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Romantic/Radical: Lee Hoiby

By Robert Wilder Blue

Mark Shulgasser and Lee Hoiby.
Photo by Ken Howard.

American composers, by and large, do not enjoy the same name recognition as do their European predecessors. But if Lee Hoiby’s name doesn’t ring a bell with the “average” American operagoer, that’s not to say he’s an unknown. Hardly a university voice student gets to graduation without having performed his music. For nearly forty years, American singers from Leontyne Price and Arleen Auger to William Sharp, Jennifer Larmore and Renée Fleming have championed his songs and their audiences have been the luckier for it.

Hoiby has penned ten operas; an eleventh is in progress (Romeo and Juliet); two have fallen from the current catalog (Letter to Morocco and Beatrice). The Scarf, a one-act opera taken from the Chekhov story, was given at the 1957 Spoletto Festival and announced Mr. Hoiby to the world as a talent to be taken seriously. Its success led to a commission from the New York City Opera, Natalia Petrovna (1964), based on Turgenev’s play and later revised and renamed A Month in the Country. An adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest with a libretto by Mark Shulgasser was premiered at Des Moines Opera in 1986 to great acclaim and given a high-profile revival by The Dallas Opera ten years later. Along the way, there were also two one-act operas, Something New For the Zoo (1980) and This Is The Rill Speaking (1992, based on Lanford Wilson’s play), and two musical monologues, The Italian Lesson (1985, text by Ruth Draper) and Bon Appetit! (1986, text by Julia Child), which were performed off-Broadway and on tour by actress Jean Stapleton.

But Hoiby’s most-performed opera by far is Summer and Smoke, adapted by Lanford Wilson from Tennessee Williams’ play and premiered by the St. Paul Opera Association on June 19, 1971. The opening night cast included Mary Beth Peil as Alma and John Reardon as Dr. John Buchanan; Williams attended and took a curtain call with the cast, composer, librettist and director (Frank Corsaro). Summer and Smoke will be given a new production at Central City Opera this summer and to mark the event, USOPERWEB phoned Mr. Hoiby recently at his winter residence in Florida to chat with him about his operas and his creative life so far (as much as one can during a telephone conversation). He asked Mark Shulgasser, his partner of 23 years, to come on the line to fill in some of the details that might otherwise have gotten left out.

RWB: How did the idea come about to make an opera of Summer and Smoke?

LH: Tennessee gave me the choice of all the plays and of course the first thought I had was A Streetcar Named Desire. But I reread it and found no variety in it. It was like Pelléas and Mélisande in that regard. I could take those monologues and have a ball with them, you know, but I just didn’t see how I could make a really well balanced operatic structure of a play like that. It didn’t call for music. I was also very much drawn to The Rose Tattoo but I felt it was so ballsy, it needed someone more Verdian to do it. Finally, someone suggested I take a look at Summer and Smoke. It was a flawed play, it needed music and I thought it was really perfect for opera, so I just jumped right in.

MS: Also, I think that Streetcar is just too squalid for Lee. Lee’s temperament is much more like Alma’s in Summer and Smoke. I don’t think Lee feels comfortable with the idea of a guy in his undershirt in an opera. He’s more of a poetic kind of composer. There’s got to be some myth in it. The Ashcan School is not for Lee. His harmonic and melodic vocabulary is too drenched in the classics – Schubert and Brahms. Summer and Smoke is poetic and sort of flimsy and it really does get filled up with his kind of passion. In the play, Alma is supposed to be repressed and prim but in Lee’s version she unfolds as a deeply feeling character.

RWB: Frank Corsaro described Summer and Smoke as an opera that dealt with loneliness on a universal and timeless level.

LH: It’s also about conflict between two different kinds of people whose natures are different.

MS: It’s about frustrated desire, I guess. It’s a romantic story – romance thwarted, which is more intense. It’s really just another version of the usual operatic romance.

LH: Well it’s something you can sing about until you’re blue in the face. And that’s at the bottom of my whole endeavor as a composer – to express feeling – no matter what Stravinsky may have said on the subject.

RWB: Have you revised Summer and Smoke over the years?

LH: First of all we revised it a lot when it was produced on PBS with the wonderful director Kirk Browning. They only had 90 minutes so we had to cut out great chunks from the original version – 15, 20 minutes. But in doing so we discovered some wonderful cuts that we kept.

MS: It took a long time to do those cuts. I suggested that Lee take out a lot of music that was rather rhetorical and loud, some of which, he confessed, he had added at the director’s request for the original production. Some conductors have regretted the cuts because there are places where they really get to wave their baton and make quite a noise.

LH: It was kind of breast-beating music, a lot of which we cut out.

MS: Some of the music of Summer and Smoke is very passionate but it doesn’t pop out at you and shout, “this is a passionate scene.” It just sort of erupts. It’s hyperromantic, but it’s resolutely unhistrionic and unflamboyant and in that sense I think it embodies Lee’s general dislike of opera. A Month in the Country isn’t too flamboyant either. But when I encouraged him to set The Tempest he really had to let go because you can’t hold back on spectacle when you’re setting that play of Shakespeare.

LH: Summer and Smoke had some twenty productions in the decade after its premiere. It was a tragedy for me that Belwin Mills, the publisher that printed it, went out of business and put all their music in a warehouse somewhere. For years nobody could find the music to Summer and Smoke. Why they didn’t call me up I’ll never know, but I’ve met people who said they wanted to do it but couldn’t get hold of the music. But that was one that got off to a really good start. It was done all over the place, mostly in colleges though; the big companies didn’t do it. It’s an intimate opera and maybe they were a little afraid of that. I eventually reorchestrated it and brought it from a large orchestra down to a smaller-sized one and I think it works better.

RWB: Your first major operatic commission was Natalya Petrovna. How did it come to pass?

Lee Hoiby

LH: William Ball saw my opera The Scarf in Spoletto (which got a very good review in Time magazine – my one and only Time review). He loved it and suggested we do an opera together. He chose the subject and got City Opera to commission it – bing bing bing – it took only four years. It was revised several years later when John Moriarty wanted to produce it at the New England Conservatory. The revisions were made with Mark’s oversight – he’s my revising engineer.

MS: We didn’t make many changes, I just sort of cut here and there where I thought things were a little bit weak or unnecessary. But I do take credit for one innovation in the second version and that is the addition of an overture to the second act. The original version just sort of plunged into it.

LH: I simplified the orchestration also and I made a smaller version. It took me forever to get all the parts changed.

MS: I think that’s what people don’t understand about opera is that every little change is really an arduous amount of work and expense.

LH: We changed – I counted them – 175 places in The Tempest after the first production and it took me about a year to do them all because I’m very fussy and I don’t want any mistakes in my parts.

RWB: Was it difficult to return to Natalia Petrovna after fifteen years?

LH: My style, my vocabulary, never really changed, unlike so many composers. It’s like Brahms or Chopin in that respect; from day one you know who they are.

MS: There is a development in your work but it’s not a stylistic change per se. I think your composition has become more sophisticated – the first version was the work of a much younger, less-practiced composer.

LH: It’s a refinement. I compose much more slowly now than I did then. It takes me a long time to get a piece the way I want it. Often there are 15 or 20 versions of the same page by the time it’s done. But the language is the same. Sometimes it’s complex as in Summer and Smoke, sometimes it’s pretty simple like in the new opera, Romeo and Juliet, which uses a more directly melodious language than Summer and Smoke.

There are certain things that came out in A Month in the Country that I’m still very proud of and I think that people will like when they hear them again. There’s an octet that is the bee’s knees I’ll tell you. It’s a double canon and audiences just love it. There is a laughing quintet that was done very brilliantly by the librettist who brings in all these characters and gives them all reasons to laugh or sob and cry. And there’s comic coloratura duet that always stops the show.

MS: In his review of the original Washington production Paul Hume compared the final octet to the [Die] Meistersinger quintet and the [Der] Rosenkavalier trio.

RWB: New York Times critic Harold Schonberg said it was “of overwhelming beauty, a supreme moment in opera” and “more natural, ringing truer” than the Vanessa quintet.

MS: Ever since then Sam Barber wasn’t very nice to me. Lee dedicated A Month in the Country to Menotti prior to their relationship completely falling apart and he dedicated Summer and Smoke to Barber…

LH: … which I think Sam thought was too cheeky – I was just supposed to be a student you know.

RWB: What do you make of the vitriolic response to the premiere of Barber’s opera Anthony and Cleopatra? It not only halted his creative life, it virtually slammed the door on all American opera.

LH: That was a very sad event. And Barber was, of course, not entirely responsible for it, but in the end I guess he was. It was easy to blame [Franco] Zeffirelli at the time but the music too was unyielding and not that charming. There was not that much beautiful music in it and you couldn’t understand the words – there weren’t any supertitles then. But it really killed him. And I think it affected us all because there was a feeling that if Barber couldn’t do it then it couldn’t be done.

RWB: Would you tell us a little about your upbringing, what lead to becoming a composer, what sort of artistic and musical influences you had?

LH: My juvenile triumphs? [He laughs.] I was born and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. There wasn’t anybody musical in my family. (MS: Not true; his grandfather was a violinist in a Danish orchestra and his aunts formed a saxophone quartet.) My father played the ukulele and he could yodel. My grandmother loved Grand Old Opry and that was it. We didn’t have a piano but grandma did. My mother could play a bit and she would sit down at my grandmother’s piano when we were visiting and play popular tunes like “Shine on, Harvest Moon.” I was enraptured by this and begged her to let me up on the piano bench with her. She taught me a couple of little things and from that day on I’ve been at the piano.

I started playing tunes that I heard on the radio and making up words for them. I also made up my own compositions – rather lengthy ones. I had one that I called “The Storm” and I made everyone turn out the lights when I played it. It was full of diminished seventh arpeggios and octave passages and big chords. Very early on people set me apart a little bit because of this and that’s probably one reason I didn’t tell people I could play, because they treated you differently. ‘Oh he’s a sissy. He can play the piano.’ And so I grew up kind of lonely that way. But I did play some in school.

Then I met a very great musician – one who really took me in hand.

MS: May I just throw this out? Lee’s father was a kind of a beery alcoholic and when he was home, which was only intermittently, he used to drag Lee to the bar and force him to play honky-tonk or whatever was popular at the time. (This is like out of Brahms’ biography, you know.) A kind of aversion developed and I think that’s one reason Lee didn’t become a pop composer.

LH: I could play all the tunes and I could make a living doing it. I played in bands and in bars all through college just to make a little money so I could buy records of Maggie Teyte. But I think the reason I don’t like popular music too well (except for Joni Mitchell and a few others) is because I played it so badly. I just never wanted to learn how to do it. The bands I played with were so bad and no matter what I did they always sounded horrible and it was a very dismal experience for me. So when I got away from that I never wanted to play it again. I still can do it and maybe at a party if you give me a couple of vodkas I could do it with some pleasure.

But then I met this great musician, Gunnar Johansen, who was a world-class pianist. He taught at the University of Wisconsin and when I was 16 I started studying with him. He was my teacher for six years and he never charged me. He led me by the hand into the most sacrosanct level of musicmaking on earth. His teacher was Egon Petri whom I later went to study with and who took me to another even higher level in terms of musical understanding. All this time I was writing music – not knowing why – and kind of hiding it.

Eventually, I was ready to do my Town Hall recital debut as a pianist. Previous to this, Stanley Holingsworth, whom I had met while I was studying for my M.A. at Mills College (in 1952, I think) and who was then a student of Gian Carlo Menotti at the Curtis Institute, had shown Menotti my Violin Sonata and some songs. Menotti invited me to come to Curtis to study with him. At first I told Stanley I was not interested in Curtis or Menotti, and the next thing I knew I received an airplane ticket to Philadelphia. I didn’t know what hit me. It seems the decision was made on auto-pilot. I dropped everything, left Petri and Mills College and went to the Curtis Institute and started learning from the ground up how to write music. It happened overnight. I have often asked myself about it. It was, however, a good decision.

RWB: Did you have a natural affinity for writing for the human voice?

LH: Oh, yes. I think the reason is because at Mills my roommate and I would go down to the practice rooms below the music hall and read through Schubert songs until practically dawn. We developed a tradition: every New Year’s Eve we would sing in the New Year with Schubert. We also played through Debussy, Brahms, Schumann – all of the major song composers. But it was Schubert more than anybody else who taught me how to write songs.

All the students I was around liked singing my songs, but the first time I got the feeling I really knew how to write a song was when I heard Leontyne Price sing five of my songs in Constitution Hall in 1965. I just flipped. They were better than I had thought and it made me very serious about wanting to do more.

RWB: What poetry or texts were you attracted to?

LH: I was flailing around – I didn’t know anything about literature. It was pretty catch as catch can, but I did catch some good poets; I couldn’t write music to the words of a bad poet. I found the text for “The Doe” in a New Yorker magazine by a young poet named John Fandel. I wrote to him and he let me set it to music. When Mark came along he took over that part and he has picked almost all the texts I’ve set in the last twenty years.

RWB: Did you ever meet Joni Mitchell?

LH: I met her once and I was so utterly overwhelmed that I couldn’t talk. I was completely pinned to the wall. She looked at me and asked me to repeat my name and was very sweet and smiled. I felt there was a connection there and that's all I really needed. I went through hell and high water to get through that reception after one of her Carnegie Hall recitals. Later, a girls’ school in Troy, New York, Emma Willard’s School, asked me to write a piece for their girl’s choir and I dedicated it to Joni Mitchell.

RWB: Your operas (as well as those of a number of your contemporaries) went out of fashion in the late ‘60s and ‘70s when most of the academics and critics were touting serialism as the only viable music language.

LH: It was a very lonely time. I didn’t feel free to express myself in any style that felt right to me, even if it was close to Mahler or Menotti or Strauss or whatever.

RWB: Before we began the official interview you told me you “valued freedom above all” and that you were “a real radical.” Do you think it was your destiny to be an outsider?

LH: No, it’s quite surprising. I was very gregarious and rather brash when I was young – impolitic. I was never rude but I was a pretty jumping kid. It surprises me that I have become almost a hermit for the last thirty or forty years. But one changes. Music can take over your whole life if you love it and really find your own way of doing it. I found my way is really being alone most of the time.

RWB: The period between Summer and Smoke and The Tempest was a long time of not making operas. Would you like to have made more operas if you had been asked?

LH: I was sort of in a rebirthing process during those years.

MS: But there was other work.

LH: Oh I always was writing. I wrote a big oratorio on Galileo and some other things – songs, chamber music, choral pieces, always something.

MS: I have to comment. People are very quick to assume that Lee was quite miserable about the situation, but it’s not really true. He’s so agreeable that since people want to assume that of him he’ll allow it. He’s a perfectly happy person who rarely thinks about the musical world. There may have been periods where he did a bit, but I think it was more just a matter of facing an empty bank account for a while and being rather worried about how it was going to be dealt with than any kind of sort of musical/political experience. He really is a loner. He has so few musical friends and he often would rather not tell a person that he was a composer. It just required too much explanation. The thing is that he has a reputation – people assume that he’s a kind of disappointed person, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

LH: Oh, not at all. I consider myself to have been an unbelievably privileged person on this earth to be able to spend a whole lifetime composing. I cannot dream in my wildest imagination of a greater privilege. I don’t feel at all a victim. I feel almost a pride in my aloneness and my separateness, being a loner. I don’t know why … maybe because it leaves me so much free time. I just love being able to do what I want to and go where I want to and see whom I want to. I love to play in public and give classes and things like that once in a while – that’s fun. But if I had my druthers, I’d just stay home.

RWB: Now that we have your number, we’ll be calling again soon to talk about your two Shakespeare operas, The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet.

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