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Kenward Elmslie’s World

By Robert Wilder Blue

The first opera I ever saw, age around eight, was Gluck’s Orpheus and Euridice, Central City, Colorado, in an Op’ry House in the Rockies. Two big-bosomed women kept embracing romantically as best they could, which struck me as hilarious. One, it was explained to me, was a man, which struck me as even more hilarious, in spite of the fact that at home, bathroom door locked, wrapped in a white bedsheet, using tennis balls for breasts, I indulged in a private ritual. Blowing imaginary smoke through flared nostrils, I’d pretend I was Bette Davis.

As an adolescent, I developed crushes on Broadway musicals. I wanted to be a tap dancer when I grew up. In my last year of prep school, I sidled into the gym to attend my first rehearsal of something I’d written, the lyrics of the spring varsity show, the title song, “So Far, So Good.” Out of athlete mouths of football bruisers, my private scrawled words ballooned exponentially to fill up the whole universe. I retreated back to my tiny room to listen to well-worn show albums.When flying on planes, after the chewing gum had been passed out, I’d fall into a drowsy swoon. The hum of the airplane motor would turn into a fantasy overture of a fantasy musical play with sample melodies from the show linked together. I could will fantasy violins to crescendo in my head amid romantic ballads, a secret knack I was quite proud of.

Waiting for my big Broadway break I met a flesh-and-blood, serious composer, Jack Beeson, who needed a flesh-and-blood librettist to provide him with words to be put to music for an opera! The words “librettist” and “poet” didn’t yet seem to apply to me, but I decided to give it a whirl. It was a chance to write a show.

Step A: Pick a story. My mind went blank and stayed blank.

Douglas Moore, who was working with my mentor/compadre, John Latouche, on the opera The Ballad of Baby Doe, suggested I read up on Aimee Semple McPherson, the 1920s charismatic evangelist. One episode in her scabrous life inspired me. Aimee eloped with her radio engineer and to cover her tracks bamboozled her fanatic followers into believing her sudden disappearance was due to death by drowning. Her romance over, she popped up in the Mexican desert, purportedly having been kidnapped by atheists. Resurrection, Second Coming. I wrote out a test scene. Members of Lifeshine Arc grieve for drowned leader, Sister Rosara Easter, on an Atlantic City beach. Jack Beeson was delighted and I was off and running, writing for a medium I knew little about and had no special fondness for.

Out of a vague sense of culture obligation – study the enemy – I’d drag myself to the mostly 19th century rep at the Met, and nod out, lulled by lackluster-by-Broadway-standards productions – tacky scenery, absurd posturings. The voices grated on my ears, accustomed as they were to Mary Martin, Ethel Mermen, Gertrude Lawrence, Pearl Bailey, Alfred Drake. Before the advent of body mikes and sound systems, theater singers still knew the art of projecting to the farthest reaches of the second balcony. I could catch lyrics on the wing, savor the formal intricacies of rhyme, the recurrent structure of stanzas replicated with exactitude. To be cut off from my own language seemed insane. Every so often I’m asked by perfectly intelligent, educated individuals, ‘Are my librettos in English?’ And to compound the felony, on the rare occasions opera was sung in English at the Met, English turned into opera-eze, an invented tongue where “r’s” were trilled mercilessly. ‘Mister’ was invariably pronounced “mee-stare,” and all “a’s” sounded laughably hoity-toity, a parody of an Oxford accent for no good reason.

Pretending I was writing a Broadway musical that would be both a smash hit and great art, I inched my way through The Sweet Bye and Bye and, Jack Beeson nipping at my heels, finished it despite dry spells, false starts, word blocks, out-of-kilter fragments that veered off perversely. I always assumed our opera would get performed and it was, by the Juilliard Opera Theater, a semi-professional production, which subsequently was where I saw first Miss Julie, an opera I wrote with Ned Rorem, and most recently, The Seagull, the opera based on the Chekhov play with music by Thomas Pasatieri. Panned in the New York Herald Tribune, The Sweet Bye and Bye was hailed as ‘an achievement’ by the New York Times music critic, and was promptly forgotten, resurrected decades later in Kansas City. The performance came to spasmodic life. When I laughed at my own jokes, irate music lovers around me shushed me. I resolved not to write any more opera librettos.

How have I ended up writing six opera librettos? One reason, during rehearsals and sometimes during performances, intense pleasure flashes shoot through my body, somewhat similar to making love, though I’ve never attained these particular pleasure flashes coupling. To attain these pleasure flashes I must write words, words meant to be sung, words that please both my mind and ear. Spoken words don’t provide me with these pleasure flashes, nor does poetry. These words have to be sung, put to music by a composer whose treatment of language pleases both my mind and ear. First words, then music to enhance my words, then a highly skilled performer to sing them with intuitive clarity and grace in such a way that the necessary skills seem part of the performer-as-character’s being, in turn part of a story that unfolds with intelligence and grace, tapping into an epic, mythic sweep, into a deep core of unchanging and unchangeable reality, thanks to the awareness and prescience of the director and conductor, enhanced by sets and costumes and lighting, reinforced by the orchestral accompaniment that fuses with the words, sometimes taking over, sometimes holding back, enabling the space words and music share to fluctuate constantly so that words and music become words-and-music, inextricably linked to each other, fused to all these other collaborative elements to form a new entity: Opera. That is a tall, tall order, to combine so many different kinds of difficult collaboration into a dynamic, high-energy live performance of considerable duration and unwavering focus. I sit in rehearsal rooms and empty theaters during final rehearsals, or theaters with an audience, and listen and listen to the end result of my having put some words down on paper several, sometimes many years before. Sometimes, I experience the mysterious pleasure flashes. The moments pass. The performance ends. The work goes back onto the page or the disc. And I find myself making up more words to be sung. Hence, the cycle.

Wordsmith Kenward Elmslie has taken bows as a poet, lyricist, librettist and performance artist over a nearly forty-year professional life. New Yorkers recently got a chance to see two of his most well known works, The Grass Harp, for which he wrote the book and the lyrics (music by Claibe Richardson), and The Seagull, his fourth opera libretto and his first collaboration with composer Thomas Pasatieri. In December USOPERAWEB spent two mornings with Mr. Elmslie, talking about his life and work and being an audience of one for his readings of remembrances of a life in the theater.

Where did it all begin for Kenward Elmslie? “I was born in New York City in 1929, and grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado. My mother had tuberculosis and this was a TB resort. She died when I was about nine years old and my father moved us to Washington, D.C. He was British and had kept his British passport and identity so when war broke out in 1939, he got work decoding for the British Embassy.

“My father loved Gilbert and Sullivan and my mother loved Wagner and I used to listen to both on those big, thick records we had in those days. There was a piano in the house but I really never had any musical training. My father loved musicals and as dads take their sons to baseball games, my father took me to musicals. It was an interest we shared and that became my adolescent passion, writing the words for musicals. I listened constantly to show albums and was very aware of lyrics. As a teenager I would attend Broadway shows, sometimes seeing them again and again – like On The Town with music by Leonard Bernstein. Everything about musicals fascinated me – the words, how the actors sang them, the variations in audience response. I studied these musicals, too, outside the theater - the book and the lyrics. That’s what I wanted to do – to write lyrics for musicals.

“Of course as a kid, I used to listen to the Hit Parade on the radio every Saturday night (this was before television). That was the climax of the week – which ten songs had swept the nation. That was also an influence, but mainly it was theater, especially the works of John Latouche, which I ferreted out in my prep school days, and Lorenz Hart and Ira Gershwin, and Oscar Hammerstein II, somewhat. I loved the musicals of Kurt Weill; I knew about the Three Penny Opera long before it became visible off-Broadway in Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation. I began writing lyrics while still in prep school. My senior year there was a musical – all guys of course, with guys turned into girls, like the Hasty Pudding Show at Harvard – and I wrote the lyrics for it which hadn’t been done before. It seemed a natural thing to do. And that was my first experience hearing people singing my words. It was very frightening at first hearing words that had been on the page coming out of human mouths.

“I went to Harvard to major in English. I didn’t know what to do in life really, except that I wanted to be a writer. It seemed natural to major in English. In my senior year, I was admitted to a restricted class taught by the poet Archibald MacLeish and that seemed like a good omen that maybe I had some talent. In those days, Harvard was still quite puritan about the arts. But I was glad I was near Boston because in those days Broadway musicals all tried out in Boston and Philadelphia. Often I saw them again in New York to see what had been done with them to shake them up or in some cases destroy them.

“After I graduated from Harvard, I moved back to New York and lived with John Latouche, my significant other. I met some poets who are all now very famous and prestigious and are known as the New York School and, as it happens, I’m one of them. My favorite poet I suppose was Frank O’Hara and then John Ashbery and Jimmy Schuyler who spent time visiting me in Vermont. Through them, I lost my initial distrust of poetry, which didn’t seem to me a mainstream form. Very few people read it. Musicals at that point surged into real life and poetry, I felt, didn’t. But I overcame this antipathy to poetry because it gave me the freedom to write in a way that musical theater didn’t and that was what made me switch to being a poet who also could write works for the musical theater.”

When were you first paid for your words? "Oh gosh. The only thing I ever made much money at was a popular song that Nat King Cole sang and some other singers too. I wrote it for a show; its title is "Love-wise." At that time, it was sort of a cliché addition to an adjective, the word ‘wise’ – love-wise, beauty-wise. I loved this lyric and took it to my collaborator on the show. This was in the Brill Building where songwriters used to hang out – and still do. I had made up the melody and this was quite normal for me. As I would write lyrics, melody would come to me. I hummed my melody to him and he played what I had hummed to him on his grand piano and fixed up the ending and helped me with the lyrics and submitted it to Nat King Cole who was a friend. It was briefly a song hit.”

The Opera Stop

Elmslie stepped into the world of opera with The Sweet Bye and Bye, written with composer Jack Beeson. A second collaboration followed, the classic American opera Lizzie Borden.

Memory of Lizzie Borden

I remember my father drove me to work to the Beeson house on Shelter Island. A job. A bonafide writing job. A Ford Foundation commission to write the libretto of Lizzie Borden. I remember Jack Beeson stashed me away in the Beeson barn. I had the distinct impression I would not be allowed out back into civilian life until I had completed my assignment. I remember my assignment was to make up the words for a sextet for Lizzie and Margaret, the Borden girls; their tyrant father; their stepmother, Abbie; plus two intruders, a sea captain who wants to marry Margaret and a minister in dire need of funding.

Interjection 1: Way back then, I wasn’t all that fond of opera. My goal in life was to write words for musicals. I dreamed of Broadway, as kids still did back then, and seeing my name up in lights, Book and Lyrics by Kenward Elmslie, which eventually actually happened, though not the name up in lights part.

Meanwhile back at the barn, I pretended I was writing lyrics for a slightly peculiar musical about a legendary axe murderess. I remember Jack’s mellow riffs about Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hoffmanstall. He Richard, me Hugo.

Interjection 2: How I became Jack’s ‘Wherever you go, I go, Hugo.’

Douglas Moore was working on The Ballad of Baby Doe with John Latouche, my significant other, whose lyrics I idolized. Douglas Moore happened to mention Jack Beeson, up at Columbia, needed a librettist pronto. John Latouche snapped his fingers and, presto-chango, next thing I knew, I was writing a test scene based on the life and times of Aimee Semple McPherson, the charismatic 1920s evangelist. Jack set my test scene to music no problem. And that’s how I began writing opera librettos. Six so far. Two with Jack.

I remember how Brenda Lewis, the first Lizzie, savaged my innards. Immersed in her as Lizzie, I’d lose all awareness of myself as librettist, hurtled down, down, to volatile, visceral depths. Brenda revealed Lizzie with such raw, hurricane force, I felt her Lizzie tapped into the same primeval voice I heard as writer when Lizzie words came to me, from where I didn’t want to know. All I had to do was write them down. Then my primeval Lizzie voice would leave me in peace, mission accomplished, and I’d find myself back on my own, stranded in daylight.

I remember, first time around, the world premiere, Jack’s music engendered some resistance in the audience and critics. The libretto got off scot-free – compensatory denial I suspect for critics who found the music just too difficult.

I remember the first Lizzie sitzprobe, hearing my words immeasurably enhanced by this dense, incredibly calibrated world of sound, orchestral and vocal. Writing librettos seemed a craft of such finite dimensions and yet my words conjoined seamlessly to Jack’s music, a noble calling.

I remember Lizzie Borden’s third, Bicentennial-year production, the first at Lincoln Center. The audience gave the music a spirited, nonadversarial fair shake. What a difference a decade makes! This time around, both music and libretto were home free.

I remember my stepmother after seeing Lizzie on TV, zeros in on Lizzie’s stepmother. ‘What an awful person!’ This takes me aback. I had such a good time writing Abbie. I’m very fond of her. Eyes narrowing, my stepmother asks me where on earth I got the inspiration for Lizzie’s absolutely dreadful stepmother.

I remember Brenda Lewis and Jack and I are perched above eaters at a dinner for patron worthies, pre-Glimmerglass Lizzie premiere. Speech time. Brenda tells how satisfying it is to work on a role written by a poet, whose words are rich with resonances, resonances that provide a constant challenge and reward to the performer. I’m stunned. She’s not only outed me as a poet, she’s found the right word I never would have though of: resonances. Resonances, to explain why I’ve come to love writing librettos. How else can my words become an integral part of a confluence of resonances – vocal, orchestral, visual and verbal, empowered by the honed expertise of live performers who, miracle of miracles, know how to unleash this complex cornucopia of resonances unique to opera.

Beeson first conceived Lizzie Borden in 1954 and with writer Richard Plant worked intermittently for seven years. During this time, Beeson and Elmslie wrote The Sweet Bye and Bye, which was premiered on November 21, 1957 at The Juilliard School in New York. Plant was eventually forced to abandon the Lizzie project due to illness and Beeson turned to Elmslie to finally get her finished and on stage. “I was sort of off and running as a librettist. Jack had done the research and he had also made a very workable scenario. The first act is really Richard’s and Jack’s, really Jack wrote most of it. I fixed up some of the words in Act One and injected some humor into the first scene in Act Two because I thought the first act was really very heavy. But, I followed his scenario with only a couple of departures. There was the problem of what to do about the murder – I think Jack was flummoxed there. I told him that he had to take over there, that the orchestra had to do the murders. They just couldn’t happen on stage. It should be like a Greek tragedy in that way. He looked a bit stunned and then bit the bullet and came up with incredible murder music.” Lizzie Borden premiered at the New York City Opera on March 25, 1965, with Brenda Lewis in the title role.

Elmslie’s third opera date was with Ned Rorem. Miss Julie, based on August Strindberg’s play, appeared at the New York City Opera the same year as did Lizzie Borden, however it was a less happy experience for its creators. “It was the only opera out of six that had a really ghastly production – the premiere at the New York City Opera. It was directed by Nikos Psacharopoulos who did splendidly by Lizzie Borden, though that was by accident. Jack really wanted the director Michael Cacoyannis who had made a reputation off-Broadway at the time. But he mixed the names up so we had Nikos instead. It think the problem with Miss Julie was partly due to the fact that Ned Rorem didn’t really have the theater bug, which Jack Beeson really had and, Lord knows, I do. Ned wrote these long songs and choral passages and I think they diffused the dramatic energy of the piece, which was an inherent weakness in the work at that point. I felt the audience’s restlessness as I was sitting there watching. But it also was very unfortunately directed. Donald Gramm was in it; the leading lady (who shall remain nameless) was just not right for the part. [She was Marguerite Willauer. ed.] She just didn’t have what it took for the part. She lost her voice and never regained it. Miss Julie really has to be a stunner both as a vocalist and actress. The rehearsal process was very short. There was extreme pressure, almost abusive pressure is the way I would put it, on the performers to make a go of it. And it got just awful reviews.

“Miss Julie might have disappeared if not for the subsequent production with the revised score. A small company in New York wanted to do it and the conductor went through it with Ned and cut a lot out. This was the version that was then done at Manhattan School of Music. To my amazement it was transformed into a riveting theater work. That production was very well directed and it was a marvelous performance. It cohered in a way I couldn’t believe. It was quite effective as an opera after all.”

Dream Fulfilled

A childhood fantasy came true in 1971 when Kenward Elmslie’s name appeared on the marquee of the Martin Beck Theater, marking the Broadway premiere of The Grass Harp (adapted from the Truman Capote novella). The cast included Barbara Cook, Carol Brice, Ruth Ford, Karen Morrow, Russ Thacker and Max Showalter; the show opened on November 2, played seven performances and closed on November 6. “I was trying to get the musicals I had written on the boards and that was horrendously difficult. Finally, one made it to Broadway after years of vicissitudes: The Grass Harp. It was produced by Richard Barr, who put Edward Albee on the map, and it was a very quick Broadway failure – although it is still very alive and well and has a distinguished reputation among theater people who care about musical theater – I can say that honestly.”

Some I Remembers of The Grass Harp

I Remember first meeting Truman Capote in Boston. A play of his based on his novella, The Grass Harp, was trying out pre-Broadway. I was with my significant other/mentor John Latouche, whose lyrics I idolized. Truman’s high-pitched, nasal voice and weirdo effeminacy terrified me. He complained vociferously about Cecil Beaton’s tree, which upstaged the performers and sabotaged his play.

I Remember working with Claibe Richardson, composer, on a musical adapted from The Madwoman of Chaillot; Richard Barr, producer; star, Lotte Lenya. Only it turned out we didn’t have the ‘rights.’ Several years work down the drain.

I Remember suggesting The Grass Harp, Truman’s novella (not his play) as a project to get us going again. I remember tackling some songs to see if it was right for us. It was. So we played them for Truman. He loved what we had done, counseled us to make it our own and gave us the rights, no hitch.

I Remember its first production, Trinity Square, Providence. My survival mantra I owe to the poet Frank O’Hara: Go on nerve and don’t look back. Ah. Opening night’s a marathon disaster, three-and-a-half hours long. The critics panned the daylights out of our fledgling. Elaine Stritch, a crowd-pleaser as Babylove, was consistently crocked and nightly gave Claibe near-heart failure – erratic tempi and pitch.

I Remember Kermit Bloomgarten, the prestigious Broadway producer, optioned our musical for Broadway. But to raise the huge sum of $250,000 (in 1971 – peanuts compared to now) he needed a star. I remember Claibe on piano. We shared the vocals, got to audition for Gwen Verdon and Julie Harris. An incredible pleasure after backers’ auditions -- solemn guys in business suits, a no response situation. If they reacted positively the property might prove pricey. I remember going to Brazil with Claibe to nab a star. We tracked down Mary Martin at her isolated finca. She turned us down charmingly. Show-biz shrewd, she knew she needed to play both Dollyheart and Babylove to fulfill her fans’ expectations.

I Remember Ann Arbor where The Grass Harp tried out, pre-Broadway, in a theater so brand-new, flies secreted in cinder blocks, kamakazi-style, dive-bombed open singers’ mouths, which made singing extremely hazardous. The Detroit critics panned the living daylights out of our perennial fledgling. Richard Barr gallantly refused to close the show out of town.

I Remember the first matinee at the Martin Beck Theater, post-New York Times mixed notice. Small audience. Inhibited, cowed response. A dire contrast to the week of previews when audience response kept building. I remember Truman’s fixed advice: ‘Mike it.’ The Grass Harp was surely the last unamplified musical to hit Broadway. I remember the final performance, the seventh. The audience went wild. Laughs, showstopper after showstopper, endless bravos and curtain calls.

I Remember a recording studio in Cologne, Germany. Claibe and I were early. Our mission: bring back orchestral tracks for an original cast album. Only the harpist was there, hailed from Alabama. She had once played for Barbara Cook in a Broadway pit. I remember hours went by and the assembled orchestra – willowy violinists from the Cologne Philharmonic, protean Afro-American jazz guys – this group wasn’t together – when Karen Morrow, who’d played Babylove in the Broadway show and wanted to spend Thanksgiving in Europe with Claibe and me, stepped to the mike and did Babylove proud. Galvanized, the orchestra kicked in and we finished three days of sessions in the nick of...

I Remember bringing back our Grass Harp tapes. U.S. Customs: ‘Anything of value to declare?’ ‘Heck no. Just some dumb old reel-to-reels.’

I Remember we assembled the cast in a dinky New York City studio. The engineers weren’t used to ‘real’ voices – Carol Brice, Barbara Cook. They took away their booster gizmos. I remember when the album came out, listeners, including some critics, couldn’t figure out why on earth the show had flopped on Broadway.

I Remember attending a revival at a college in Manhattan. To my dismay sitting next to me was John Simon, acerb New York drama critic. The enemy! He nudged me mid-song, ‘If There’s Love Enough.’ ‘Great song,’ he whispered.

I Remember the director of a book-in-hand production at the York Theater, New York City, asking me if I had any old, unrevised scripts tucked away. He found the published acting version lacking. I dug through a morass of scripts and to my horror I realized that I had cut, cut, cut the dialogue mercilessly. The book is always the culprit when musicals fail. Everybody liked our songs. Go with the songs. I put back whole pages of dialogue, wantonly savaged. A show reborn. A fresh start.

The Seagull

No American opera composer was leading a more charmed life in the 1970s than Thomas Pasatieri. By 1972, six of his operas had seen the spotlight and been embraced by critics and audiences alike. When Houston Grand Opera invited Mr. Pasatieri to write an opera for them, he chose Anton Chekhov’s play, The Seagull, as his source and asked Mr. Elmslie to supply the words. “The story is that Tom approached me to write the libretto because he admired Lizzie Borden. To be honest, when he came to see me I wasn’t very impressed. He seemed very strange. I asked to hear his work and he got to the piano but he couldn’t sing. It was sort of a block; he was young and I think he was sort of intimidated. Lord knows that since then he has become a consummate performer. When we wrote The Seagull I would go to see him as each act was in progress and he would sit and play it at the piano and taking all the parts brilliantly. I loved these sessions.

“I initially wanted to say no, but the sorry truth is he plied me with margaritas and he stared at me with these wonderful eyes that proclaimed, ‘I need you, I need you,’ and before I knew it I said to him, ‘Okay, Tom. You win. I’ll write your libretto, although I don’t know how.’ I woke up the next morning sober and I had to keep my word. I read the play and found it so complicated – all these mismatched lovers – a very complex group of complex people – very difficult for opera. I was in deep trouble. So I went to a friend, an acting coach, Stella Adler, who was famous in the theater world for working with such as Marlon Brando. In five minutes she put my fears to rest. She got a text of the play and explained the opening moment with Masha and described how a storm was about to break, how Masha had dirty fingernails, and so on. She made it palpably real. She also told me to get the Stanislavsky notes for the Moscow Art Theater production which I promptly did. This was the main liberating factor, because I realized that Chekhov generally was done very sort of gloom and doom and I found that in the Stanislavsky production it was filled with humor and comedy and that its strength was the ability to lunge from incredible sadness to incredible comedy. And so I began to tackle it, my fears having been allayed. I had a marvelous time writing it; I didn’t get blocked. To Tom Pasatieri’s credit, he was a marvelous editor. I had written too much and he took only what he needed and so I owe the conciseness of the libretto partly to him.

“When it was in rehearsal in Houston, Frank Corsaro, the director, had one demand – that we add a duet for Constantine and Nina in the final act and this we did. His instinct was absolutely right; it needed to flower there into a duet, their tormented love given full expression. That’s one of the strongest parts of the opera, which we owe to the director.”

Memory flash. I’m in Houston. Dress rehearsal of The Seagull, music by Thomas Pasatieri, for which I’ve provided a libretto based on Chekhov’s play. Something called a bobbinet is in place – a scrim-like mosquito netting hanging down from the proscenium. Projections of leaves are swirling. The performers are shadows, ass-deep in leaves, moving through murk. I doze off, wondering how The Seagull can be so totally boring. I hear someone screaming, ‘Take down that fucking bobbinet or I’m leaving Houston.’ It’s Tom Pasatieri. I join the fracas. The producer appeals to me, ‘don’t I like the bobbinet?’ I tell him I think it should go. It seals off the performers. ‘Never,’ he says, eyes flashing, ‘$40,000 down the drain? Never.’ The set designer, no adornment for Gay Pride Week, screams, ‘It can’t be changed.’ The director’s miserable. The leaf projections were his idea. He loves cinematic visual concepts on stage. Tom and I huddle. ‘Take it up for twenty minutes,’ I suggest evenly, the good cop. They buy it. Up goes the bobbinet, never to return. Our opera is saved.

The rest of the rehearsal goes well until the final gunshot off-stage that marks Constantine’s suicide. As usual, the pathetic cap pistol sound can be heard from the wings. John Reardon, who plays the part of Trigorin, strides to the edge of the stage, ‘Surely in all the state of Texas a gun can be found that works.’ The orchestra applauds him. Then he adds, ‘After all, the gun in Dallas worked!’ Shocked intakes. Boos. I succumb to momentary tar-and-feather, New York School of Poetry paranoia. Frank Corsaro, the director, quips, ‘He should have quit while he was ahead.’

World premiere. Slow first act. The intricacies of so many characters to keep track of and the symbolic, heavy-duty imported lingo of Constantine’s play, sung inside the opera itself, make the audience work harder than they’d like. Second act takes off. Masha’s drunk aria breaks through. Football crowd uproar. Visceral blast-off. Solid third act. Curtain calls. First the cast, then the conductor, then the director and set designer. Then Frederica von Stade, “Nina,” fetches me from the wings and I take a librettist bow, another be-tuxed guy. No one in the audience knows who I am, what I’ve done to deserve this accolade. It’s fun, acting like royalty. Then Evelyn Lear, “Madame Arkadina,” fetches Pasatieri. All hell breaks loose. The Seagull is a triumph in Texas.

Winning Team

Elmslie and Pasatieri wrote two more operas, Washington Square (1976) and Three Sisters (1979). Regarding the former, “I went to Henry James’ novel and totally ignored the play, The Heiress. I really made up parts as it was necessary. I like to do that; I like to depart from the work and take off on my own. Sometimes that does not work though; it did not work with Miss Julie. I tried to take off on my own on that but Strindberg was inflexible. I found I had to hew very closely to the structure of the Strindberg play. I like having a point of departure as I did in The Seagull. There are places where I just take off – the Jocasta aria for Madame Arkadina is a total made-up section and there are others. I can’t even remember the parts that I made up. Fortunately, I think they hew seamlessly to the parts that are more directly inspired by Chekhov.

“In Washington Square I got two copies of the novel and I used scissors and cut out all the dialogue and make a kind of collage. I put the pieces in envelopes belonging to each character. I invented a scene structure and then used as much of the dialogue as I could. But there are parts where I had to make up the structure of the work. I tried to use the standard devices of opera – arias, duets and so on. There’s a quartet that you won’t find in Henry James.

“It had a problematic premiere in Detroit, which was partly my fault. There were scenes that just didn’t flow right. Partly it was the fault of the orchestration also. Tom had originally conceived it as a chamber opera, hoping that thereby it would be produced. But his initial conception suddenly shifted and it was suddenly scored for a regular opera orchestra and I think that made the problems in the music.

“It’s the one opera I’m very proud of. From working with Chekhov and from my experience revising The Grass Harp, I’d learned my craft on the run, as it were, and I’d learned how to fix the deficiencies in the script. And the revised version of Washington Square again given by the same company that tackled the revised version of Miss Julie worked just beautifully. All the difficulties were solved, amazingly.

“Three Sisters was a great joy, if I do say so, and also easy for me because I knew the Chekhov turf and was so inspired by working with Chekhov. It’s much simpler in structure than The Seagull and I didn’t have any trouble with it. It just sprang into me. I think Tom had had some bad luck with an opera that was given in Baltimore that was not well received. Careers flower and diminish. When Three Sisters was given later in Columbus, Ohio, it worked just fine. But there was no interest in it after, so it has floundered. It’s a good opera and a new production is warranted.”

Elmslie returned to The Grass Harp recently for a book-in-hand production in New York. It was an opportunity to revisit a medium that has not been entirely fulfilling for him. “I’ve had a tough time with the musicals I’ve written. It’s very hard for a book and lyrics man to keep his vision intact. In my experience, it’s much harder than writing a libretto. Opera directors more or less stick with what they are given; but musicals seem to be fair game. It’s assailed by the director, the choreographer and the producer. Everyone thinks they know how to rework a musical so it will run forever. I had a very difficult time with The Grass Harp and an even worse time with the last musical of mine, Postcards on Parade, which an off-Broadway theater actually withdrew because it was such a mess. Part of it is that I try to do my rewrites at the behest of the director. With The Grass Harp, I did what Ellis Rabb wanted and that was a big mistake. When I reopened it later, I found I had done a great disservice to the work by cutting my book so relentlessly and ruthlessly. Now The Grass Harp is alive and well. I can’t ever shake the theater bug, which can be very dangerous!”

Seagull Flashback:

I’ve just taken bows closing night at the Kennedy Center as I’ve written the words for an opera, The Seagull, inspired by the play by Anton Chekhov. The opera, composed by Thomas Pasatieri, has migrated to D.C. from its world preem several years before in Houston, followed soon after by a second outing in Seattle, same cast, same set, same production. Tom and I both like to take bows, even at regular performances, which is pretty shameless. Tom’s a great coach – taught me how to bow. Start out modest, ‘Who me?’ surprised, then a take-your-time head and midriff lowering, then back up triumphantly. Smile broadens to a big beam of gratified, deserving acceptance of accolade. Optional: press fingertips to lips and blow increasingly fervent hand kisses to the audience, pretending you’re Liberace. Then step back into the line-up without trampling the diva. The pecking order of stage bows for a new opera is a rigid ritual. First the ensemble, then the stars, then the reigning diva fetches the conductor from the wings. Solo bow. Then, led by the diva, a clump of noncharismatic klutzes in evening garb stumble on, blinking a bit shamefacedly: director, choreographer, set designer, costume designer, wig designer and, here’s where I come in, the librettist. Group bow. Much surreptitious eyeing back and forth to get the timing and move of the line-up forward to the lip of the stage without tumbling into the orchestra pit. Then, ta-da, the diva fetches the composer. All hell breaks loose if the new opera is a success – rare – and even if it isn’t, the fate of nine out of ten contemporary operas, which is what The Seagull is referred to as. Are movies referred to as contemporary? Seen any good contemporary movies lately? A sure-fire room emptier. Which tips off the strange predilection of opera audiences and opera impresarios seeking sold-out houses for old, sometimes very old tried-and-true operas, dating back at the very least to the 19th century. Some, and this is really weird, in the language it was originally written in. Only in America. In Europe Germans get German; Italians Italian.

Kenward Elmslie and Thomas Pasatieri take bows after Manhattan School of Music production of their opera The Seagull. Photo by Nan Melville (2002).

Back to curtain calls. Early in the game, being a charter member of a nervy band of one called Librettist, Lib I began to insist in my own solo bow with my own diva leader-outer, then the composer, then the composer-librettist, then back to everybody, cast included.

That closing night at the Kennedy Center I got my comeuppance. Still basking in my mini-moment of stage-time glory, as soon as the final curtain fell, amid the burble of backstage congratulations, I noticed the stagehands, like men possessed, savaging the scenery, ripping it to shreds. Thinking they’d gone bonkers, I started to protest. It was explained to me the sets had to be taken to a dump to be burned come morning. Houston Grand Opera didn’t want them back and Timbucktoo, a Broadway-bound musical starring Eartha Kitt, was moving in the next day. Sets burned. Ai-yi! No more seagulls. Oh what a life! Bravissimos one minute; a has-been the next. Actually, The Seagull spread its dusty wings in Atlanta, new sets, the following year – playing in a huge movie palace where Gone With The Wind first unreeled. Then came Fort Worth and now The Big Apple. The Manhattan School of Music production directed by Mark Harris is to be perpetuated on a CD. Next flight, coming up in 2004, San Francisco. The Seagull’s a survivor. Memo: practice that bow! Don’t trample the diva!

For the ultimate Kenward Elmslie experience, don’t fail to visit
    http://www.kenwardelmslie.com/

More on Jack Beeson
    http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Spring2002/Beeson.html

Premiering soon
    http://www.thomaspasatieri.com

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