'The House of the Seven Gables' - Scott Eyerly

Ghost Opera: The House of the Seven Gables
Scott Eyerly Transforms Hawthorne's Creepy Novel Into a Gripping Stage Work

In December 2000, the Manhattan School of Music presented the world premiere of Scott Eyerly's first opera, The House of the Seven Gables. A live recording made during the performance run was released recently on the Albany label. USOperaWeb caught up with Eyerly while he was in northern Michigan at the Pine Mountain Music Festival and asked him about the opera and its genesis.

Scott Eyerly

"In 1989, while seeking a story for my first opera, I picked up a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1851 novel, The House of the Seven Gables. I was in residence at the MacDowell Colony and working during the day on chamber music in my studio out in the woods, and after dinner I would go back in the evening and read the book. It's one of the greatest late-night books, especially someplace like that where it's very dark outside and rather creepy.

"What seized my imagination immediately were the atmosphere and the characters. I had that sense of being able to see the opera as I was reading. Vivid stage pictures suggested themselves to me, from the vast, gloomy house to its singular inhabitants. I was also drawn to a powerful morality in the tale. Hawthorne's exploration of human nature, especially the repercussions of one's actions on others, struck me as being no less relevant today than in 1850.

"I would love to say that musical motives suggested themselves to me as I was reading but unfortunately that was not true at all - I heard not a note of music while I was reading nor even for years afterward. I had a sense of what I thought the music should be like; but it was similar to when I have a dream with music in it - the moment I wake up I can never literally remember pitches but I remember what the music was like, whether it was lyrical or exciting or whatever. I took lots of text notes while I was reading the novel, but the only musical thing that occurred to me was the idea of certain musical motives having seven notes.

"One thing I did, which now I almost can't believe I did it, was to write out a very detailed synopsis of the action of the book with no effort to dramatize it. It was very detailed, 50 or 60 pages in tiny writing. Then I began to write notes in the margins, like 'could this be a scene?' or indicating where I thought something could be cut. I think one of the reasons I did this in such detail was that I was afraid of missing some key aspect of the story and not realizing it until the opera was finished. I needed to feel confident in my knowledge of the book.

"The next step was to make a synopsis for the opera, which went through many drafts, of course. I showed that to a dozen or so theater and opera people whose opinions I respected and asked them to tell me what they thought. That process was very helpful. All this was still before I'd written a note.

Dominic Aquilino as Jaffrey Pyncheon and Kelly Smith as Phoebe Puncheon in a scene from Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater's world-premiere production of The House of the Seven Gables. Photo by Carol Rosegg

"Finally I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to start working on the piece. I decided that I wanted to use part of that funding to spend the summer in Salem, Massachusetts where the actual House of the Seven Gables stands. Although the story is fictional, it is set in a real house, which the author himself sometimes visited. I wanted to start writing the opera there. I'm a great believer in 'place.' I don't know if you call that 'vibes' or spiritual energy, but I liked that idea. The chance to see what Hawthorne had seen intrigued me. Several real persons whom I met during that summer became minor characters in the opera who appear in the party scene in Act I.

"I learned that the house has a bedroom off-limits to the tour, which on rare occasions is made available to scholars for overnight use. Thanks to the site's administrator, I was actually allowed to sleep over at the House of the Seven Gables. Alone. (I think.) So, on an appropriately blustery evening, I arrived at the House with my toothbrush and pajamas. I wandered freely for one hour, after which time the alarms were turned on, leaving me confined to the bedroom and grounds. And what happened? I'd love to say I saw a ghost. More helpfully, perhaps, I caught a glimpse of Hawthorne's world. A few excerpts from my notebook that night:

shadows stream from their sources like manes of hair in the wind, like flames streaming from a burning log... creaks -- (some very loud) snap crackle pop at odd times, like the stray fire-cracker going off in the distance... the beautiful parlor, red and gold, warm also, the whiff of too-fragrant, slightly rotted sickly sweet flowers... dead moth in the window in Clifford's room...

"A terrifying experience did occur the next morning. As I sat on the bed tying my shoes, I heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. Slowly but purposely they drew to my door. A hand grasped the knob, turned it, and ... The security guard yelped when he saw me. He hadn't been told I was there.

"In Hawthorne's story, the house itself is almost a character. Gazing at its walls, I felt a sense of falling... of dust settling, of time passing. Attempting to capture this, I composed the progression of seven chords which opens Act One (slow, descending whole notes). This progression, often varied, underpins key moments in the opera. The fact that there are seven chords is deliberate. I liked the idea of "sevenness" as a structural element. By no means does every motive have seven notes, but several important ones do, for example, the curse hurled on the Pyncheon family: 'GOD WILL GIVE YOU BLOOD TO DRINK!' Here I thank Mr. Hawthorne for having provided seven syllables.

"When I spoke to the gentleman who was the director of the historic site of the House of Seven Gables and was telling him my hopes and dreams for the opera, he wondered where I would get the dialogue from because Hawthorne didn't write a lot of dialogue. For me, that was desirable; I could make up the dialogue and not take Hawthorne's lines. Also, I like that sort of formal 19th century dialogue. From an operatic standpoint, some of the language has a weightier quality that lends itself to music. For example, Hepzibah says 'I cannot' rather than 'I can't' because they didn't use contractions then as often as we do now. In normal speaking, that can sound a little thick but I think that sort of phrase is served well by opera. It still has to sound utterly natural and American, even if it is a different era, and you can't have one false note - meaning you can't have the wrong emphasis or syllabification. Text setting is almost like walking on pavement - if it's smooth you don't notice it; if it's rough you complain or notice that it's not right.

"As for the actual process of writing the opera, I would look at a scene from my synopsis, and start what I call the 'tennis match.' I would frequently go back and forth between writing the text and the music. First I'd write some drafts of the text of a scene and when one of these started to gel, I would start to set it to music. But often, I'd realize I wanted a certain rhythm in a vocal line which the text wouldn't allow, so I'd go back to the libretto and adjust it, then back to the music again, over and over. A few times, the music got ahead of the words, for instance when I composed the theme for the house, the seven chords, and the little child's song Clifford sings at the beginning. I care a lot about musical form and I believe it's important for some sections or phrases to repeat - not always literally, of course, and only where dramatically appropriate. Writing a completely through-composed score is not my style.

"I got a paperback copy of the novel and as I read through it for the second and third times, I used colored pens to highlight significant passages dealing with each of the five principal characters. Each one had his or her own color; for example, anything significant that Clifford said or was said about him, I highlighted in light blue; Phoebe was bright green; Jaffrey was purple; Hepzibah was rose and Holgrave was orange. The following may sound sort of Wagnerian I guess and I have mixed feelings about saying it. But I have to admit, because it's so obvious, that one of my approaches, one of the tools in my kit, is the use of a musical motive - a phrase, a chord, a melody, whatever - that is associated with a character or feeling or idea. So I knew that each one of the five characters was going to have his or her motive or at least a 'type' of music. To use an obvious example, Phoebe's music is very fast - in the score it is often written in sixteenth-notes - because I wanted it to be fleet and bird-like. And, going back to the 'tennis match' idea of the music/libretto, I would often return to the text and change it to match the music I wanted. Also, I wanted to write her music in a 'sharp' key - she just wasn't a 'flat' key. Because she was the youngest character in the opera, she is a high, lyric soprano. When it came to orchestrating her music, I used flutes, pizzicato violins and those sorts of colors. Perhaps, this sounds like Liszt writing his sonata after Dante, but what was fascinating about Hawthorne's story was the intersection of the characters - it was almost like five chemicals being mixed in different combinations. It was interesting to think about how these five characters reacted to each other, who was the catalyst, the aggressor, the passive one, etc. And I tried to make that apparent in the music.

"Seven years were to pass between my Salem visit and the announcement of the opera's premiere. Because it was premiered at Manhattan School, it was different than if it had been done with a professional opera company. I did not know what singers I was writing for and, of course, in a professional setting that would not be the case - you would know who was singing the major roles. We held auditions three months before opening night!

"I was not present at most of the rehearsals during the first two months because I was madly orchestrating the piece. I had not started the orchestration until I knew that Manhattan School was going to perform it, for the obvious reason that it involves so much work. But I was in regular contact with Linda Brovsky, the director (and for several years before this, the dramaturg). I had a huge level of trust in her and we knew well what each other wanted for the piece and I wanted to let her do her work.

"About three weeks before opening night, I attended my first fully staged rehearsal which was a piano run-through and was very impressed with what I saw. I had been involved so many times in the process of creating pieces for musical theater that I was very familiar with how they developed in rehearsals and tryouts - with things being added and thrown out up to opening night. But with The House of the Seven Gables, we had also had a couple of workshops with the Center for Contemporary Opera, and I had done so much rewriting before the rehearsals, that once rehearsals started, hardly any changes were made. The only things I really had to change involved some technical things that had to do with timing of changing sets, like adding music so there wouldn't be silence between acts two and three, because they had decided to do those acts together. And I changed the ending - approximately the last 30 seconds, because Linda's idea for staging it didn't really fit with the music I had written. She had come up with the idea of having seven ghosts present throughout the opera, that silently comment on the action from time to time. I have to admit I was very nervous about this at first, but when I saw it I realized it was a brilliant idea. Well, for the ending instead of the curtain ringing down as the principals left the house, Linda had staged it so that the seventh ghost wafted across the room and left quietly, closing the door softly behind her as a moonbeam comes up on a single rose. And they needed a quiet ending for that, rather than the booming one I had written. Well, I nearly cracked because I had to rewrite it and orchestrate it over the weekend - while I was still writing that last minute scene change music!"

Is there further life for The House of the Seven Gables? "Cincinnati Opera is including a quartet from the first act in one of their outreach programs with their young singers. Working with my publicist, we have been sending out sample recordings and press materials to let the world know about the opera. My hope, of course, is that a company will want to produce it or will take an interest in me and ask me to write another opera. Quite a few people thought The House of the Seven Gables was very strong and I happen to be pleased with it. I made some cuts for the compact disk version which appear now as optional cuts in the score. If the opera gets produced again, I would be open to suggestions for changes. But at the same time, I'm eager to write another opera. I feel I've learned so much from the experience that I could build on.

Read The House of the Seven Gables online!