/
http://www.homework-online.com/tgg/index.asp
http://books.mirror.org/gb.fitzgerald-fscott.html

Gatsby, the Movies
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/1104/movies.html

Zelda, the Musical
http://www.zeldafitzgerald.com/default.asp

See also interviews with Dawn Upshaw, John Harbison and Mark Lamos.