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Stephen Paulus
An Unlikely Journey to Becoming an Opera Composer

By Robert Wilder Blue

Stephen Paulus

"As a composer you have long stretches when you are writing and thinking and cogitating and ruminating and finally it all comes together. Then you have a burst of a few days to a few weeks, depending of whether it's a chamber work or an opera, when there's this intense public activity. You go to rehearsals, interact with performers, talk to the conductor, meet patrons and board members and you're expected to be able to speak about your work. Then all of a sudden, you crawl back in your hole or wherever and go back to writing music again." Stephen Paulus

USOPERAWEB talked to composer Stephen Paulus recently about his new opera Heloise and Abelard, which will be given its world premiere April 24 at The Juilliard School in New York. It's his eighth opera over some 23 years of professional composing - a respectable record by today's standards. Of course, we asked him first to tell us where his musical journey had begun. "I was born in Summit, New Jersey, but we moved to Minnesota when I was two. Both my parents had musical backgrounds. My mother was a homemaker and an interior designer and grew up studying piano. My father was a businessman and an organist by avocation. He played at church and had a great gift for improvisation. I had great times listening to him vamp his way around a pipe organ. I think maybe that's where some of my own creative urges came from. He had an old Reed organ that he tinkered on and I actually started on that; I didn't have any real piano lessons until I was ten."

"I was always interested in composers. I used to read biographies of them and stuff like that and I began to imagine what it would be like to be a composer. We had some blank music paper in the piano bench and one day I took it out and started filling it up with notes. I was about twelve or thirteen. I started turning out little piano pieces - they were not too original, but my piano teacher encouraged me.

"I continued studying piano through college and got a BA in piano performance and a liberal arts degree from the University of Minnesota. It was as an undergrad, though, that I decided the performer's life was not my cup of tea. You have to have a certain feel for the limelight, getting out there and performing. When I was a sophomore I went to hear Van Cliburn and afterward I went backstage and talked to him. He basically depicted it as a fairly lonely lifestyle. You're on the road all the time and a hotel room is a hotel room whether it's in New York or Muncie. I began graduate school at University of Colorado at Boulder but transferred back
to the University of Minnesota and eventually got a master's degree in composition.

"In 1973 Libby Larson and I started The Minnesota Composer's Forum, which evolved from our experience at the University of Minnesota. We went out and got a student activities grant for 400 bucks for the year and got together graduate school colleagues and paid everybody five dollars to play the pieces we had composed in our classes. One of my first pieces, Three Elizabethan Songs for soprano and piano, was done there and my advisor, Paul Fetler, a composer himself said, 'You know, Steve, these are not bad,' which is high praise from another composer. I was really buoyed up by that. A day or two later Domenick Argento, who also taught there, stopped me in the hall and said, 'I really enjoyed your songs.' He can be rather dry and acerbic when he wants to be and he hardly knew me at all. I hadn't studied with him at that point and, well, he was like the dean of composition to me. So I thought, 'Cool, maybe I actually have something.'

"Paul was my main teacher at the University of Minnesota. I only really studied with Dominick a bit. Once he came to a concert and my bio in the program said I had studied with him and he actually came up afterwards to me and said, 'Did you really study with me?' A couple of times during grad school I went to see him and we talked about things, but I've actually learned more from him since graduating. We get together for lunch and talk about opera - 'can you believe this opera company is doing that?' and so forth.

"I think I had somewhat of a natural affinity for writing for the voice, although why that would be I don't know. I sang in choir in high school for a couple of years and I accompanied a lot of singers during my graduate school time. I really enjoyed working with singers and I was always fascinated with the range of color and the power and the potential that lies in the human voice when you pair text and sound. A simple sentence can become very profound and important by the way it's set or a very important sentence can be made very light and almost inconsequential by setting it a different way."

We asked Stephen if he had acquired a love for opera as a child. "The natural thing to assume would be that my mother dragged me to the Met or whatever, but that isn't the case. I went to dozens of organ concerts because of my dad - E. Power Biggs and Virgil Fox or any of the other guys who came to town. And we went to orchestra concerts but never any opera or ballet. I saw my first opera as a graduate student when the Met came to Minnesota; it was Peter Grimes.

"I had no intention of writing operas but people recognized some dramatic qualities in my instrumental work, and I sort of got pushed into that field. While I was finishing up my PhD, I got a letter from Opera Theatre of St. Louis saying they wanted me to write a one-act opera for them. I was dumbfounded. When I spoke with Richard Gaddes, who managed the Opera Theatre at that time, I felt it necessary to say at the end of the interview, 'You are aware that I haven't written any operas.' This sounds stupid almost, but I wanted him to know in case it had been some grand oversight or that he was assuming I was steeped in operatic lore or whatever. He said, 'Yeah, I know that. Do you have any other questions?' So I returned home and thought, 'now what the hell do I do?' I had not even taken any of Domenick's history of opera classes. Man, would that have been useful.

"When I finished my PhD my wife and I went to Europe for a little break and a celebration of having made it through the academic morass and all this stuff. The first thing I did was to get a hold of Domenick to tell him about the commission. I ended up connecting with Domenick and his wife Carolyn in Florence, where they went every summer. We spent five days hanging out with them, eating, drinking and talking and I took copious notes. He said a couple of things that stuck with me. One, he said to avoid choosing stories with 'O. Henry endings' - when the story hinges on things like, 'the pearls are fake.' Two, after you know the story it has to be the characters that carry the day. They have to be interesting and hopefully evolve, change, mature, develop from point A to point Z, during the course of the opera. If the story's not compelling and dramatic in some way, whether it's an internal tension or a very visceral thing like The Postman Always Rings Twice, what's the point of setting it to music? These things have been the overriding, guiding principles in my choice of stories. By the way, after taking all these notes, I got to the train platform to leave and discovered I didn't have my notebook. Well, we had drunk enough Chianti and I figured out later that I had left it in a restaurant. We actually went back and asked for it but it was nowhere to be found.

"The only other thing I would wrap around that is that it's very important to have the singers understood. I've actually run into composer colleagues who say, 'Well, you can't understand them anyway so who cares? I want to use brass here and it's got to be dramatic.' I've always made a conscious effort to speak with singers, to come up with certain principles and standards about what works for the voice, like what range works and what vowels don't sound pretty. I shouldn't say just pretty, but what things actually sound ugly or grating - at one range they're okay and at another range you just want to run from the hall. What's going to carry and when does it lie in the passaggio? What works with certain accompaniments? I'm continually learning about these things.

"A vast majority of people are attending opera because they like lyricism, and that comes in many packages, not just one style or genre. They like the human voice. That's the one thing you don't get if you go to a symphony concert, unless they're doing the Strauss songs or whatever. They want to be moved somehow. They're a clean slate when they come in, depending on how familiar they are with things. They may be saying, 'well, this performance is not as good as the one I heard in Dallas or New York or I like that singer better.' But I think most people are saying, 'All right, do your thing, singers. Do your thing, composer. Do your thing, conductor and orchestra. Transform me. Make this a riveting, emotional, wonderful experience.' That's why they pay 85 bucks and get dressed up and sit some place for three hours. It's very important to find some way to reach the audience in whatever style is your style. But that has to start with reaching the performers. They have to get on board and be the champions. If you can win their hearts, I think you're more than halfway home to moving the audience. The singers will infuse it with the right spirit and say, 'This is something I believe in. I like this tale. I like my character. I like living and singing and I like interacting with people.' That makes for a wonderful, healthy collaboration. Unfortunately, it's all too rare, even when everybody has the best of intentions."

The Postman Always Rings Twice

"During the middle of orchestra rehearsals for The Village Singer at Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Richard Gaddes said to me, 'We want you to write a full-length opera.' I asked him, 'How do you know this one is going to work?' I didn't really want to commit in case it turned out to be a grand failure. But he was the first one to say he believed I would be able to do this. So his answer was, 'Well, my nose twitches and I think it's going to be a huge success. So we want to do another one.'

"About a year later, I met Richard and Colin Graham in New York and Colin handed me the book, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and said, 'Here's your opera.' I looked at it and I thought, 'oh, right.' I'd heard of it, but I hadn't read it or seen the movies. I read it on the plane and wondered how you could make it into an opera. I had no experience in solving dramatic problems like the car crash and so forth. Colin had gone back to England and I sent him a letter and I told him no. Well, he sent back a complete draft of the libretto. At that point, I realized there are ways of dealing, where you don't have to have everything happen on stage. But I was so naïve, I didn't know how to cut out important things like that and still have it work. I was totally won over and I would say my only hesitation was that the language itself comes, as we all know, from the hard-boiled school of fiction. The phrases are short and they didn't seem particularly lyrical to me. What saves it, I think, is that the first act is basically a drive toward a murder and the short, punchy statements really fit the characters. In the second act the language becomes a little more, I wouldn't say lyrical, but the phrases are more humane as the relationship between the two doomed lovers blossoms. As a composer you get to find the lyricism in the story and to develop that musically and pull themes out of the first act that work differently in the second act."

Heloise and Abelard

Abelard and Heloise Surprised by the Abbot Fulbert (Les Amours d'Héloïse et d'Abeilard), J. Vignaud, 1819, oil on canvas. Photograph used by kind permission of the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha.

"Frank Corsaro called me a few years ago and asked if I would like to write a piece for the Juilliard Opera Center. I told him I was interested and he asked if I had any ideas. I mentioned Heloise and Abelard and he told me he happened to have written a text for an oratorio based on that subject for a Swedish composer who had died. He said he'd send me the text and if I was interested we could actually turn that into a libretto. I was enthusiastic. So that's how that came about."

"One of the most difficult things for any composer to size up is to get some feel for the whole dramatic shape. You can have a great idea going in for a particular scene or an act but if you stick with that idea too long it's called boredom for the audience. You have to look at the whole thing and sort of go through it, conducting it and singing through it mentally. You have to really be severe and ask yourself, 'okay, does this work? Am I still interested twenty minutes into it?' After completing the first act I felt it was about fifteen minutes too long and I went back and was ruthless about taking out things and rewriting things. I cut 30 or 40 pages out and it became almost a new piece. After that, the rest of it sort of wrote itself of its own accord."

Any thoughts on the critical response to your previous operas? "The most tiresome things I read are the incessant articles and commentaries and editorials, especially emanating from The New York Times, asking 'Where's the great American opera?' - as if it's going to come announced in full regalia that something is the masterpiece. As we know, sometimes the greatest of works are instantly recognizable and sometimes it takes years. This idea that somehow we're all not measuring up, that we're not turning out masterpieces, means that we've failed in their minds. It's just tiresome and I've decided to ignore it all. But it's a challenge.

"And the other constant question is, 'Why didn't they follow the Viennese school?' It just says once again that people who think that way are not moving with us. We've been there and done that and we're on to something else now. It becomes an old tired song and there's not much we can do about it as composers. To do anything other than write what you feel internally would be dishonest. As Dominick said, 'Critics have ruined many a breakfast of mine, but never lunch.'

"I'm quoting Domenick way too much, but he pointed out to me one time that it's taken most composers about five operas to get up to speed. It's difficult for a young composer or someone who's not particularly known as an operatic composer to get opportunities for even one opera! Maybe the answer is to write pieces for smaller venues so they can get their chops up to speed. I find when I'm talking to graduate student composers at universities and colleges, many of them aren't at all aware that the music has to serve the drama. Sometimes a director or conductor will say, 'look, we need four more bars so the soprano can get to where she's supposed to be to sing to the guy' or 'we need 25 seconds more music for a set change' or 'this sounds like treading water and I've got the whole chorus off and you're going on for another 26 measures - you have to cut it.' Those are very practical, down-to-earth things that one has to deal with. They're part of the creative process and that lesson doesn't come up in Composition Seminar 101."

"For the past few years opera seems to generate a lot of interest. There are all these talks about young people being more interested, which bodes well for the field. Opera companies are still pretty much interested in the premiere, though, and not terribly interested in subsequent performances. Although I've been somewhat fortunate, depending on which opera year you pick."

More 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
http://student.maxwell.syr.edu/anderson/heloise.htm

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

See also the interview with Frank Corsaro