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Kirke Mechem's 'Tartuffe'
Presented by West Bay Opera in Palo Alto, California

KIRKE MECHEM is the composer of some 250 published works in almost every form. His three-act opera, Tartuffe, with nearly 200 performances since its premiere by the San Francisco Opera, is one of the most popular operas ever written by an American, and has been performed all over the world. Mr. Mechem currently lives and works in San Francisco.

Mechem was guest of honor at the 1990 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and was invited back for an all-Mechem symphonic concert by the USSR Radio-Television Orchestra in 1991. The concert was recorded by Melodiya and released on the Russian Disc label. Mechem was born and raised in Kansas and educated at Stanford and Harvard universities. He conducted and taught at Stanford and was for several years composer-in-residence at the University of San Francisco. He lived in Vienna for three years where he came to the attention of Josef Krips, who later championed Mechem's music as conductor of the San Francisco Symphony.

Mechem's talents have been acknowledged through numerous honors, including retrospectives, grants, commissions and special anniversary performances. They have come from, among many others, the United Nations, the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Choral Directors Association, the Music Educators National Conference and the National Opera Association (lifetime achievement award).

Vocal music is at the heart of Mechem's work. He has been called the "dean of American choral composers." What the Choral Journal called "characteristic Mechem style: singing lines, imaginative and varied use of rhythm and texture for expressive ends" describes his instrumental music as well. He is currently at work on a new comic opera, The Newport Rivals, an American adaptation of Sheridan's classic play The Rivals.

COMMENTS BY THE COMPOSER

"There are really two Tartuffes by Molière - the three-act comedy he originally wrote, and the five-act comic morality play he was forced to make of it in order to get it past the censors. Unfortunately, we have only the latter, but evidence suggests that the first version was a straight satire of human character.

"In Molière's plays, not only hypocrites but con men (Tartuffe), dupes (Orgon), and naïves (Mariane and Damis) are laughed at for mouthing words that the audience recognizes as shopworn clichés. To get the same effect in opera, these characters must occasionally sing in styles equally recognizable as musical clichés. When composing Orgon's first aria I naturally wanted to mock the stereotypes of operatic religiosity in the same way that Molière ridiculed the tone of Orgon's newly-found sanctimony.

"Being my own librettist, I was able to reconstruct the play along musical lines, making further changes as I composed the music. Molière had fun with language and so did I. He invented words, he punned, and he told literary purists that the end of comedy was to please-that his success was his justification. I have taken the same attitude as composer."

(The above information is excerpted from information provided by the composer, and reprinted with his permission.)

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 West Bay Opera