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By Robert Wilder Blue

John Harbison

American composer John Harbison thought he might spend his creative life composing operas on a regular basis. But the era into which Mr. Harbison was born has not been a welcoming one for American opera composers. In fact, only one of his three operas was written in response to an invitation; The Great Gatsby, after F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, was given its world premiere by the Metropolitan Opera on December 20, 1999 - the composer’s sixty-first birthday. It was a long time to wait for the boy from Orange, New Jersey, who grew up listening to the Met on the radio.

Harbison lived among a music family and was improvising at the piano by age five. “There were no professional musicians in my family, but there were a number of pretty developed amateurs. I have a lot of songwriter folks in my family. My father started out interested in becoming a composer and wrote quite a number of pop songs but wound up as an historian. My mother was a writer for a church magazine and was a good player by ear. I knew lots of concert music at a young age as well as the standard American theater songs of the time, which is sort of the way my father’s interests fell - Gershwin and Bach.

“I never really got into anything besides music and my parents encouraged me in that direction. From the start I seemed to gravitate toward making things up - improvising interested me more than learning pieces. In fact I never really studied much piano because my piano teacher was a composer and was more interested in working with my composing. I became more skilled as a jazz pianist than a concert player.

“I listened to the Met broadcasts growing up so I knew a lot about the operas before I saw them. I actually built sets for them at home, although I had no sense of what they were like visually. I just knew them as musical experiences. I was in the Opera Guild and once they mortified me by announcing my name as the youngest member, ‘little Johnny Harbison.’ A few of my friends heard that and it was very embarrassing. When I was eleven or so, my father started taking me to New York for my birthday to see operas at the old Met. The first opera I saw was The Marriage of Figaro with Ezio Pinza and Bidú Sayão. I remember sitting remarkably close, although maybe that was just in my mind. But you could actually see the faces of the singers. The second opera I saw was Tristan and Isolde and I insisted on staying through all of it. I had heard it before on the radio and I knew it was an important opera. We had to sleep in the train station because in those days you could’t get from New York to Princeton between one and six in the morning.

“Of the opera composers, I was most interested in Mozart because I could hear in the music such a clear continuity. I loved the way a whole scene in a Mozart opera seemed to be a complete piece. The music was attached to the drama, but there was also a symphonic experience that was very satisfying. I had more difficulty with other composers, especially Verdi, when I was just listening and not seeing the piece. It was a long time before I could approach Verdi and I kind of went in the reverse way. I started with Falstaff, because I found it interesting in a symphonic sense, and worked my way backward through his operas.

“I’d always planned for my career to be centered in opera, but when I was starting out as a composer I found that it was a virtually impossible field to enter. So I just wrote my first opera, Winter’s Tale, with no commission and no performance. I learned a lot about composing and about that craft, but of course without the prospect of a performance, it was ten years before I finally saw a production and heard the music. At that point it was not as relevant to my development as a composer as it would have been earlier and I’d sort of given up on the idea of centering my career as an opera composer because I wasn’t getting any work in opera. Full Moon in March was kind of a following up gesture to Winter’s Tale. I wanted to write a short, practical piece that I could have performed. Again I wrote it with no commission and no performance, but I had a performance quite soon and got to hear it. Full Moon in March gets performed quite a bit now - there’s usually at least one production somewhere every year.

“I thought there would be more chances to write opera, but instead I got offers to do other things. At that time, I was trying to live half-years away from teaching on commissions. So I followed the commissions for the next ten years or so and they were entirely orchestral and chamber music. The ‘80s were a real hopeful period for orchestral commissions and there was a lot of opportunity for American composers in orchestral music for the first time since the thirties and Koussevitsky. This was the period of composer residencies that were sponsored by ‘Meet the Composer.’ I was in the first wave of that and I did residencies in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. I wrote three symphonies and about six concertos during that period. Unfortunately that activity has somewhat died down in recent years.”

Finally, Gatsby

Jerry Hadley as Jay Gatsby, Claire Thatcher, Alicia Berneche as Daisy Buchanan, and Patricia Risley as Jordan Baker in Lyric Opera of Chicago's production of John Harbison's The Great Gatsby. Photo by Robert Kusel, courtesy of LOC

“The commission for Gatsby was given around 1991. My trajectory was to produce an act a year and then a full score in another year, which would lead up to a year or so before the production. Compared with my previous experience with Winter’s Tale it was really luxuriously fast! I found the idea of working on one piece exclusively to be refreshing. I usually work on many pieces at once and it was nice not to do that for awhile.

“I had started to work on the subject around 1984 or ’85 and I had tried to get the rights, but I didn’t get an answer from the Fitzgerald estate. That essentially, eventually, stopped my momentum. But I took advantage of the idea and turned one of my orchestra commissions into the overture. I wrote a bit more music at the time before I decided that without the rights I shouldn’t go further. But I’d drawn up a sequence which I liked and sort of pinpointed the parts of the material I thought were musical. I suppose what I liked about it was that it was a novel in which there wasn’t much dialogue and there were very few essential actions.

“For me, composing is composing no matter what the assignment. Somehow the musical responsibilities are the same whether you’re writing a little motet for chorus or an opera or a string quartet. They all require what I would call a sense of formal drive, formal urgency. I think of each scene in an opera as a movement such that you could listen to it and hear a musical continuity even if you had no idea that it was attached to anything. Often when I see certain operas, I have developed a resistance to what’s happening on stage because I feel so strongly about the color of the music. I’ve seen The Marriage of Figaro so many ways and let’s just say the aura of what I see visually can often be very distressing. Perhaps this is because I learned so many operas from hearing them before I ever saw them.”

We noticed that Mr. Harbison had written the libretti for all of his operas, so we asked if he was the obvious choice of librettist? “Actually people think that if you sign the libretto you did it in sort of a defiant hibernation and that couldn’t be further from the case. I had at least six or seven active consultants. But, I don’t think a librettist in general should have much vanity about the document because it is, after all, an opportunity for music. I would regard even the best libretti in that way. I tried to find a librettist but I wanted to form a contract that would allow me to change things without sending faxes and telegrams and emails. I really have the need as I write opera to change words as I go. That is to say, as the composer I want to be able to be totally flexible. I work very impulsively and sometimes the music really doesn’t permit the retention of certain verbal designs.”

The premiere was hyped to the nines. It was dubbed the “last American opera of the 20th century,” based on one of the country’s greatest novels (although an honest show of hands would probably reveal that few have actually read it) and (mis)remembered as a classic film (or two). Add to that the Antony and Cleopatra curse that plagues composers of new operas at the Met and one has to wonder what sort of career suicidal tendencies the composer harbored. “With an American subject matter you get something back from the public in the knowledge of the material, but you also get a certain skepticism that it is not their Gatsby. It can’t be anybody’s Gatsby to perfection because everybody’s got his or her own. Mark Lamos wrote a very useful program note for the Chicago performances, trying to tell the public that it was something different from The Great Gatsby they had read. That’s an important point to get across. I’m not claiming kinship with it, except to say that Tchaikovsky ran into a lot of resistance in Russia with Eugene Onegin because it wasn’t the Onegin everyone knew. It took fifty years before it was accepted as another Onegin. One sympathizes with the Russian public as Tchaikovsky takes on what is almost their national poem and turns it into - god help us! - an opera.”

Did Harbison pay attention to the notices after the premiere? “I thought that I ought to read the reviews because everybody assumed that I would. I had to go out and speak to a lot of groups and the questions were almost entirely about the notices rather than about the piece. In the world of opera one discovers that everyone has a remedy. I’ve never had someone come up to me after hearing a string quartet and say ‘if you were to get rid of the second movement this would be a good piece.’ Total strangers came up after seeing Gatsby and gave me cures for this or that problem. I’ve actually had blind phone calls from people who said they knew how to cure the problems of the third scene of Gatsby. And I’d say, ‘Well, let me hear it.’ I have a collection in memory storage of some sort of panacea for virtually every moment in the piece.

“My corrections of the piece were almost entirely based on one experience, which was the first time I heard it all the way through at dress rehearsal. I had what I recognized as a kind of uneasiness at certain times, which is how I always detect the need to make changes. Some changes were made for the Chicago performances and there were a few more I was not able to work out to my satisfaction at that point and have since. This is so much more difficult than composing, to figure this kind of thing out. But most of what I’ve done is based on that original perception.

“New operas need time to settle and they often don’t get it. Pieces have to have enough chances to be evaluated so the right kind of sorting can occur. One of the reasons we have so many Italian operas in the repertoire is that there was a marvelous clearinghouse in Italy in the 19th century. There were companies in virtually every important city and the latest operas traveled to most of them within a few years. That certainly benefited Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, and even Puccini, who got the chance to find out what was going to happen in front of different audiences. I always take great courage from Wagner, who is the most adamant high culturalist I can think of. He still has audiences in spite of the fact that he makes outrageous demands on every generation. I think that is a great index of the health of opera as a medium.

“It’s important for people to connect with operas that come out of their own culture. That’s how the Italian opera culture was built and certainly the German even more so. They possessed opera as an outgrowth of their daily lives and that’s what we’re still looking for in the States. It’s what Britten was trying to achieve in England. He also had a very good idea which was to write operas that were inexpensive to produce. We need to produce inexpensive yet artistically demanding operas, the way Britten, did to put those roots down further into the ground.”

Will there ever be a time when we see fifteen or twenty new operas a year in this country? “If that happens we will really begin to speak about a home opera culture. It could happen, but I think it’s a ways off and I think that companies are going to have to think of new operas as investments rather than short-term markers. Even Verdi had to deal with the commercial aspects of his operas though. I was reading recently that he felt like the producers of A Masked Ball were accusing him for its lack of commercial success, which of course annoyed the hell out of him.

“Also the problem is (and my publishers are always reminding me of this) I’m not one of the easy composers, something I’ve learned to live with it. Susan Feder at Schirmer is always reminding me that I’m one of their hard sells and that’s not an ideal position to be in if you want to write operas. It takes a lot of money to put on an opera and few opera companies are willing to take a risk on a difficult composer. On the other hand, I think collectively as composers we need to assert the aural part of opera as much as we can because most of us who love opera are clinging to it because of the music.

“The youngest generation today has a strong narrative urge. The idea of the telling of a story is alive to the younger generation in a way that it hasn’t been for a long time. And I think that together with the visual aspects are the reasons opera is beginning to draw again. Of course, we’re used to hearing so many kinds of music coming at us all the time. I think most people coming to opera are showing by buying their ticket that their minds are going to be open to different experiences. One of the things that opera provides that really nothing else does is a sense of going somewhere else, being in another world - even more than a movie does, in a way, because of that empathy we have with the people on stage. It’s an amazingly different experience from anything. I think that once people get a taste of opera they begin to feel connected to it and begin to need that experience. It’s certainly a thing I noticed when I finally went to opera - that sense of really being transported.

“You know, opera is something I love and enjoy thinking about and don’t always have that many chances to talk about.”

The Great Gatsby, the Opera
http://www.bookmagazine.com/archive/issue8/opera.shtml
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/1999/dec15/artsharbison.html
http://www.operaworld.com/special/gatsby.shtml

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 Jerry Hadley, Dawn Upshaw and Mark Lamos.