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By Robert Wilder Blue

Few American opera composers were as prolific or popular as Thomas Pasatieri during the 1960s and ‘70s. Between 1971 and 1976, seven of his operas premiered successfully; but when his thirteenth opera, Inés de Castro, bowed in 1976, it received dismissive, even hostile notices. Four operas followed; however by the time the last, Maria Elena, was given in 1983, the world had begun to lose interest in the neoromantic idiom in which Mr. Pasatieri worked. This change of fashion coincided with a general fear and loathing on the part of American opera impresarios and audiences toward all new work, regardless of the style. Composers reacted in various ways; some persevered and managed to get an opera produced from time to time (rarely at the so-called “major” American houses, though), others concentrated on writing instrumental music and songs. Thomas Pasatieri went to Hollywood to work in the film industry.

Last December, when USOPERAWEB learned that the Manhattan School of Music in New York would be giving the local premiere of his best-known opera, The Seagull, we welcomed the opportunity to find out whatever happened to Thomas Pasatieri. In conversations before and after The Seagull performances, he spoke with us about his work and life.

“I was born in New York City on October 20, 1945. First we lived in Maspeth and then in Flushing, Queens. I began taking piano lessons when I was about nine years old and very soon began giving concerts. When I was twelve, I was going to St.Francis Prep in Brooklyn and taking cello lessons and playing in the school orchestra. I studied theory with my piano teacher – that was part of learning about music – and as far back as I can remember I always wrote music.

“When I was fourteen I had composition lessons with Nadia Boulanger. I had read that she was giving a lecture in New York – I think it was at the Manhattan School or the Mannes School of Music – and so I traveled into New York and brought my music with me. After her lecture, I went up on stage and presented myself to her. I told her that I had read that she helped American composers and that I was an American composer. She asked to see my music and she also asked for my telephone number and the next day I got a call from her secretary saying she would like to see me. And that’s how that happened. She gave me lessons in New York and then by correspondence from France.”

What was your music like then? “Chopin, Rachmaninoff – I was very much influenced by the piano pieces I was playing at the time. My piano teacher, Vera Wells, also taught me contemporary music early on – Bartok, Copland, the Russian composers – so I had those influences. I’m doing four books of my opera arias – one each for mezzos, tenors, sopranos and baritones – and just the other day I was going through boxes in my home in Palm Springs looking for two operas that I wrote before my official career as a composer began and I found these compositions from when I was ten, eleven, twelve years old. They still exist.

“When I was sixteen I entered Julliard and my composition teacher was Vittorio Giannini. Giannini came from a family of operatic performers – his father was a tenor, his sister was a very famous soprano, Dusolina Giannini – and, of course, he had composed several operas. So it was natural for me to want to write not only songs, but also opera. I wrote two student operas while I studied with him. The first, for which I also wrote the libretto, was called The Trysting Place based on the play of Booth Tarkington. The second was called Flowers of Ice, with a libretto by a musician-pianist named Ronald Rogers.

“Because I studied with Giannini, who was himself a student of Richard Strauss, I had the influences of the Italian school and the German school. Giannini was a great, great teacher of technique. In the summer of ’63 I accompanied him to the Brevard Summer Festival in North Carolina and had composition lessons every day. At a certain point I was writing two fugues a day and that went on for two months. So that formed the basis of my technical approach. The natural bent of lyricism and romanticism was there, too, and in those days it was not fashionable to be lyric or romantic in a musical sense. But that’s who I was and Giannini encouraged me to allow my lyricism to be part of my music. Of course, Giannini revered Strauss and so did I, so I would have to say that Strauss was probably my earliest influence operatically.

“Then, in 1965, I had just graduated Julliard with my bachelor’s degree and was spending the summer at the Aspen Festival studying with Darius Milhaud. In those days there was a competition for the best work composed during the summer – it was a money prize. I wrote a twelve-minute opera for three characters called The Women and orchestrated it and copied the parts. The competition was actually a concert held in the tent and so there was an audience there. Milhaud was one of the judges. In fact, his wife, Madame Milhaud, staged it and Leonard Slatkin conducted. My work was presented last and when it was finished there was deafening applause from the audience and a standing ovation and I was thrilled. I took the prize. Robert Holton, who was a representative of composers with Schirmer, was in the audience and he made my acquaintance and that’s how I started to be published and performed additionally.

“I returned to New York and was working on my Master’s at Juilliard. I presented The Women, as well as another work I had written, La Divina, to Christopher West who was the director of the Julliard Opera Theater and he decided to produce both of them. I remember it was March16, 1966. The interesting thing is that before Julliard moved down to Lincoln Center, it occupied the building where Manhattan School of Music is now, and so the theater that they were done is the theater where The Seagull is being done this December.”

Tell us a little more about The Women. “The Women takes place in the afterlife and the three characters – a mother, her son and his wife – are dead. The women argue over the man and their constant arguing causes him to die again and they are left with nothing – an eternal struggle. The story came to me in a dream, full-fledged, everything. When I woke up from this dream, I began to write the libretto. I worked twenty-four hours a day writing the libretto and the music and then orchestrating it. I will never forget that, it was like a bolt of lightning in my life. It was of a whole cloth, the way that it came to me, and I was absolutely possessed. I had to write it. You know, we’re talking about 1965. That’s how many years ago? – 37 years ago – I remember it and the feeling I had as if it were yesterday. My belief is that it was sent to me because it was meant to be the direction of my life. And I would have to say it was the turning point of my life.”

Should we pause to ponder what a dream analyst might say about this? “I don’t know – if you mean the subject matter, that’s very strange. The opera is still performed quite a bit and there are people who will come up to me and say, ‘This is our story, this happened to us.’ I remember an interviewer asking how it was that at nineteen years of age I had written this. I don’t know. I have no explanation for it except that it was meant to be. It was almost as if it was dictated to me. I could hear the words and the music. There’s another thing that I haven’t spoken about. Milhaud did not like my music at all, but he still awarded me the prize and I believe that it was because of the audience reaction. There had been such an enormous outpouring from the audience that he could not give it to another composer on the program. Madame Milhaud was a different story. She really loved the music and was very fond of me personally, as I was of her. Perhaps she was directed to help me.”

Two one-act chamber operas (Padrevia, Calvary) and a full-evening work (The Penitentes) followed. Then came the television opera, The Trial of Mary Lincoln. How did the opportunity to write an opera for television come about? “In 1969, after I took my doctorate at Julliard, I began teaching at the Manhattan School of Music and the president of the school at that time was George Schick, the conductor. He was good friends with Peter Herman Adler, the Czechoslovakian composer, and Adler was the head of the newly formed NET Opera Theater. Word was out that they were going to commission a composer to write an opera for television. I had a meeting with Schick and he said, ‘if there is ever anything I can do to help you, let me know.’ I told him I wanted to meet Peter Adler and he arranged the first meeting. I brought in the tape of The Women from Aspen and La Divina from Julliard and Adler liked them very much. He asked me to bring in some other pieces for another audition and then he brought in some singers to sing some of my songs and after maybe four or five auditions he gave me the first commission.

“Then I had to come up with a story and libretto. A friend of mine who had written the libretto for my opera The Penitentes, Anne Howard Bailey, had been a television writer. I called and told her about the commission and she came over and we talked about a beautiful novel by Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome. We proposed it to Adler, who said, ‘yes.’ We began to work on it but discovered we couldn’t get the rights. So, we began discussing historical characters and Anne suggested John Wilkes Booth or Mary Lincoln. I didn’t know anything about Mary Lincoln – very few people did then – and so Anne, who is a great historian, told me her story and I was fascinated. Adler loved it and that’s how that happened. We filmed it in Boston and it premiered on Lincoln’s birthday in 1972, just two weeks after the premiere of Black Widow at the Seattle Opera. So, two of my operas were premiered nationally within a couple of weeks of each other.”

Is writing an opera for television approached differently than writing for the stage? “There were many things you could do on television that you couldn’t do on stage and of course things that you couldn’t do on television that you could do on stage. The libretto for Mary Lincoln is like a screenplay but it really is very traditional. There are arias and ensembles and there’s a mad scene at the end, so I don’t see that it’s any different in that respect. But because it was for television and was filmed in advance, we were able to go back and forth between different parts of Mary’s life, from when she was young to old. We filmed all of the trial scenes which happened much later in Mary’s life and they were cut together with scenes from her younger life. As far as the orchestration, since it was really a recording with microphones I was able to do things that you wouldn’t necessarily hear in the opera house. And it was played by the Boston Symphony, so it was an exquisite performance.”

Many of Mr. Pasatieri’s early operas were written with no production in sight. We wondered if it wasn’t a bit risky to begin writing an opera not knowing if it would be produced? “Yes [laughs]. I didn’t have a production in sight with any of my early operas. With my third opera, Padrevia, based on a Boccaccio tale, I had no production in mind, but the head of the Brooklyn College Opera Department happened also to be at Julliard and saw The Women and La Divina and offered to produce it. The Penitentes was my first full-length opera, but it was produced after Black Widow. I began Penitentes in ’67 and it was finished by ’69, but not produced until ’74. In fact when I started to write Black Widow there was no production in mind.

“But, this was a different time. When I was writing operas, it was not like it is today. Very few people were writing operas and even fewer were being produced. There was Carlisle Floyd, Lee Hoiby, Gian Carlo [Menotti], of course, and a few others. But writing operas was something I had to do and I was lucky because things just fell into place. After Black Widow and Mary Lincoln were premiered everything else was commissioned, so it was no longer a question of getting a premiere.”

“Just to complete this line of thinking, when you say it’s dangerous to start writing an opera before you have a production, it’s awfully dangerous to start writing before you have the rights. I thought Yeats’ play, Calvary, would be perfect for opera and I began writing because I loved it. My publishers were a little nervous about that, but they got in contact with Yeats’ widow who owned the rights to the estate. She communed with the spirit of her departed husband who said, ‘Yes, let him do it.’”

Let’s talk about Black Widow. “I had read a play by Miguel de Unamuno called Dos Madres (Two Mothers) and loved it. Unamuno was a contemporary of [Federico] García Lorca, although he was certainly not as famous as García Lorca. After reading the play, I began to write the libretto and the music immediately. Then of course there was the question of the rights, so I went to see the wife of the head of the Spanish Language Department of Columbia University and told her I was writing this opera. I asked her if she could help me get the rights and I believe she wrote to Unamuno’s widow and they gave me the rights and that’s how that happened. It was probably in late 1970 that Glynn Ross, who was then the director of Seattle Opera, had come to New York and I played part of Black Widow for him. He decided he wanted to premiere it and as they made preparations for the premiere the following season, he then produced Calvary, a one-act church opera (although it doesn’t have to be done in church), which was premiered in a church in Seattle the year before Black Widow.

“The night of the premiere of Black Widow, I was offered two commissions, one by Baltimore Opera and the other by Houston Grand Opera, which leads us to The Seagull. A friend of mine, Matthew Epstein, who’s now artistic director of Chicago Lyric Opera, was in New York and I called him from Seattle and told him about this commission from the Houston Opera. He told me he thought [Chekhov’s] The Seagull would be perfect. I remembered reading the play but I wasn’t really familiar with it. Fortunately there was copy in the hotel bookstore so I was able to reread it right then and there. At that time Matthew was a singers’ agent and he represented Frederica von Stade, Richard Stillwell and Evelyn Lear, who were the mainstays of the original cast. I dedicated The Seagull to Matthew.

“[Librettist] Kenward Elmslie had an estate in Vermont that was actually on a lake, so it was very much like the setting of the play. We went over the shape of the piece and the scenes and the emotional intent of the scenes and then he would go off and write and mail a scene to me and I would get it in New York and begin setting it. As with any libretto, there are always changes that a composer makes. Something may be brilliantly written, but if it just doesn’t work with the music that you’re writing for that moment you have to change it or even cut it. Sometimes you need additional words.”

The Seagull was your ninth opera. How had your compositional language evolved to this point? “There was a concept in my mind that kept developing and that was a contemporary bel canto. In The Seagull you have my most florid writing. In fact, if you talk about the title role, the creator was Frederica von Stade and in the early part of her career she was well known for doing the mezzo coloratura roles and she had quite a bit of flexibility in that regard. Now that’s not to say that in each of the operas before The Seagull there wasn’t florid music. The final scene of Mary Lincoln has quite a lot of florid music and certainly it exists in the epilogue of Black Widow also. But it came to full flower in The Seagull.”

The Seagull is probably your best-known work. “Yes, but the most performed is Signor Deluso (based on Molière Sganarelle), for many reasons. It’s a one-act opera and it is not difficult. It has been performed literally hundreds and hundreds of times. I must have seen fifty different productions over the years in colleges, opera workshops. It’s been done in Europe a great deal, too. I was reading on the Internet a few years ago about all the performances of it in Korea. But as far as full-length operas, The Seagull is certainly considered my best work – including by myself. It’s my favorite of all the seventeen operas. Maybe it’s because of the combination of my youthful ardor, Kenward’s magnificent libretto, the phenomenal cast that I had for the premiere and the reaction of the audience and the critics. It was a milestone in my life. After the premiere in Houston it went to the Seattle Opera and then to the Kennedy Center, Atlanta and Fort Worth. The last act was done on television and then the universities did it – Oberlin and the Academy of Vocal Arts. Also, when Carter was President I was invited to the White House with two singers to perform the final duet. So that was a very special time for me. And now it comes to New York”

Inés de Castro

“When Baltimore Opera offered me the commission they had already chosen the story. Robert Collins, who was the director of the opera, had always wanted to do an opera based on the life of Inés de Castro and he had found someone in Baltimore who had given him the money to commission the work. It was a very romantic story and the music I wrote for it was very romantic. It was an opera that I dearly loved and it got tremendous audience acclaim, just a phenomenal reaction. Up to that point I had had tremendous success with the critics and now it was time for the other shoe to drop. Inés de Castro received almost universally terrible reviews and I was not prepared for that to happen. Now, being much older and having changed careers, I know that this happens, not just with composers but with all artists and performers. There’s a great early success and a build-up and laudatory phrases written by critics and then there comes a point when it’s time to tear that person down. The tide turned and it turned with a great vehemence. But eventually I accepted that and I went on.”

Today, the tonal, lyrical style of the operas of Barber, Menotti, Floyd, Hoiby and Mr. Pasatieri, and among a younger generation, Jake Heggie or Mark Adamo, is often termed American verismo or neoromanticism (which depending on the context can be complimentary, explanatory or derisive). But during the ‘70s and ‘80s, those composers who chose not to follow the serialist/atonal, minimalist or the broader experimental movements were not taken seriously by critics and the music intelligentsia. Perhaps the best one could hope for was to have the less pejorative but nonetheless condescending label “folk” applied to one’s operas. “It wasn’t as cut and dried as that. My music was certainly neoromantic at a time when, for the most part, the critics had a deep belief in a different kind of music. But audiences never took to that kind of music. I did what I did because I had to do it. I couldn’t have written any differently just to please an academician. There were many times when I was severely chastised in colleges where I would go to give master classes, not by the voice teachers or the singers or even by the other faculty composers, but by the student composers. There’s a wonderful line in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George where Dot says to George, ‘Give us something new, something that is from you, and then it will be new.’ And that’s very true. Every opera that’s written is new, because it comes from the personality and the life of the composer. Now whether or not you want to criticize the means that composer uses makes no difference to me. And it won’t matter to audiences. Either they will like your work or not and it won’t make any difference what the critics say.

“As for the dreadful reviews for Inés de Castro, they only made the audiences more vociferous in their applause. At one performance, there was so much thunderous applause that I asked the stage director, Tito Capobianco, ‘Have you ever heard anything like this?’ Tito said, ‘It’s a reaction to the review.’ They were furious that this opera had been torn to shreds by the critics. And that was, you know, very painful. But listen, you have to accept it. If you’re going to put yourself in front of the public, you have to be able to accept whatever happens. If you believe all the great reviews, you’re going to have to believe the bad ones too. So it’s best not to read any of them.”

You stopped writing operas twenty years ago. “There was a lot of music after that, but no operas. It was my decision at the time not to write again for the lyric stage. There were several things that occurred in my life in the early ‘80s. My decision not to write any more operas was not based on the fact that I no longer loved opera. American companies were interested mainly in world premieres and they were not interested in repeating operas. Nearly everyone’s operas disappeared after the first production. Europe was not doing American opera – not in a serious way – except for perhaps Porgy and Bess. I still see the same thing happening. American operas, even when they’re very successful, are done a few places within a year or two of the premiere, but then they disappear. I was thinking today, ‘What would be considered a successful American opera?’ You’d have to say The Ghosts of Versailles and Nixon in China and Carlisle’s operas, Susannah and Of Mice and Men and Cold Sassy Tree. I’m sure there are a few others I’m not thinking of at the moment. But how many American operas that premiered between, say, five and twenty-five years ago, are being done now? So I decided I didn’t want to do this anymore. I didn’t want to write my heart out only to have a world premiere and then be forgotten.

“I was artistic director of the Atlanta Opera for four or five years and I was traveling a great deal and I had been traveling since I was ten years old giving concerts and now I was 38 and I wanted to change my life in the following ways: I didn’t want to travel anymore and I wanted to work in a profession where I could earn money and be able to live and have benefits and pensions and things like that. The only place I could work in the music profession and accomplish that was in the film industry. So I came out to Los Angeles in January of ’84 while I was still director of the Atlanta Opera. I commuted for the remainder of the Atlanta season. The last piece I produced there was The Barber of Seville which was in August and in September I started to work in films and television doing orchestrations. And that is where I built the financial side of my life. I certainly don’t regret it, because now at age 57, it has enabled me to do with the rest of my life whatever I want without compromising a secure lifestyle. I’m grateful for that. Now I have the luxury of being able to write again, to write an opera if I decide to, without any of the ropes that would tie me up. I’m not dependent on an income from opera to sustain me. But a lot of time has gone by and I have not written an opera in over twenty years, which is a long time. If you think of it in an historical perspective, the entire career of Frederick Chopin lasted nineteen years. He only lived to 39 years, so I’m even stretching it because his career didn’t start until he was into his twenties. It’s been over thirty-seven years since my first opera premiered in ’65.”

The men behind Manhattan School of Music production's of The Seagull: librettist Kenward Elmslie, Thomas Pasatieri, conductor Gordon Ostrowski, and director Mark Harrison. Photo by Nan Melville (2002).

It’s a bit like a ‘40s movie. The young, successful (and handsome) composer becomes dejected because he feels unappreciated. He slams down the piano lid and storms away saying he’ll never write another note. Then, the comeback. “There you have it! Now the return of the opera diva – because that’s what it is, you see. This enormous buildup of excitement about The Seagull in New York and my attending is reminiscent of a B movie, a C movie really! What you see is the opera diva who lost her voice and is now coming back and performing again. That’s why there’s so much excitement. It’s been so long and here I am returning to New York with the most successful of my pieces, which hasn’t been done in a long time. And the opera wolves are out for blood. It’s too exciting. It is so operatic, it’s cliché. But it’s also wonderful. I wrote a paragraph for the program notes for Manhattan School of Music and I wrote that I was profoundly grateful that The Seagull has survived and is being produced again. So I have no complaints – at least today. I’m having the time of my life. I’m looking forward to it as much as if it were the world premiere. And who knows? There may be a No.18!”

Were you tempted to tinker with it at all? “I actually wrote two new interludes for this production. They are staging it in two acts, rather than three. So because these are different divisions, I looked at it and thought rather than force something musically, I would write new music that would be appropriate to these divisions and to the stage action. They are also recording it. Finally, a complete recording of The Seagull!”

The Final Three

Do you have any desert-island operas? “Norma, La Traviata, Elektra and Don Giovanni.”

Is there an opera composer you strongly dislike? “Hugo Weisgall, because I do not like his music.”

And what about an underrated or unjustly neglected opera composer? “Respighi, Leoncavallo (many neglected operas) and Giannini, my beloved teacher and a GREAT opera composer.”

And now?

“Now for the shocking revelations of the C movie: I'm moving back to New York and returning to opera! I've just rewritten Before Breakfast completely and now the opera scent is back in my nose and I'm thirsty for blood. Notte orrore! I burn. I freeze.”

See also Thomas Pasatieri Photo Gallery