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Colin Graham, Abridged But Still Larger Than Life

By Kip Cranna and Robert Wilder Blue

Colin Graham

Seems as though Colin Graham is the man to call when you want to make a new opera. His destiny was foretold perhaps when he met Benjamin Britten forty-nine years ago; since then he has shaped and influenced fifty-five world premieres as a director and sometimes librettist. His current resume lists many American works, including John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles, Conrad Susa's The Dangerous Liaisons, Stephen Paulus's The Woodlanders and The Woman at Otowi Crossing and André Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire. No single interview could capture fully Mr. Graham's extraordinary, ongoing career, but we thought we'd at least find out what was on his mind at the moment.

San Francisco Opera Musical Administrator Kip Cranna caught up with Mr. Graham recently after he had just returned to his home in St. Louis. "I've been in Minneapolis doing Mark Adamo's Little Women. It's amazing - it's had five different productions since its premiere (in 1998); there's the first one originating in Houston, another in Central City, another in Bloomington (University of Indiana), another in Glimmerglass and another in Chautauqua. It's wonderfully orchestrated, but it's perverse for the singers. Mark stretches the voice from the top to the bottom of the register and gives the singers piles of stuff over the passaggio and nothing where the voices really tell. They're expected to get the pitch out of nowhere, like to get the E-flat in a chord totally unrelated to E-Flat. It really causes a lot of heartburn and angst and problems in rehearsal. But, it's quite a good piece, a very clever adaptation."

Colin Graham was born in London and attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art where he studied acting, singing, dancing and musical composition. After graduation, he worked as an actor for a time before deciding his calling might be elsewhere. "I decided I wanted to be an opera singer. Fortuitously I discovered that I didn't have the voice for it when a guy at an audition sang the same aria as I had and I was able to hear the difference! But I always loved opera anyway, so I decided if I couldn't sing it I would have to direct. Shortly after that, I got a job at Covent Garden as an assistant stage manager during the Erich Kleiber season - very exciting for a tyro like me. Then in 1953 I was writing to every company in the country trying to get jobs and I got a call from the English Opera Group - the Benjamin Britten company - and started to work as an assistant stage manager. My second year we did the world premiere of The Turn of the Screw the director emigrated to Canada and I had to undertake all the revivals, which went on for a couple of years. As a reward for that, Britten gave me the premiere of Noyes Fludde to direct. That really got me going. The same year I also did a couple of those Gerard Hoffnung 'crazy concerts'."

"Britten was the consummate professional in every single aspect. He had his personal problems, mainly in that he couldn't bear confrontation, which he considered betrayal. He had this terrible hate relationship with the Glyndebourne Festival because they treated him really badly when they premiered The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring in the '40s. Anybody who went to work for Glyndebourne got a black mark against them - he considered that a betrayal, even somebody as close to him as Janet Baker; it took her a long time get back into his good books. He could never bear to tell anybody that he didn't like their work; he always left that to other people. It caused a lot of hurt to people very close to him. Otherwise he was a fantastic professional. I learned a huge amount about opera from him, both directing his earlier pieces and also the new ones I did with him. That was really the major foundation block of my career.

"He never workshopped his operas, but he always wanted the designer and director to be very closely involved at the libretto stage. There were always constant questions: Is there time enough for this? Is this too long or too short? He had a very clear idea of what the characters were about and why he'd written it the way he had. He felt very strongly that in the end it's the music that's got to carry the can and the libretto is what made him write the kind of music he wrote. Therefore the libretto had better be right.

"I was very much involved in the beginning of his last seven or eight operas as a result. He wrote most of Curlew River in Venice and I would go out there for a month at a time to work with him. I actually designed the set for that one - he wanted the set model with us so that we could discuss exactly how it was going to be used. There was going to be no conductor, so he wanted to be absolutely sure that every lead from the musicians would either come from a gesture on the stage or a word or something like that. This was all very carefully worked out, so that it was 'workshopped' within the creative process. I've always been fascinated - as Britten was - by making the maximum effect with a minimum of means, distilling everything as much as possible to make it more powerful. This has actually affected all my work since then. I've always tried to do everything with less scenery and less this and that; sometimes I manage it and sometimes I don't."

Mr. Graham served of director of productions for Britten's English Opera Group and for the Sadler's Wells Opera/English National Opera over the next two decades and made a lasting stamp on the opera scene in England. At the same time, he also directed operas at Covent Garden and theater at the Old Vic. "When I was still in England, I was doing quite a lot of straight theater. But unfortunately in this country I haven't done a single play since I came over here. What I really miss is doing Shakespeare, which was my first love - Shakespeare and musicals."

Britten would provide the bridge for Colin's introduction to the U.S. "I did my American debut in Santa Fe in 1974, the American premiere of Britten's Owen Wingrave, which I had done two years before on television for its premiere and the previous year at Covent Garden for its stage premiere. Then, Richard Gaddes asked me to go to St. Louis with him to start the company there, but at that moment I had to say no because Britten's Aldeburgh Festival was still going on at exactly the same time. Britten died two years later and (his partner) Peter Pears said, 'There isn't going to be any more opera here now, so you'd better go to America.' So I did.

"I started working with St. Louis in 1978. It was a brand new company then. I joined it in its third year and have been here every since. In 1983 Richard Gaddes decided he was going to take early retirement because he was so fed up with the financial process and he appointed me artistic director and he said 'You have to live here'. At that time in my life there were all kinds of things going on and I wasn't at all happy with what was happening at English National Opera where there were changes in management and it seemed the right moment to leave them after being there for 25 years. It all came together and it was quite a change for me.

"There were three things that Gaddes was concentrating on in St. Louis. First, each opera should be rehearsed as closely as possible to the Glyndebourne model, which is to say a minimum of five weeks of rehearsal. Secondly, the audience would be educated from the very first season to accept twentieth-century works. And thirdly, all four operas of the repertory would be performed simultaneously so that people could see them all in three or four days. He got a lot of international press by that means.

"The idea of doing it all in English was there from the beginning as well. I think I'm right in saying that we are the only company left now that does it that way. This has meant that a lot of singers are not prepared to spend the time learning something in English, since they will never sing it in English again. Recently that has been quite a drawback in casting. Nathan Gunn is going to do Hamlet in English because he really wants to do it and learn how it works. Dwayne Croft did Eugene Onegin with us in English and three months later did it in Russian at the Met. He said if he hadn't done it in English with us, he never would have had the success when he did it in Russian, he would have been learning it phonetically and not from the thought patterns. I've just done Onegin in Russian at Opera Pacific with someone not knowing a word of what they were saying. It wastes such a lot of time and ends up being a rather bland performance as a result. It's a burden on the director, especially if you have a very limited amount of time."

A Long List

We asked about Graham's incredible record of staging 55 world premieres and wondered if he could name them all if he had to. "I have a list of them somewhere. James Levine made me write it out when he was promoting me to direct John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles at the Met, so that he could take it to the board. There have been a few since The Ghosts of Versailles and I hope there will be more. Because of my attachments to Britten, a lot of other people in England asked me to do their operas. I guess they hoped the Britten tag would help promote their operas; they knew that because I'd been working very closely with him, I would know how to appreciate what a composer's got up to."

Who was the first American composer he worked with? "Thea Musgrave - actually she's an American now, but she wasn't when I first worked with her in Britain on The Decision. I also did The Voice of Ariadne and Mary, Queen of Scots. My first 'real' American opera was Stephen Paulus's The Postman Always Rings Twice.

We asked Colin if he could spot a trend in American opera over the course of his work. "I think the audience reaction has become much more positive for new works, but I'm not sure the management's reaction has. I think managements are still scared of them. I can't help comparing everybody with Britten, because I worked so closely with him. I believe he never wrote an unnecessary note or word or dynamic marking. I see composers being so prodigal with unnecessary notes and words; there's a dangerous tendency these days to treat voices like orchestral instruments which just have to push a button and the note comes out. It's a lack of understanding of how the voice really works. It's partly the training that composers are getting and it's partly the kind of influence that has them harkening back to dodecaphonic music and being afraid of writing melodies because they'll be considered retrogressive by the press. There are still a lot of fears of being ordinary or old-fashioned."

Is there an inferiority complex about American opera? "As far as managements are concerned there is an inferiority complex in that they think nobody will come and they won't be able to raise the money for it. Of course the real problem is second productions. Unless you have the publicity of a world premiere, you're not going to get any interest from the press for a second production. It's just remarkable what's happened to Little Women and Dead Man Walking. They're the exceptions-it's just amazing, really."

The Japanese Connection

Colin Graham's deep love and knowledge of Japanese classical theater sprang from his direction of Britten's Curlew River. "But I'd always been fascinated by the idea of Japanese classical theater. When Britten adapted a Noh play for Curlew River he said 'I don't want you going to look at films or going to Japan to bone up on it, because this opera is not going to be a pastiche of Japanese music and I don't want your production style to be a pastiche either.' After the success of Curlew River I started to get invitations from the British Council to go and study Japanese classical theater in Japan - which I did. And I was completely bowled over by it, particularly by Kabuki. I somehow lucked upon a young group of Kabuki actors who were doing a lot of dance dramas as well as the domestic dramas and the classical pieces. I got the full range, particularly the colorfulness of the dance dramas and the ancient traditional pieces. They're much more interesting than the 18th-century domestic dramas, which are really a lot of talk with nobody doing anything specifically 'Kabuki' with either their movements or their acting. I was very impressed with the versatility of being able to dance and sing and tumble and play a musical instrument. As result of all that, I got Minoru Miki commissioned to write An Actor's Revenge (1979), which is about a Kabuki actor - one of the female impersonators.

"Then I got a Winston Churchill Fellowship to go back to Japan to study it more closely and my thesis was actually a production of The Actor's Revenge - they got a huge production book of blow-by-blow photographs and accounts of what had happened in Japan." Since then, Mr. Graham has written libretti for Minoru Miki's Joruri and The Tale of Genji, which was presented at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in June 2000 and in Tokyo in September 2001. "It was a huge success, very exciting. We did it in English with Japanese 'side titles'. It looked wonderful in their theater and we got fantastic reviews. People were saying that no Japanese could ever have achieved the standard of Kabuki movement that these American singers had achieved."

Graham has several projects in the works, including writing libretti for David Carlson's Anna Karenina and Bright Sheng's Madame Mao. We asked whether he found it a daunting project to adapt such a long and famous novel as Anna Karenina. "I did a treatment for Britten many years ago and at that time it was supposed to be done by (Russian soprano Galina) Vishnevskaya and Peter Pears and (Mstislav) Rostroprovich was going to conduct. It was going to be done at the Bolshoi and things were trotting along quite happily until the Russians walked into Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the British Foreign Office told Britten he couldn't do it. So the whole thing fell through, alas. But I nurtured my notes. I did a lot of spade work then about the reduction of the book into drama form, hopefully without losing any of the principal Tolstoy elements.

"David is almost finished Act I. The new theater for the Florida Grand Opera is being built at the moment in Miami. This is supposed to be one of the operas that's going to open it in 2005 if everything goes well. The opera will be ready, but whether the theater will be is a different matter! I've been doing constant revisions. He calls me up and says 'Let's make this into an aria or a duet' or 'Could you give me some more words' or 'Can we cut this?' We're in touch a great deal by e-mail and telephone."

And Madame Mao? "That's going very well. He's almost finished one and a half of the two acts. We structured it so that there are two artists playing Madame Mao, the young one and the older one - before the change and after, as it were. They are in two different voice categories, mezzo for the older one and high soprano for the other one. It will have two or three Chinese Opera scenes in it. I've invented a story based very loosely on a couple of Chinese Opera things that parallel what was happening in Mao's life at the time. One is when he's being successful and one is when he is being unsuccessful. Madame Mao destroys the Chinese Opera of the time as part of the Cultural Revolution. I find it ironic, since she was involved in Chinese Opera when she was younger. It's really about the change from the star-struck young woman who gets used and dropped by men all the way through her life, into the kind of Lady Macbeth figure she became, wreaking revenge on all her enemies. That's for Santa Fe for 2003.

"Then of course there's Silk (a libretto for André Previn based on the Italian novella Seta by Alessandro Baricco). I've said to André on more than one occasion, 'Are you going to write this or is it going to languish on the shelf forever?' Then I had a strange offer from a company that I guess had better be nameless, saying they were so fond of the libretto and asking if I would consider letting another composer write it. So I got back to André and I said, 'Now look, this has happened, are really you interested or not? Because I would like to consider this offer from somebody else. If only you would lower your sights away from the major houses, you'd get many more performances - especially since it's a non-chorus opera - if you went to the smaller houses and got a consortium of them.' And he said, 'No, I am going to do it, I'm totally in love with it and I really want to do it. I've been very ill and my life has been very complicated and I have all these other commissions.' I said, 'I know, I know, are you going to do it?' As a result of that, he got enthusiastic again and this company is actually thinking about an American-European consortium. I think he's going to write it for 2004."

We asked if Previn had mentioned planning any revisions in Streetcar. "Yes, strangely enough. He called me and said 'I need an aria for Stanley! Will you write it?' And I said, 'What about Philip (Littell, the librettist)?' And he said, 'I want you to write it.' So I wrote it and I sent it off to him and I've heard no more. My main problem with Streetcar is with the first two scenes where you have to go through Blanche's whole story twice, once with Stella, once with Stanley, and it's not very gratefully written for the voice. He didn't know for whom he was writing for at the time (ultimately Renée Fleming). When you look at the play, Stanley really has very little to say, so it's hard to find an aria for him. But I wrote one to go in after the duet he has with Stella outside the house, where he sings about 'gettin' them colored lights going.' That is the only possible place, really. It'll be interesting to see what happens."

Is there a favorite American opera? "I can't put my finger on one that I've loved more than any other. I did see Dead Man Walking (in San Francisco) four times; I was so engrossed in that! I think The Postman Always Rings Twice is a wonderful opera, though I say so myself. It's really due for a revival. (Stephen's) last opera Summer was very good, I think the best he's ever done. Now he thinks his new one Heloise and Abelard is the best thing he's ever done. He really has developed a lot as a composer. The Ghosts of Versailles was wonderful when it was happening. It's really a great charge - very exciting to do. I would love to do another opera of Corigliano's if he'd write one."

Any subject in particular you'd like to see made into an opera? "I would love to see (Marcel Carné's1945 film) Les Enfants du Paradis made into an opera. I think it's a wonderful subject. It would be expensive because it's on a big scale and it has everything in it - theater music, street music, passionate opera music, wonderful characters, a wonderful story. I think it would make a superb opera. I've tried to interest the odd composer across the years, but they don't like having ideas suggested to them.

Is Graham optimistic about the future of new opera? "Yes, I am. I think they will go on happening, particularly if composers continue to be realistic about writing for a sensible orchestra and not a Straussian-sized one and really be sensible about the chorus - either having a small chorus or not having any costume changes. At this very moment I think the greatest future is for operas that do not have chorus, because the chorus size makes the expenses so much higher, with the clothes and the rehearsal time and everything else. Composers hate to have to think about these practical things. I remember saying to Conrad (Susa), 'Why on earth didn't you have Dangerous Liaisons orchestrated for a road company-sized orchestra, because it's such an intimate piece with only seven characters and no chorus.' And he said, 'Because it's so much easier to have four horns and four trumpets than to work out how to get the same effect with two of each.' You can always expand a piece later if you want to, as they did with Little Women. It's like a Britten orchestra with string quintet and a wind quintet, plus harp, percussion and piano. They augmented it and it's still a brilliant piece of orchestration but it was just so clever when it was a small size. He's too clever for his own good, that young man. He's always encouraged by John Corigliano, his mate."

We asked Colin if he ever thought of quitting. "I think about it but I don't want to quit. I would like to be able to draw my horns in a little bit and concentrate more on writing and more on St. Louis and not have to go here and there in order to get the money to pay next year's taxes, which is becoming more and more of a drag. I do find it really debilitating trying to do new stagings in other peoples' old sets. Even this production of Little Women in Minneapolis - which had only been done once before in Bloomington, Indiana - was hampering. I did Onegin in Opera Pacific with a good cast really, but the production originated in Chicago in 1947! It was being held together with duct tape. Baltimore bought it and spent a lot of money on it years ago. Then they put into storage and when they trotted it out and unrolled it, it was all eaten by rats! There were these huge holes! Thanks to the lighting designer it was made to look respectable, but it was actually a bad design in the first place, by an Italian designer who'd never looked at Russia in his life. That's such hard work, trying to make silk purses out of sows' ears. I get more satisfaction at home in St. Louis where everything is new. I'm in control of what's going on to a much larger extent.

"I find working on a new piece very challenging and stimulating, especially if one is involved a little bit in the creative process, not just taking a fait accompli and being told to get on with it. I don't find the possibility that it might not be done again at all discouraging. I'm kind of hungry to do something new, so I wish that somebody would trot along, but they haven't so far. The phone may ring any day."

More Colin
http://www.operaworld.com/north/director.shtml
http://www.operaamerica.org/verdi2001.htm
http://www.ironbodies.com/Testimonies/colin_graham.htm

More Benjamin Britten
http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/britten.html

More on Minoru Miki and The Tale of Genji
http://www.operajaponica.org/libretti/taleofgenjilib.htm
http://www.operajaponica.org/interviews/mikiminoru.htm
http://mcel.pacificu.edu/as/students/genji/homepage.html
http://www.taleofgenji.org