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Words, Concepts and Music According to Michael Patrick Albano

By Robert Wilder Blue

Michael Patrick Albano

Composer Cary John Franklin and librettist Michael Patrick Albano have made three operas together and are at work on a fourth. The third of these collaborations is Loss of Eden, which will have its world premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis on June 9, 2002. The opera is a joint commission with the Plymouth Music Series of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who will present the opera in September 2002. We weren’t trying to be xenophobic when we pointed out that half of this American opera-writing team happens to be Canadian: Mr. Albano comes from Port Colborne, Ontario. “That’s a small town on Lake Erie very close to the border crossing at Buffalo, New York. On weekends it’s where we sort of grew up and did our shopping and our concert going and things. Lucas Foss was the conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic when I was a teenager; within 20 minutes you could sort of scoot over for a concert or go to the art gallery or something.

“Looking back it was always a tug of war between music and theater for me, which I guess was a good preparation for opera. In high school I did all the usual things with being in the drama society and that sort of stuff. I discovered that there was such a thing as a library and spent hours and hours there reading Eugene O’Neill and Noel Coward and so forth. I never particularly liked acting much but I got turned on to directing when there was a teachers’ strike and they were only allowed to teach and couldn’t do any extra curricular things. That was of course a huge cataclysmic event in our drama society. Who would direct that year’s play? Well I said I would do it. I mean it’s not really an ephemeral event and I don’t want to make it any more dramatic than it is, but I remember thinking, ‘gosh this is fun – it’s so much more fun than acting’. Also, I was phenomenally interested in the technical side of things and that of course takes you more into the vector of directing.

“I played the piano and studied the violin; I played very badly but with great flare. I guess somewhere in the early teenage years I discovered opera, in large part due to the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. When I look back on it now it’s phenomenal the education those broadcasts brought without you really being aware of it. I listened to many of those Met broadcasts before I ever saw an opera.

“I had an immediate love affair with La Traviata but I also fell in love with Vanessa from the first time I ever heard a note; and I remember listening to The Saint of Bleeker Street. I have a friend who also was in high school with me and he had far more sophisticated taste – Wagner, Richard Strauss – and was an avid record collector. So I did learn a lot about music through his tastes and experiences but from the beginning it was always an eclectic mix between what was very new and outré and what was romantic and made a more emotional impact. Ultimately I think it’s the key to all opera and if you look at Vanessa and Traviata, both of them make strong emotional impact.

“I became very attracted to the stories and their sources. I remember looking at the libretto of Lucia di Lammermoor, which is one of the first complete operas I bought on recording and with score, and being entranced by it and not thinking it was foolish and ridiculous. It spoke to me in a very strong way and looking back I realize I began to learn to think about theatrical construction and what works and what doesn’t. I mean Lucia is a pretty silly story without Donizetti’s music. So I also began to notice when music is the stronger component and when the text is the stronger component.”

Since he brought up the subject, we asked Mr. Albano, as a librettist and director, how he would intrepret an opera such as Lucia di Lammermoor to make it relevant for today’s audiences without distorting the story or disrespecting the music. “One of the first things is never to be condescending in one’s approach. Condescension is a very dangerous first cousin to concept opera. I remember years ago when I was about 14 or something seeing here in Canada a production of Macbeth with very strange costuming and set. At that time it was called Eskimo which is politically incorrect; it would be called Inuit now. Afterward there was a question-and-answer period with a British actor and someone asked why are all these people in Scotland were dressed like Eskimos. And he said, ‘Oh we did that purposely so that you Canadians would understand it.’ I remember that vividly because it was just so off track, but it was such a lesson in what often is done in concept operas where the director or the scenic designer is saying more or less, ‘We’re doing this so you great unwashed can understand it. We know you can’t understand the atmosphere of 15th century Scotland so therefore we’re setting it in a Brooklyn laundromat because that’s your experience.’ I think it’s quite obvious it becomes a real talking down to audiences and I think you must never ever underestimate the intelligence of audiences. We have to give up that valued conceit that we know more than anybody else.

“The other thing is to keep the production, specifically the scenic designer, in line. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a scenic designer was that the purpose of scenery is basically to tell you where you are, which scenery very seldom does for us any more. Scenery has taken over the role of telling us how to think about something. I think we can all live without going to yet another opera where the curtain goes up and the scenery is all crooked because somebody is going to go crazy. Those kind of sign posts are so lacking in subtlety that you have to think, ‘give me some credit for being able to recognize insanity and making my own judgments about it.’ It sounds cliché but basically you go towards what the truth of the piece is and how it can resonate for us now. Sometimes you go into larger issues. But first of all, you have to have faith in a piece; if you basically dislike a piece I don’t think you should ever touch it because you won’t bring anything to it except a mildly disguised disdain at best.

“I remember fairly recently I saw a La Bohème on television that came from Australia. Everyone had said, ‘Oh you must see this Bohème, it’s all new and it’s all conceptual’ and yada yada yada. So I was looking forward to it because I think Bohème is timeless and can stand a new looking at. Well, there was just so much stuff on the stage it was claustrophobic – so many gimmicks, so much scenery. I thought, ‘This is not all looking at opera in a new way’. When you look at a piece in a new way you often try to take it down to the bare bones. I’m not saying that you end up there but it really helps educate you. This might be why directors, myself included, are so attracted to doing abstract productions. When I want to take that approach it starts with getting rid of all the junk on the stage. There’s a singer underneath all that, you know. Let her be seen; let him be heard. Isn’t music the gateway to the audience? The emotional life of the piece travels on the music.”

The Lindbergh Opera

Loss of Eden tells the story of Charles and Anna Morrow Lindbergh and Bruno and Anne Hauptmann and how their lives were altered by one of the most famous crimes in U.S. history. “It’s a story that intersects with mythology in a way. It was interesting for me to ask people about Charles Lindbergh; you know, to ask the man in the dry cleaners, ‘What does Charles Lindbergh mean to you?’ People had little tidbits of information of which the strongest elements were the Transatlantic flight, of course, which brought him such fame, and this incredible ‘Crime of the Century’ kidnapping. There was a lot of misinformation though. A lot of people thought he had invented the airplane, sort of combining his essence with the Wright Brothers. Many people knew something about the ‘famous kidnapping’ but had no sense of what happened to the child, whether it died or was returned. It was odd to realize that the character had quite a bit of resonance to it still. At the time the story must have been blazingly shocking. No wonder people were reeling from it. I mean just as a chilling anecdote, there was evidence that reporters broke into the funeral home where the child’s body was and pried open the casket! We think we’ve had it bad with the treatment of Lady Diana, Princess of Wales.”

We asked Mr. Albano to give us a sense of how this larger-than-life story could be made into an opera libretto – a kind of mini-masterclass for budding librettists. “The million-dollar word is distillation. If you write a libretto that is too dense there is a danger of not allowing any room for the music. Steven Lord, who is a wonderful conductor, once said to me, ‘You know a libretto should be nouns and the music should be the adjectives’, which I thought was a great way of looking at it. But no matter what analogy you make, the main thing is that there must be room in an operatic libretto for music. In a film screenplay you have to leave room for the visual don’t you? A real, honest-to-goodness, living Hollywood screenwriter said to me, ‘Every word must do a job’. That’s not to say you can just sit down and write something distilled. It comes out of the writing process: you write and rewrite and it starts to become clear to you. Then, once your words are set to music it’s obvious what words are extraneous. This is why it’s virtually impossible to write a complete libretto and then sort of hand it to a composer. What is a much more phenomenal and rich process is to write a theme or half of a theme and then hear what’s happening when words become illuminated by music. I tell people who are interested in writing an opera libretto to look at the libretto of Aïda or Traviata and just look at the brevity of it. It’s been the result of a tremendous amount of pairing away to the actual essence of the piece.

“If the basic idea excites you then the rest of it is still hard work but it becomes really a developmental process. You go a number of different routes and discover things and you end up discarding a lot of material. If you are confident of your subject matter then you can also have the confidence not to fall in love with your own ideas. And you cannot think the opera is about words. You can hear something and say ‘My God, that’s a touching phrase’, but it’s really the words that have provided a springboard for an emotional repercussion that comes from the music.

“What I did with this story first of all was to read everything possible about the Lindberghs. So if you ever want a book on the Lindberghs, do not buy one, I’ve got 43 of them! It’s like the process you do when you research anything: you read absolutely everything you can and then you forget about it and start to write your own story. Two things very much steered the way this project went. One was just a basic construction thing: I didn’t know anything about this story or how it would begin or end, but I told Cary that the first-act curtain had to be the discovery of the empty crib. I just couldn’t think of a better ending of a first act. And with all the rewrites and all the reconstructions that has stayed absolutely constant. The other thing that came from Colin Graham who is, of course, no beginner to writing libretti. He said you have to give yourself the permission to write the undocumented things. In other words, if you were at a dinner party and the Lindberghs left the room to argue and nobody heard the argument, you have to write that argument. What does Gore Vidal talk about? He always said ‘as though springing from agreed upon truths.’ So we didn’t change the historical details; we didn’t make Lindbergh into an astronaut or anything like that. But we’ve written the imagined events and conversations.

“It’s been a smarter choice. First of all I’m not really sure that documentary opera works. That’s a whole other interview for someone and I’d be very interested in the answer. It certainly works as film, but I don’t know that it works as opera because I don’t know where the emotional portal would be. My first treatment of this libretto resembled Noel Coward’s Cavalcade. The Lindberghs lived in such an interesting time and met the most dynamic people and I was trying to include snippets of all the people they had met and known. We discarded huge scenes of that treatment. It wasn’t because our original impetus lost its fire or truth in the way it was speaking to us; it was just that we weren’t getting there; we weren’t finding the right voice for the idea that had originally excited us so much.

“What we’ve ended up with now is so completely the opposite of all that. It’s really about two couples, the Lindberghs and the Hauptmanns, and how the American dream eluded both of them (but not for lack of trying).”

Read more about the lives of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh:
http://www.lindberghfoundation.org/history/index.html
http://www.crimelibrary.com/lindbergh/lindmain.htm
http://www.nationalaviation.org/enshrinee/lindberghch.html
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/lindbergh.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lindbergh/
http://www.stemnet.nf.ca/CITE/lindy.htm#Flight
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lindbergh/sfeature/anne.html