San Francisco Opera has commissioned a one-act, chamber opera from composer Lewis Spratlan and librettist Constance Congdon. Mr. Spratlan is a prolific composer who has written music in almost every genre. His opera, Life is a Dream, Act II (concert version), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for music. Ms. Congdon is a much-performed playwright whose works include Gilgamesh, Lips, The Servant of Two Masters, Tales Of The Lost Formicans, as well as three opera libretti. Last August, USOPERAWEB spoke with Mr. Spratlan and Ms. Congdon while they were in San Francisco to oversee a public reading of the libretto for their creation, Earthrise.

RWB: How did Earthrise begin?

Lewis Spratlan

Constance Congdon

LS: I received a message from Kip Cranna in the fall of 2001 asking me to meet with Pamela Rosenberg in New York to discuss the possibility of a commission for a chamber opera. Pamela and I met and we began discussions on the project. I had done no preliminary thinking about a subject before our meeting and our conversation didn't really get that far. We talked about her larger project - a series of one-act opera commissions. I think she was interested largely on the strength of my earlier opera, Life is a Dream, which had the good fortune of winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Shortly after that, in January or early February, I got in touch with Connie and made a germinal suggestion of a topic to her - the larger umbrella notion being, of course, aspects of the Faust story. The idea I suggested to Connie was a very a simple one, which was a conversation between an aging woman and her clone, the idea being all of the implications of cloning and the potential bargain with the devil, so to speak, the unknown consequences of being able to prolong one's life through a duplicate of oneself and what the dangers of that might be. But I didn't tell Connie any more than that. And she responded very quickly in terms of being very interested.

RWB: Did you have a previous association?

LS: We both teach at Amherst College and the only prior association we had was being coadvisors for a particular student on his senior project. I was very familiar with her work because she has done libretti for a colleague of ours at Smith College, Ron Perera, The Yellow Wallpaper, and an adaptation of Updike's S., the novel, and also a children's opera.

CC: And we shared a love of palindromes! I still have one on my bulletin board in my office that Lew wrote for me, although I can't remember it right now. It was one of the long, clever ones.

LS: I think it was, 'Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.'

CC: That's a palindrome!

I said yes immediately. I had wanted to do another libretto. I had done a project for American Conservatory Theater, adapting The Misanthrope, working in rhymed couplets and iambic pentameter. So there the need for verse was awakened. I liked the idea Lew posed. I read a lot of science so I actually knew something about genetic engineering. I ran the idea past a friend of mine who is also a playwright. And she suggested that the problem be that the clone was actually dying and the old woman was dying too. I knew that was it. I thought, 'That's opera.' The other thing that I had been reading most recently was all the news about Dolly the sheep who was aging prematurely and encountering a lot of old ewe problems. And that was really interesting. Lew and I started reading a lot about genetic engineering.

LS: We exchanged quite a number of e-mails and started sending articles back and forth to each other.

CC: And we began to learn that cloning was really unpredictable. One of the things Lew found in an article about cloning some rats was the one of the rats turned out to be quite fat and the ur-rat wasn't. And they were genetically the same and their environments were the same.

LS: So there began to be the question of unpredictable genetic errors.

CC: In the meantime, Lew gave me the CD of the second act of Life is a Dream and I listened to it in my car and I thought it was just amazing. I still remember driving down Highway 9 feeling so thrilled that I was going to work with this incredible composer. I kept it in the CD player and listened to it several times, so I had Lew's music in my head for days, out of the pleasure of it, not as any sort of assignment.

Lew and I had a couple of story conferences, kind of like Hollywood without the palm trees, the fast cars, the smog, the drugs or the emptiness. We started talking about what we wanted musically and story-wise.

LS: I remember we talked about operatic textures: ensembles, solos, how recitative might work its way in, thinking about traditional operatic structures, not necessarily in terms of specifics but just talking about it all.

CC: I asked Lew what the one thing he wanted to have in an opera and his response was, 'A quartet.' I thought immediately of the quartet in Così fan tutte. And somewhere we got very interested in the idea of using a countertenor, even before we had the story, and once that gripped us it became the thing we wanted to count on.

RWB: Why?

LS: I don't know, I think I was just trying to be a troublemaker at first: 'What if the clone were played by a countertenor?' So there was already a built-in twist. But it turned out to be one of those 'what-ifs?' that got under the skin and it bore some significant consequences.

CC: I remember saying that I wasn't fond of pants parts (please forgive me, all the wonderful women who have sung pants roles). I think we didn't want the artifice of having a female singer in a pants part. We felt like we wanted it to be 'real.' One of the things about opera is how well artifice works, but we wanted it to be more grounded. So the idea that this countertenor character would be something that could be real, not a fantastic thing...

LS: or a twist on something or an inversion of something or anything comic.

CC: The more I think about, I realize that the character really came out of the sound of the countertenor voice. But there was the problem of what it was, male or female or androgynous? Somehow he kind of evolved as a 'he.' And my favorite writer is Thornton Wilder and so Wilder the clone was born. Once that happened, the libretto took off for me. And the aging woman became Fauna and then I had to figure out what her job would be and what her life was like. The idea of her being a scientist came about - someone who had created her own clone - and that gave birth to the lab assistant who was an android.

LS: All this had happened very quickly, within the first week after I met with Pamela. And to show you how quickly it continued, Connie had 90% of the libretto done within a week after that. Of that 90%, I don't think we have changed more than 5%. She's a prolific playwright.

CC: I work very quickly.

Earthrise will explore the unknown consequences of human cloning and genetic manipulation by depicting a conversation between a retiring lab scientist, Fauna, and her 'replicants.' Each of the three clones displays one essential quality of Fauna, a quality that has become exaggerated and intensified in the cloning process. After interviewing these supposed 'carbon copies' of herself as potential successors to carry on her work, she rejects each of them in turn. In despair over the results of her research, Fauna is about to destroy all her data when the situation is redeemed by the appearance of another of her genetically manipulated creations: an androgynous figure named Wilder. A long-lost test-tube baby created as part of Fauna's experiments combining DNA from various sources, Wilder seeks to reunite with his 'mother' Fauna. His fatal genetic flaws are proof of the failure of Fauna's life's work, but the two of them take comfort in the warmth of their mutual affection. Together Fauna and Wilder watch the earth rise from her extraterrestrial laboratory window and prepare to return home. (Synopsis courtesy of Camille Crittendon.)

RWB: At what point did SFO approve the story?

CC: We sent the libretto to them in March and that was followed by a conference call with Pamela and Kip and both had some suggestions for changing the end. The original ending didn't have him dying; it was actually kind of sappy. But it seemed quite logical that Wilder would be sick and having more time to think about it we changed the ending, I think giving it more depth. That made all the difference. Structurally it was basically the same, there were very few other changes - some minor line changes, but everything was already there.

LS: We inserted some early references to his illness, but really didn't add an awful lot of dialogue.

CC: Up to just a few weeks ago, Lew and I both had concerns about it being overly melodramatic. I mean, I love Lucia di Lammermoor when I listen to it but when I watch it in the opera house, I think it's so crazy. We weren't doing that kind of story with that artifice of opera, as when Mimi's dying and sings the most beautiful music and hits the high 'Q.' The idea came that Wilder would get weaker and weaker and collapse into Fauna. I thought of the Pietà and of a mother with a dying son and once I had that vision, I knew that was the ending.

RWB: Did SFO impose requirements as regards logistics for performing the opera?

LS: In our first meeting, Pamela told me it should have a maximum of six characters, which we used. The orchestra was to be a maximum of twenty and in fact I used only thirteen players: four woodwinds, three brass, one percussionist and strings. It had to be thirty minutes. Personally I like working against limits that way.

CC: It's the sonnet phenomenon.

LS: There's a lot that happens in this piece but the language is very economical - the bang for buck in terms of the precision and consistency of the language is very high. There's also very little fat in the music - scarcely a bar of orchestral rumination or anything of that sort - no overture or interludes. It's a very condensed piece. But I found that all a plus.

CC: Often there's a schedule to do a scenario which is the normal way to do a libretto but a lot of libretti are adaptations of stories that are already written. As a playwright, I never write a scenario; I just begin. I knew that if I wanted this to be something that poured out of me, I needed to do it that way. So I just began to write. Kip got a little nervous when the scenario date came and went because I had skipped that step. But they were fine with the completed libretto and with our revisions.

RWB: The story is not unlike a few traditional opera stories: there's a bit of Trovatore and Die Frau ohne Schatten in it; two characters are named after famous operatic heroines, Marguerite in Faust and Adriana from Adriana Lecouvreur.

CC: Opera uses the great mythic themes.

LS: They're archetypical.

CC: I love opera and that's when you really know you're onto something when you get one of those themes and it feels right. There are two things: action happens in the minds of the audience and that basic action, regardless of how detailed the story may be, really does come down to those very basic themes and those are the stories that hit us the deepest. For a writer in terms of plot it's self-sustaining, which is great.

LS: Watching these archetypes continue their lives well into the future with all of these new moral issues that come up is certainly a big subtext, seeing these are age-old propositions regardless of what the immediate circumstantial surroundings are.

CC: I think that's why Pamela made the decision to use genetic engineering as the specific premise.

LS: She didn't suggest that.

CC: You did?

LS: Oh, yes.

CC: You're brilliant.

RWB: What are the Faustian aspects of your own lives today?

CC: We encounter them every day, don't you think? Living in the modern world, don't you think we're always making deals with the devil - small 'd' - bargaining with the devil so we can continue to have some kind of life.

RRWB: Every time we buy something in a plastic container, for instance?

CC: Yes, sir! Absolutely. I think a lot of Americans think about that. If you're not thinking that, there certainly is a twelve-year-old child who will tell you.

LS: You take a new medicine that is touted to do 'X' and you discover a year and a half later it does 'Y' and yet we still are always taking new drugs because we want to be healthier and live longer. We realize every day that there are unintended consequences, as longer term studies come out.

CC: You could name the entire 20th century, 'Unintended Consequences.' I'm sure the people in 1906 (the year my father was born) didn't think about this. They really believed in progress. I believe in progress as well, but the idea that there would lots of negative unintended consequences was not something he thought about.

LS: 'Better things for better living through chemistry.' Do you remember that old DuPont slogan?

CC: Oh yes.

LS: That was our mind-set. It was a brave new future and technology was going to save us. We've crossed the line into being able to control the environment and mastering all the things that used to kill us.

CC: But technology has got to save us now. That's the bargain we've made. Although I want to say that I'm not anti-technology at all. Believe me, there are lots of technologies that are wonderful: birth-control pills, most of modern medicine...

LS: ...antibiotics

CC: ...oh yes. Instant communication, ambulances.

LS: Bigger and bigger crop yields are good, although now we're seeing the downside of the engineering that went into that. Feed the world but what might the cost be? So, yes, there are Faustian aspects to our lives all the time.

CC: The thing I also want to say about genetic engineering is that we have a very extreme story here in this opera. I'm also not against genetic engineering, but it definitely has a dark side. We've been using genetic altering since we decided to cross one type of sheep with another - that's husbanding to alter DNA.

LS: Cross-breeding peaches - people didn't call it genetic engineering, but that's what it was.

CC: Our story is really extreme one. You could make a case that Wilder pays the price for the genetic engineering and his mother pays the price by losing him as well as dealing with the failure of what she has done. At the end, he says to her, 'what can I give you?' She responds, 'Wisdom.' That's what is needed, rather than people panicking.

RWB: Words vs. music. Most operas from the past live on because of the music not the stories or the words...

C: I have two words for you: Don Carlo. My former husband used to read the libretto to me when I needed a laugh.

RWB: What if your most brilliant turn of phrase goes unnoticed because it doesn't suit the music or because the singer can't be understood?

C: One of the things I'm comforted by is supertitles, not just because I write words but because I also find the experience of reading the supertitles very pleasurable. It's as if there's a quiet voice reading me the poetry while I'm listening to the music. This occurred to me when I saw The Death of Klinghoffer. I don't think that libretto is very good, but it is a beautiful poem. So I was reading that and watching this beautiful production and listening to the music and I realized that I didn't hate supertitles. Now I go to the Met where they're on the seatback and they sort of come to you subliminally when you're watching the stage. But even when they're above, it's as if there's another layer of the world above the stage.

LS: The poetry isn't often complete in supertitles, they're often condensations.

CC: Yes, because they want to keep up with the action. The thing that I feel when I write a libretto is that I start to call it my opera. But by that I don't mean that the libretto only. It's like making rice. You take a cup of rice but you have to add two cups of water to make rice. That's what happens with a libretto. You have the words but you add the music and then you have this wonderful opera. It seems like an incredible return for a few words to get a tsunami of beautiful music.

Visually I do think about what is happening and Lew has a tremendously visual or theatrical imagination. I'm always concerned with what the audience is actually seeing, knowing that they are not going to get all the words. I started out as a poet. Once you move from the page and the silent corridor between reader and page and you go into any kind of presentation, whether you're reading the poetry out loud or listening to the spoken word in the theater or the huge leap of adding music into opera, yes, you're losing that square on the page and that silent corridor, but you're gaining many worlds for it. You learn to write in a slightly different way so you know that the poetry in a play will come from the productions and the actors. In an opera you increase that by one hundred fold.

LS: I want to suggest a stance to this: I honor words perhaps to excess. I am extremely concerned with the clarity of the text and I'll make sure that the word that comes at a difficult point vocally is very well understood at the beginning through a previous statement so that the idea is planted. There's a very strong example of it in Marguerite's aria where she sings, 'what I crave is your knowledge, your laboratory, your life,' and the 'life' is set in the middle register. Then she has a long roulade, but that idea is already there, we're not dependent on decifering the word 'life' from within all that coloratura.

At another point when Wilder says, 'Mother, I'm ill,' I silence the orchestra so that the word 'ill' can come out. So I'm extremely respectful of the text in all my vocal writing - I have a bias in that direction. One could very well defend the opposite attitude that the words become subsumed into the music and it's up to the singer to convey the sense of it and it's not the responsibility of the composer to worry about it. But my attitude is the opposite. I find it almost necessary to go that way. I also put myself in the position of the listener; I like being able to understand what is being sung. Having said all that, there is, of course, the reality of the situation where you just can't do that all the time.

Also, I would say that Connie's writing is beautiful and poetic in the finest sense of the term but it's not at all grandiloquent or dressy as poetry. It's very economical and very conscious of what is entailed in the singing of it. For example, the care that she takes either consciously or subconsciously to use singable, open vowels (we haven't actually talked about this) on accented moments is so inviting to work with.

RWB: Tell me about the upcoming public reading of the libretto.

LS: The final version of the libretto was sent to the actors maybe three weeks ago.

CC: Although I rewrote the last two pages in terms of stage direction, which the actors don't yet have in their scripts. Of course, in a reading the stage directions are more important.

RWB: What happens after the reading?

LS: We'll see what adjustments we want to make as a result of the reaction to the reading. One of the things in terms of the androgyny or pansexuality (if you want to speak of it that way) that we built into Wilder is that I had written the vocal line to dip down into the chest voice, or into the baritone range. Kip had sent me a CD of Zack's singing so I had a very good sense of what his voice could do. We met today and he sang some of it, but now I think I may have overdone it a bit writing too much down there. He can get down there and he sounds wonderful; but I didn't realize that the cost for that is that it disturbs the middle register of his head voice. So he's going to go home and study carefully what I've written and he'll get back to me if he thinks there are places where it rests too long down there.

We'll have the reading tomorrow night and there are a couple of issues Connie and I are quite interested in, some logistical issues we're wondering how the audience will react to. And we're wondering about this very charged emotional ending that sort of objectifies it and gives a sort of Brechtian question to it and about whether that has compromised the emotional purity of the moment.

There's a workshop scheduled for next June, which will be with orchestra and off-book - memorized, probably not with costumes and sets. It is mainly for the foundations that are thinking about supporting the commission.

A few weeks after the reading, we wrote to Mr. Spratlan and Ms. Congdon to ask about their reactions to the reading and the audience's response. They responded via e-mail.

September 7, 2002

Dear Robert,

It was a large audience for a reading - a bit unnerving. But Heather ran the discussion well, so we didn't get bogged down with one person or issue dominating the entire post-reading Q&A. I loved having scientists there and I also thought the audience was a very interesting group of people - SFO did a good job advertising the event.

Of course, we talked mainly about the social issues instead of the libretto or what the music would be - Lew was surprised at this. It's common for post-play discussions and equally frustrating for the writers there, too. We live in this world where art is supposed to have a 'message' or is suspect of having a secret, manipulative 'agenda.' Questions about character motivation - why does Wilder think of Fauna as his mother, for example, are much more interesting and useful for the writer of any dramatic work. Questions like that allow writers to hear things an audience might be confused about. In that particular case, I found a way of understanding something I just instinctively knew was true. Just as Frankenstein's monster would think of the Dr. as his Creator, or 'father,' Wilder would think of Fauna as his mother - the only one he has left. I find this touching and think any female would understand this. This allows me to write about the libretto better, as well as develop more ways to present it to an actor/singer.

SFO treated us very well, by the way - and that made everything even more pleasurable.

Thanks!
Connie

September 10, 2002

Dear Robert,

I found the libretto reading and discussion very worthwhile, mainly for the advance attention it has brought to Earthrise. I was amused at how the 'community dialogue' aspect of the event inadvertently cramped the audience's attention, tilting it too much to the libretto's moral/ethical issues at the expense of a poetic hearing - as if what had been presented was an academic paper rather than a work of art. I bet that if it had been advertised simply as a 'reading,' without a dialogue facilitator and all the rest, the discussion would have had quite a different tone. Anyway, I found it all rather stimulating (if occasionally goofy). Hats off, too, to the fine and sympathetic Theatre Rhinoceros actors.

My biggest frustration, of course, was the lack of music. No libretto is meant to stand alone: all matters of emphasis, irony, double-entendre, repetition, pace, and sheer emotional zing are lacking without the musical setting. It was a bit like looking at the blueprints of St. Peter's or the Gehry Guggenheim in Bilbao (not that my little one-act can be mentioned in the same breath with these monuments, but you get the point). All the same, the wonderful characters and complex moral problems of Earthrise did get introduced, and it seemed evident to me that those who came went away with a lot to think about.

All the best,
Lew

Countertenor Zachary Gordin was chosen to play the role of Wilder. He and Spratlan met in August to discuss the role.

January 10, 2003

Dear Robert,

Zachary Gordin

My ties with Earthrise began at the first rehearsal of Giulio Cesare at San Francisco Opera, where Pamela Rosenberg approached me with the idea of a new commission in which she wanted me to sing a large role. She mentioned the need to get in touch with the composer, Lewis Spratlan, and discuss the music which was to be composed for my character, 'Wilder,' because my voice has a higher extension than most countertenors (I top out at an e-flat over high c, really more of a soprano in timbre too). John Parr (head of music at SF Opera) and I made a recording for Lew just to serve as a preliminary guide to my voice, which up to that point he hadn't heard.

Lew and I began exchanging e-mails talking about range, tessitura and the use of chest voice. This last one was tricky. I have never been a fan of singing in my chest voice, but Lew raised a good point - it can be quite powerful to build into a musical line a register break that exploits the contrasting qualities of tone. So with that, I was game! After a few more e-mails we met in San Francisco the day before the libretto reading for Earthrise. It was then that I also met Connie Congdon. I wanted to talk with them and hear the music, sing through a bit of it, get their vision and some depth and perspective on the piece. After our meeting at the opera house, we went to chat more at a nearby cafe. I was thrilled at the prospect of working with these people, who were not only great artists, but great people.

The next item on my agenda was the libretto reading. I wanted to see the work outside the musical context and see what insight I could get from the actors that read the libretto. My learning process is very broad, I like to take every possible opportunity to learn about whatever work I'm doing. The music isn't everything in opera, as fantastic as it may be.

Connie blew me away with her writing. I was amazed at how much material, action and emotion has been packed into such a short opera. I was also excited to hear the questions raised by the audience. The subject matter - cloning and genetic engineering - stirs up very temperate emotions in people. Some are all for it, some will have nothing of it. Issues of ethics and religion came up. There were also questions of the likelihood of this story becoming a reality in the future. All very interesting points!

Now we're ready to begin the next phase - workshop of the music. That's scheduled for late June 2003. I'm looking forward to seeing the piece come together, costumes, sets, lighting… what will it feel like from the audience when it is performed?

Zachary Gordin

March 7, 2003

Dear Robert,

The workshop performance of Earthrise, to take place at the end of June, has now been cast. The singers are all Adler Fellows of the San Francisco Opera, except for Zachary Gordin, countertenor. The cast is:

Fauna: Karen Slack, Soprano
Leo: Ricardo Herrera, Bass-baritone
Marguerite: Greta Feeney, Soprano
Adrianna: Katharine Rohrer, Mezzo-soprano
Janet: Elizabeth Caballero, Soprano
Wilder: Zachary Gordin, Countertenor

The conductor will be Judith Yan and the stage director will be Josemaria Condemi.

The full score is complete, as are the orchestral parts. Connie and I will be on hand for the workshop and are tickled by this opportunity to see and hear the work well before the actual performances, to allow for any fine tuning that might be necessary and-heck-just to enjoy it. I am extremely impressed by and grateful for the care and thoughtfulness of SFO's approach to this entire project.

I'm hoping we can get together in SF in June. It will be great to add another chapter to the evolution of Earthrise.

Warmly,
Lew

March 9, 2003

Dear Robert,
I am so excited about hearing Lew's music fully sung. The great thing about being a librettist is that you get to be a part of this incredible creation - an opera. And you never write a note of music or, for that matter, have to rehearse it. I can just sit and listen and be supportive and, here's the best part, enjoy what Lew has written. As a playwright, the workshop process and the rehearsal process is about rewriting and, yes, worrying if this or that part is going to work. I just finished a workshop for a play that American Conservatory Theater is producing next season. It's called The Mother and Olympia Dukakis is in the title role. That workshop was very exciting, but I emerged from it exhausted and exhilarated. This workshop will be as exhilarating and, for me, just that. I cannot wait.

Thanks for doing this website.

Connie