Michael John LaChiusa - USOperaWeb Interview

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We don't imagine that musical theater composer Michael John LaChiusa woke up one morning in the later years of the 1990s and made a decision to be more controversial.

Michael John LaChiusa and conductor Bradley Vieth

By Robert Wilder Blue

Nonetheless, he set Broadway astir a couple of seasons ago with Maria Christine and The Wild Party, musicals whose subject matters (the Medea story and sexual escapades in the 1920s, respectively) were found to be unsuitable for that Disney-esque landscape, and whose music didn't set audiences to whistling upon leaving the theater. Worse yet, those works didn't conform to many critics' and theatergoers' preset ideas of categorization: were they musicals or were they operas? Finally, how were they to be judged? Were they the work of a genius or a hack? Critics and audiences have not been so divided in their impressions and opinions since Stephen Sondheim's Company hit the stage in 1970.

So what was Lyric Opera of Chicago thinking when they offered Mr. LaChiusa a residency? USOperaWeb asked exactly that of Richard Pearlman, Director of the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists and overseer of the Composer-in-Residence Program. He told us he had a big problem with how new operas were generally commissioned in this country. "So many times, commissions have been given to composers of symphonic and chamber music who have no previous experience in the theater. I look for people who are good composers but who have proven credentials in the theater as well. We don't extend a commission per se. We offer an opportunity to develop a new musical work for the stage. The requirements are that they create works for singers with classically trained voices and that the works be presented acoustically, i.e., without amplification. New operas are best done in stages, through the workshop process. We don't guarantee performances or a production after the workshop. Sometimes they create works that would be performed better elsewhere.

"In addition to Michael John, we are also working with Ricky Ian Gordon and Adam Guettel." But aren't they also Broadway composers? "The environment on Broadway is not hospitable now for composers such as these. It's all about money and recycling the same old format. What we're trying to do is support these young composers in the creative process." In the case of Lovers and Friends, Lyric Opera Center liked what it saw in the workshop and scheduled a full production.

Michael John LaChiusa grew up in a working class family in Chautauqua, in western New York, "a world [far] removed from that of musical theater. My father was a football coach and my mother was a housewife. My family wasn't musical but there was always music in the house; we were always singing and making music. I began writing musicals in the fourth grade.

"I graduated early from high school and I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I loved the theater and I loved writing - I wanted to be a newspaper reporter - and I love composing. I had been playing for singers at Fredonia State [SUNY] and had seen that side of music education, and decided that going to music school wouldn't fulfill that part of me that loved theatre.

"When I was 18, I came to New York and worked professionally as an accompanist and music director. It wasn't until about the mid-80s when I realized that if I wanted to be a writer of musicals I would have to give up everything else and dive into it. And that's what I did.

'Lovers and Friends' Composer Michael John LaChiusa.

"My training has been on the streets, so to speak. The term self-taught is misleading because I don't think anyone is really 'self'-taught. Somebody has always been teaching me. I learned a lot from reading and playing through the scores of great composers. Modern American composers have always been a great influence on me: I love the music of John Corigliano, John Adams, Bill Bolcolm and Philip Glass; the artsongs of Ned Rorem, Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. Virgil Thomson was an inspiration. And, of course, the Broadway greats - George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Kurt Weill, Frank Loesser and Stephen Sondheim - remain role models of craft to me.

"I always had a great love of opera growing up. Coming from an Italian family, opera was played as though it was pop music. It was never unapproachable to me. I wrote libretti before I began writing opera on my own as a composer. I collaborated with Robert Moran on Desert of Roses, which was a beautiful piece, and Anthony Davis on Tania. Eventually, I began getting commissions on my own as a composer.

"It was wonderful to be given the opportunity by Lyric Opera of Chicago for the residency. At the time, I was working on Marie Christine for Lincoln Center with Audra McDonald and then immediately started working on The Wild Party. When they offered it to me, I told them I was just show trash - once show trash, always show trash! [He laughs.] "But they were fine with that. I wanted to do something a little different for this commission. Also, I wanted to try my hand at writing an original libretto, which I found very difficult - not basing it on any source material. But I loved the challenge.

"The story of Lovers and Friends is set in Chautauqua, New York and concerns Babbitt Cross, the country's (fictional) poet laureate. Babbitt has been invited to write the inaugural poem for our country's new president - which he has reluctantly done - yet the new president has rejected it, asking for Babbitt to rewrite it: less radicalism, more optimism. During a wintry weekend in Chautauqua, Babbitt and his wife, Lucy, and their extremely pregnant daughter, Isis, are joined by their friends, who include Betsy Laughlin (Babbitt's publisher) and her husband (a Senator under the shadow of a Washingtonian scandal), Edgar Montoya (an opera conductor and Lucy's clandestine lover) and Babbitt's old friend, Nimrod Baruch. Together, the two men fought in World War II. Baruch is currently writing a book on women of the French Resistance. He informs Babbitt that he has discovered a diary, recently found within the walls of a prison outside of Paris. It contains the writings and poems of an unknown woman who was captured and murdered by the Vichy government. The poems, when translated, reveal themselves to be almost identical to the first poems that Babbitt published in this country, which launched his career. 'How can this be?' Babbitt's old friend asks him. Who is the true author of these poems? The mystery of how these poems came to be is the central story of Lovers and Friends.

"I've dedicated this show to my friend, Brenda Rae Eno, who died of breast cancer. The story's themes of friendship, of inspiration and the realization of inspiration, were developed because of my relationship with Brenda Rae, a talented artist who died too young. She had inspired me early in my life, when we were growing up in Chautauqua. There's an echo of Sir Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations in the work - a series of musical portraits of the composer's friends. I wanted to do the same.

"Musically, Wild Party was a jazz score; Marie Christine was eclectic in terms of the New Orleans/Creole influence and the African drums. I wanted to write something more reflective this time around. Actually, I've been thinking of it as a pastoral. At the same time, I wasn't afraid to write songs for this piece. The songs are very character-related so each has its own particular palette, its own heartbeat, its own tonality, its own ostinato. But when the characters meet, the music intersects.

"We did the workshop two years ago using singers from the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists. It was remarkable how good they were as actors and how deeply they approached the material, creating characters with inner lives.

"I wanted a cast that had backgrounds in theater as well as in opera. I needed well trained singers to do the material. It was a joy writing for great singers, although at first, I was nervous about using professional opera singers - I was worried they couldn't act. There's that stereotype about opera singers that they can't act or move well on stage. It's not the case today. There are so many wonderful singers who having studied the acting process and synthesized it with the music work they've done. The quality of some of the acting in the opera house rivals anything you see in the theater now."

What would you like the audience to get from Lovers and Friends? "The basic theme of the piece is to use your past to celebrate the present as opposed to using it to torture yourself. Don't deny or hide your past. In terms of art - you should be able to use all things in your life and the mystery of your inspiration never has to be clarified. You never have to explain why or how you are inspired or who or what inspired you. There is also the idea of reconciliation with the 'now' -- reconciling with the present and using the past to build on so you can have some kind of future. I'm not going to be chased by my ghosts and I'm not going to be afraid of them. What has happened to me in the past as an artist isn't going to deter me from what I need to do today.

"I feel that as I get older I should be as personal as I possibly can, even though it means putting my head on the block. One of the pitfalls of Broadway right now is that you can't make that kind of exploration. That is very clear to me, especially after working on Marie Christine and The Wild Party, which were not your typical Broadway fare. They were intelligent pieces and they were difficult pieces to a certain extent. They required listening, which is a chore for a lot of American audiences these days, unless they are directed toward what to listen to. What's terrific about the opera house is that the doors are so much more open for all sorts of influences. On Broadway, you are much more restricted. When we did Marie Christine, people said, 'What are you doing with that on Broadway - it's an opera.' And I responded, no it's a musical, everything about it is a musical. But it was a reaction to the subject matter because it was the Medea story, and that sort of subject wasn't allowed for a Broadway musical. You can do it with a play - for some reason they are more accepting there. But the restrictions on Broadway for musicals are positively totalitarian. It's kiddy-show time.

"Opera is the place to go for adult theater now. What I mean by that is that if you're an adult it won't insult your intelligence. I'm so hopeful about what's happening in opera houses in the U.S. and around the world for that matter. Maybe that will influence Broadway and maybe the audience for serious musical theater will grow as the audiences for opera have. Art belongs on Broadway as well, but that's not the case right now."

Why are we obsessed with attaching labels (opera, light opera, musical, performance art) to our various forms of musical stage works? Historically, the Germans and French established the precedent of separating "grand" from "folk" operas or opéras-comiques, which carried the accompanying assumption that one was art and the other popular entertainment. But almost since they began doing so, composers came along who refused to stay within the lines. George Bizet's Carmen was written in the style of the opéra-comique, i.e., with talking between musical numbers, but its subject matter was definitely grand opera.

Crossing a century and an ocean, it only got more complicated when George Gershwin brought Porgy and Bess to Broadway in 1934. Thus, the opera/musical argument was born. A decade-and-a-half later, Marc Blitzstein's Regina got everyone riled up again when it premiered on Broadway. Today, Porgy and Bess and Regina are regarded as classic American operas.

Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd presented a similar problem in 1979 with its dark subject matter and almost entirely through-composed score (no breaks for talking), although there seemed to be less concern at the time over giving it a label, as Sondheim was an accepted Broadway composer and the production was cast with Broadway performers. Mr. Sondheim has said repeatedly that Sweeney Todd is not an opera. But more than a decade ago, the New York City Opera presented it with opera singers, and, more recently, the New York Philharmonic performed it with a mixture of Broadway and opera singers. And don't let's forget that Leonard Bernstein conducted a complete recording of his "musical" West Side Story with Kiri TeKanawa, Jose Carreras, Tatiana Troyanos and Marilyn Horne - opera singers all!

Skipping ahead to the America of 2001, it is perhaps some learned, internal eurocentricity (or amerinferiority) that makes us want to think of opera as higher than musical theater on the artistic scale. One might be ill-advised to blurt out in public that Carousel (Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein) is inherently a better or worse piece than The Magic Flute (W. A. Mozart), but in private, the majority would still classify one as "low," the other as "high" art.

We seem to have a desire, albeit a bashful one, to recognize as legitimate our musical theater heritage, but we remain reluctant to give it the same status as opera. This argument is perhaps more worrisome to operagoers in large urban centers, though; one encounters the classic American musical theater works regularly in the repertories of regional opera companies. Conversely, La Bohème popped up on Broadway in the 1980s (with "pop" singers) and will make its way back there again next season. Both La Bohème and Madame Butterfly have been given "Broadway-style" productions in local theaters by San Francisco Opera.

What does Michael John have to say on the subject? "People say it's an opera if it's done in an opera house. But that's not taking into account that there are so many new architectural spaces where pieces are performed. Would it be an opera or a performance piece, because the space is a performance space? It isn't just about the arena where the piece is performed, or what type of company is producing it. I find that using the word musical to define what I write simplifies the matter for me. It is all-embracing. I want to see and hear a new kind of singer, neither strictly musical-comedy nor strictly classical opera; I want new and different kinds of stage directors and musicians and designers, so I write what I write. Call it hybrid, or a mutation - call it ugly, call it mongrel. I just call it a musical.

"And suffice to say, I want a new kind of critic, particularly those who write about new 'classical' music. Why is it called 'classical' music for one thing? How do you know it's going to be 'classical' music in another fifty or hundred years? How do we know that the songs the Talking Heads did in the 80s are not going to be our 'classical' music of the 21st or 22nd century? Where are you looking for your 'classical' music? Today, you might not find it where we've been conditioned to think we'll find it, i.e., the music conservatories, concert halls, or opera houses, or on 'classical' radio stations.

"I think there has to be some sort of metamorphosis of criticism. In the days when we didn't have video and sound recordings, a critic was very helpful by informing us through reportage about things we didn't have a chance to see or hear. Now we can hear and see things and can judge for ourselves. To me, is the most dangerous thing against cultural progress is when a critical roadblock is put up. The minute criticism steps on the toes of the process you're asking for a lot of trouble."

What do you anticipate will be the critical reaction to a Broadway composer writing for an opera company? "They're going to cut my head off! [He laughs.] No surprise! Things are changing though. Slowly we're getting a new guard in, younger producers, new writers, younger audiences. The critics are the last to change.

"Art doesn't change. Critical opinion and reaction to it will. So which should you trust more, the art that is presented to you or the critical opinion about it?"

In a 1999 New York Times feature, Michael John wrote, "the American musical is considered one of our great artistic contributions to the world in this century, along with the skyscraper, Hollywood film, Pop Art and (here's where I get into trouble) the television sitcom…. When people ask [of Marie Christine]: 'Is it an opera?' I'm inclined to say, 'Does it matter? Were you entertained? Were you moved?' We seem to be at a stasis point in American musical history. I realized that last season while watching the Papermill Playhouse production of Follies (Sondheim) in New Jersey. When Donna McKechnie sang 'In Buddy's Eyes,' I recognized in the classic lyric 'I won't get older' a metaphor for the musical today - and even one for our culture. We have to get older. We have to grow up. And so does the American musical."

To learn more about Lovers and Friends (Chautauqua Variations) read the interview with Robert Orth