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By Robert Wilder Blue

Mark Lamos Photo by Michal Daniel

Mark Lamos is many different artists rolled into one: violinist, actor (Longtime Companion), theater director (Hartford Stage Company), (Guthrie Theater), and opera director (upcoming: L’Etoile, among others). He was born and raised in Chicago and from the beginning was attracted to the artist’s life. “Music was always a big part of my life. My mother was a pianist and I studied violin from a very early age. I also wanted to be a ballet dancer and took classes. I loved going to see ballet and I loved the theater. Music and theater have been constant influences all my life. I went to Northwestern University on a music scholarship for four years. I love the violin but I never felt I was going to reach the level necessary to have a solo career; I could see myself turning into a good orchestral musician and teacher probably. The thing I liked best was performing chamber music but none of it was as interesting as the theater. When I was on stage acting I felt such a release. There was such a feeling of elation that I only rarely felt performing on the violin. When I was performing a recital I was always a nervous wreck. So I decided to go into theater and changed my major and stayed another year to graduate.

“I was really planning on acting and only became a director quite by chance. I started getting asked to direct things and that just continued. I suppose growing up I was looking at theater with a director’s eye. I remember playing with puppets and making little stages and theaters and putting on plays. A few years ago, my sister came to see my production of Cymbeline at Hartford Stage. She had never seen any of my work as a director and after the performance we were having drinks and my partner asked her what it was like seeing my work for the first time. She responded, ‘Oh, it was just like peeking in his bedroom when he was a boy. He would be playing with toy soldiers and knights and castles. It was as though that was transferred to the stage and they were alive now.’ That is very true! We go through life tending to think we’re on a path that is continually changing and then you realize you are probably just doing what you were destined to do all along.

“The first opera I directed was John Harbison's Winter’s Tale. It was thrilling for my first opera to be working on a brand new score with a living composer based on a play I’d actually been in at the Guthrie. In 1993, after staging Verdi's I Lombardi at the Met, Jim [James] Levine and I had dinner together to talk about other projects and the main one was The Great Gatsby. Then I met with John, who gave me a draft of his libretto. He's a thoughtful and perceptive artist and I liked what he had done. Though I am an inveterate reader, Fitzgerald had not been a writer who had interested me much until I began discussing the opera with John. At that point, I read everything Fitzgerald wrote and was dazzled, humbled, amazed. I honestly began to feel that he was the single finest writer America had produced since Twain and Melville - a staggering genius.

Patricia Risley as Jordan Baker, Russell Braun as Nick Carraway, Jerry Hadley as Jay Gatsby, Alicia Berneche as Daisy Buchanan and Clifton Forbis as Tom Buchanan in Lyric Opera of Chicago's production of John Harbison's The Great Gatsby. Photo by Robert Kusel, courtesy of LOC.

“The novel will speak to generations long after ours passes from the earth. It is a masterpiece, unlike any other work of literature in English or any other language. The story is a deceptively simple one. There's probably more about it that doesn't make it a good opera - which is what's exciting about the challenges Harbison set for himself in crafting the libretto. I suggested an ensemble for the close of the first scene, an idea which John responded to and developed. I also suggested we look at keeping Nick Carraway a narrator, and John had no positive response to that at all. He had such a strong idea about how the libretto should be crafted that I trusted his instincts and pulled away from collaborating with him on it. He didn't need a collaborator. He was already hearing the music that went with his words, 99 percent of which are actually Fitzgerald's.”

Were there specific themes or ideas he wanted to highlight in the opera? “The production, conceived with Michael Yeargan, is about evanescence, longing, deliquescence, everything passing in a mist, a fog. This is based, in part, on the weather on Long Island Sound in the summer as well as the feeling of the novel and John's music - a sense of everything passing away, meaningless lives prancing in a void.

“The characters are people, for the most part, whose lives lack meaning. The leading lady is imperceptive, frivolous, and a murderess, in fact. She's altogether despicable, yet we must become as enchanted by her as Jay Gatsby does. In this sense of meaningless, boring people, we are reminded of Chekhov's characters, few of whom are people of any importance, none of whom show any willpower - yet we are compelled, saddened, enriched by spending time contemplating their misguided lives. I feel there's something of that in the characters in this opera and they’re very challenging to make interesting and watchable.

“A lot of what the performers have to keep in mind while they’re playing it are the things you don’t see. It’s the adumbration of the text. There’s a lot of mystery about Daisy; we don’t really see what she’s like. The real Daisy is a monster and her motives are craven and yet we have to be in love with her in a funny way. People for the most part are not expressing what they truly think or feel. Gatsby is living a lie in fact and the lie then becomes real for him. Those are very delicate places for a performer - an actor - to go. Those choices are not easy ones. There are hidden rivers in all the characters and the way John has constructed the opera you get these short pictures of them, which is in a way very much like Fitzgerald’s novel. There is very little information and what you get is very controlled by the author. That’s the challenge in acting it, with the exception of Myrtle because she is quite the opposite from the rest. She’s right out there and the challenge for Lorraine [Hunt Lieberson] in playing her was to find a terribly sad vulgarity, a sort of boisterous soul that was trapped in her body, her desires, her social situation. It’s a very difficult role although it’s not very large.”

Does the audience need to do its homework before seeing Gatsby? “I don’t think so. I’m someone who doesn’t like homework. I feel we should be able to deliver something to the audience that perhaps afterwards makes them want to read the novel. But I’d like all my work to be taken at face value. If I do a complex late Shakespeare play, I don’t want study guides sent to everyone. I want them to get the experience first and then if they want to learn more, fine. I think we have to rely on our talents and our craft to tell the story. Now, in the age of surtitles in opera, at least the story is clear so the event comes to a first-time viewer/listener in a much more whole way than it did in an age when you were sitting through an Italian opera and didn’t speak Italian. All my work as a director is trying to make things terribly clear and surprising and full of wonder and if I have an audience knows what’s coming I find it less interesting. I think it becomes less interesting for them also. That’s the hard thing about doing a classic work, whether it’s Hamlet or Rigoletto, because the audience is bringing so much background or baggage from having studied it or seen it or been in love with it for many years. They have favorite performances in mind and own recordings or videos or DVDs. You’re dealing with a lot of revisionism before the curtain ever goes up, even if you’re doing a ‘straight’ production. But when you’re doing a new work I think it’s wonderful if the audience comes to it as fresh as can be.

“It was very interesting to see the opening night of Gatsby after working on it so long. One could see where it worked and where it needed help. That opening night audience included the local and international press and a huge segment of the New York musical and theatrical community and it’s as though there was nothing to do but vilify what they were looking at. The reaction was not surprising but the level of vituperation was shocking. There was no consideration for the magnitude of the undertaking and the fact that there was great worth to be found in the score and beautiful performances by the cast. I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Gosh, I wish we had opened in Seattle.’ But, everybody weathered it. I thought that most of the journalism was about what you'd expect for a premiere - relatively uninformed about the music and fixated on production.

“Like many opera composers before him, Harbison is making changes. I felt New York was sort of like a preview. There were no rehearsals after we opened so nothing could be changed. The Lyric Opera production in Chicago was amazing, thrilling, something that blossomed and turned into something really fine. The opera had a swift, forceful, tragic feel. It was much more Gothic. With any piece, having another conductor, another director, another group of singers only makes the piece grow. I changed a bit of the staging, and David Stahl's conducting was dynamic and powerful. The Gatsby in Chicago was frankly a huge improvement on the Gatsby in New York. Everyone involved with it will admit it. The Gatsby coming up in New York will be a significant improvement on the one in Chicago.

“It’s very hard to put up a new opera and I don’t know what we can do to make it easier. What happened with Gatsby really was the only solution. We played it one theater and then the composer had several months to mull and make revisions and talk to other collaborators. Then it went to be played in another theater for another audience, and now it’s coming back to New York. It is akin to Verdi taking La Traviata to five different theaters in Italy and redoing it each time. In a play you can make significant changes after each preview based on the scales that fall from your eyes when you see it in the presence of 600 strangers and based on the energy the performers bring to it when they have an audience, which they never can know until the audience is present. The writer and other collaborators are able to rethink things. You can rehearse for four hours the morning after a preview and put in changes in a day. How could you do that with an opera? The composer just can’t go home overnight, write twenty minutes of new music or rearrange something or cut something and get it orchestrated and get it to the singers and the orchestra to learn by the next day. It’s tough with musical theater, which is a similar to opera, because often you’re chomping at the bit to put a new song in but you have to wait four or five days until it can be written and orchestrated and learned.

“I commend Jimmy for insisting it come back to the Met. That was planned by both Jimmy and Joe [Volpe] from the beginning. It was very brave of them to do that and stick to their guns about it. I’m thrilled they did because they are going to have a very beautiful work. The nature of the Met is that while we were also in rehearsals for the world premiere of Gatsby, Jimmy was conducting the new production of Tristan and Isolde also. The efforts of the entire house were focussed on that huge new production as well as this world premiere. It was a huge challenge to pull off.”

How does the process of directing a brand-new piece differ from directing an existing/older work? “In the obvious way. The creator of the piece is alive, he's there in the room and his intentions must be discovered and honored. The intentions of a dead composer can only be guessed at and the meaning of the work of dead people changes over time; so there's a much wider canvas of possibilities, associations, etc. Consequently, one has to ‘read’ a dead composer's work, whereas with a living composer one has to ferret out the meaning, the composer's intention, from the composer himself. It is also important not to step too heavily on the composer's intentions. He is finding his way. It's a very tender energy; and an opera is not a Broadway show. Its unusual qualities are often going to be its greatest - the very things that make it a masterpiece.

“Something like an early Verdi opera is sui generis. As we know, only as Verdi matured did he begin to flesh out characters in a distinctive way. I Lombardi in particular was a kind of tapestry and clearly a thinly veiled patriotic gesture on the part of the composer for the audience of his day. Knowing that it was a barn-stormer of an opera we conceived it as a series of striking tableaus that would be comfortable places for the scenes to take place (as ridiculous as the scenes actually are if you read the libretto) and for the singers, who weren’t assuming roles that had a lot of depth, to be able to deliver the musical goods. Our goal was to create as beautiful a stage picture as possible to serve the raw, beautiful power of that music. Also, given the schedules of the principal singers who were there for rehearsal as little as they could be, one had to be able to fit them into the piece easily.

“Singers know they need to act now. I have rarely met a singer of any kind who didn’t want to make the moment believable, whether it was a gigantic aria or recitative or a difficult contemporary work. Even singers who are sort of ungainly often have a great deal to offer in terms of acting. I treat the singers like actors. Certainly with a piece like Gatsby that has a narrative through-line and characters that are developed and subtext that is in the music, I work with them very much the same way I’d work with actors in a play. And for the most part they demand it. People like Dawn [Upshaw] and Lorraine and Jerry [Hadley] all are very keen on verisimilitude, on creating acting moments in the music, on believability. They are just as careful and concerned with delineating their work as any trained actor. I never really feel I’m switching gears when the singing actor is that good. When I’m working with younger singers at a place like Glimmerglass, which is a place that celebrates the beginnings of careers, there is more actor coaching that goes on. And they take to it. They want to be good actors.”

We asked Mr. Lamos to tell us a little about some other American operas he has directed. “Scourge of Hyacinths is an unusual piece based on a radio drama by Soyinka, and quite powerful. The story itself is simple, the orchestra extremely complicated and thickly, vibrantly alive throughout. I loved working with an African-American cast and with Tania León, a truly exciting and gifted composer. I hope she gets the chance to do more opera.

“The Voyage of Edgar Allen Poe is a great big whiz-bang of a piece and working on it in Sweden gave me massive enjoyment. We had nine weeks of rehearsal and the Swedish singers were powerful actors, very exploratory in their work ethics - almost like straight theater actors. The company was small and caring, and the production was very experimental, very abstract, based on madness, hallucination, etc. I was worried that [composer Dominick] Argento would hate it when he came to the final rehearsals, since very little that happened onstage bore any resemblance to stage directions in his libretto. I said, ‘Since you've already had your premiere, I'm treating you like a dead composer.’ But he really loved the production - in fact he asked me to do his next premiere. He has a wonderful sense of humor and he truly loves the theater.

“For The Aspern Papers, Argento insisted that John Conklin and I stay ‘realistic’ in approach, which was a bit boring, but we felt it important to honor Dom's desires, and the concept helped its television production. The thrill for me was working on a premiere with two of the finest performing artists of my time: Elizabeth Soederstroem and Frederica von Stade (Flicka). That was richly rewarding and happily challenging. Flicka in particular, as a withered old maid aged much too early, was astonishing. I remember her saying to me, ‘It's so liberating to get away from those pants roles and play a complex, unattractive woman who's my own age.’ Even at that, it took quite some work to make a woman with such natural beauty at all unglamorous.”

Are there American operas in your future? “[Charles] Wuorinen's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, based on Salman Rushdie'snovel, with a rhymed libretto by poet James Fenton and [Michael] Torke's House of Mirth, based on the Wharton novel, with libretto by A.R. Gurney (they did the central section of Central Park together) are both slated for NYCO in coming seasons.”

Any thoughts on the relevance of opera - specifically new American opera - in today’s society? “Art, all art, is only as relevant as society allows it to be. If you get turned on by this kind of music, this kind of entertainment, when you are young, it can enrich your whole life - as we know. Without music education and training in the schools and in homes, children and young people have no way of knowing what it's like. Unless you watch and the play some baseball, you don't get it. Once you do that with baseball, you have the possibility of deciding if you'd like it to be a part of the rest of your life. We need to have similar opportunities for music, art, theater, painting, etc. It all seems so very simple. When people learn, even a bit, how to play the piano, then they can begin to have an enriching understanding of piano music that will last them their whole life long, whether it's jazz or classical, say. In this vastly confusing welter of mass images that flies at our collective consciousness today, we need to add the Arts.”

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 John Harbison.