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When The Picture of Dorian Gray premiered in Monte Carlo in 1996, its composer, Lowell Liebermann, was compared to Benjamin Britten (referring to his opera Peter Grimes) for “burst[ing] forth fully formed as a theatrical composer.” (K. Robert Schwarz, The New York Times.) Three years later, Dorian Gray made its U.S. debut at Florentine Opera in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and was broadcast nationally on NPR’s World of Opera. It was based on that radio hearing that we became acquainted with the piece and were immediately taken with the potent drama that played itself out in the music. We’ve come to learn we weren’t the only ones. But with Carmens and Toscas monopolizing the schedules of U.S. opera houses, Dorian Gray hasn’t been able to get a foot in the door. Thus was born our new series, Operas We Would Like To See Again. Opera presenters, listen up!

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
(Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Preface.)

Liebermann’s affinity for Oscar Wilde’s decadent novel blossomed early in life and betrayed the searching inner life of a teenager outside the mainstream and a deep, artistic soul. Was music or opera in the picture from the beginning? “My parents always had an appreciation of classical music but neither of them were musicians. My father played the piano when he was a child and sang. My mother was German and had that Teutonic respect for the arts and felt that music should be part of one’s education. At the time, ‘Switched on Bach’ was in vogue and she loved to listen to it. She wanted my brother and I to take piano lessons as part of our education and I think she said we could decide on our own when we were in junior high school whether we wanted to keep it up but until then we had to do it.

“I hated the piano lessons at first. I was studying with a neighbor who wasn’t a terrible good musician. She had a bad case of halitosis and she would lean over me while I was playing the piano, so it was kind of a childhood nightmare. Also, she taught with the John W. Schaum piano course, so there were these horrible little pieces with pictures of fire trucks and what-not and it was all very condescending and not very enjoyable. My second piano teacher was a wonderful woman in her 80s who had studied with Hoffmann and Lechetivsky and knew Paderewski and had even dated George Gershwin [http://www.gershwin.com/]. It was through her that I acquired my love of music. She would sit at the piano with her tiny hands and arthritically swollen knuckles and somehow she managed to play difficult pieces like the Busoni transcription of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in d minor.

“I didn’t listen to popular music growing up; I completely missed all of the pop music of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The only two popular songs I remember from my childhood are ‘Downtown’ and ‘These Boots Were Made For Walking’. I started becoming aware of it in my twenties when I started going out to bars and clubs in New York. Disco was in its final death throes then and I couldn’t believe this strange, simple-minded, loud music that people actually listened to voluntarily. I still don’t have much of a feeling for it. It’s almost politically incorrect now to say that you are not interested in popular music, but I have to say I really am not. I remember giving a lecture at a university once and there was this very sullen-looking teenager sitting in the front row. I was talking about Dorian Gray and he finally put up his hand and asked, almost angrily, ‘Why don’t you incorporate elements of art-rock in your music?’ I responded that as an artist one has to decide what elements are useful for your own music and I didn’t feel I was required to be interested in every kind of music.

“Almost immediately when I started piano lessons, I started trying to write music. My earliest pieces were very ‘Bachian’. I didn’t even know how to notate properly so I kind of put the notes on the staff spatially where I thought they should be. Years later, I found some of those pieces and I couldn’t make head nor tail of what I had intended. But I wrote a couple of short piano pieces and then stopped for awhile and then at about age thirteen I started again. For some reason, at that point I decided that composing was what I wanted to do.

“When I became serious about music, my father would take me into New York to see the Metropolitan Opera. We were living in Chappaqua and he would drive me into the city after work and I’d be very attentive at the opera and he would fall asleep. It was very touching that he did that.

“When I was fourteen I started taking composition lessons with a woman named Ruth Schonthal who had been a pupil of Paul Hindemith and Manuel Ponce. It was with her that I wrote the first piece that is in my catalog, my Piano Sonata, No. 1, Opus 1, which I played for the first time at Carnegie Recital Hall (before it was renamed Weill Recital Hall). That piece is published and has been recorded twice.

“After high school I studied for a year with David Diamond and in 1979 when I was eighteen I was accepted into The Juilliard School and remained there until 1987. I studied with Diamond for both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, but I also took a year off and studied conducting with Laszlo Halasz, who died recently. I was his assistant at an opera company out on Long Island very grandly called the Nassau Lyric Grand Opera. He tried to talk me into giving up composing and becoming an opera conductor, but that year proved to me that I didn’t want to spend my entire life working with singers on a daily basis. I don’t know what it is about opera, but it’s like a Pandora’s box of problems. There are so many elements involved in putting together an opera – so many more people and so many more opportunities for something to go wrong. Usually, they all do [he laughs].

“Another very formative experience had to do with Halasz. In his attempt to convince me to turn to conducting, he sent me to Europe with letters of recommendation in my pocket to go backstage and hand to various people who owed him favors. It was a very old-fashioned thing to do. I had letters to Karl Böhm, Wolfgang Sawallisch and Wolfgang Wagner. To make a long story short, I ended up becoming very close to Friedland Wagner, Richard’s granddaughter and she put me up for two summers in Bayreuth. My first experience hearing a complete Wagner opera was in Bayreuth, when I was nineteen or twenty, sitting in the family box next to Friedland. It was a closed television taping of Götterdämmerung in the Patrice Chéreau production with Pierre Boulez conducting. That made a big impression on me – although it didn’t turn me into a rabid Wagnerian. I helped Friedland work on the operas of Siegfried Wagner which she was desperately trying to promote and, in fact, I did the piano reduction of his last opera, Die heilige Linde. By the way, Friedland Wagner was the one anti-Nazi in the family who became an American citizen. It was fascinating being in that environment and hearing her perspective on all the stories about Hitler and so forth.

“Up to that point it wasn’t so much any particular opera or opera composer that influenced me but rather just being in the opera house and hearing the orchestra in that space and seeing the stage and imaging the possibilities. I was more intrigued that by the fact that there was room for me to do things I had not found in the standard repertory. There is not a lot of opera I love actually. I’m not a big bel canto fan; I’m not a Mozart fan, although I love The Abduction From The Seraglio. People go on about the psychology insight or the depth of the characters in The Marriage of Figaro and I have no idea what they are talking about. I just don’t get it. But I don’t worry about it. Berlioz hated Mozart too. I love some of the Mozart piano concertos but I don’t find the music in his Italian operas as a whole to be my favorite, with the exceptions of certain arias. My tastes run toward the Germanic, although I love Rossini . Some of my favorite operas are from the fringes of the repertory, like Busoni’s Doktar Faustus, Pfitzner’s Palestrina, Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. I love Puccini but I don’t care for Verdi. Puccini was the consummate composer and orchestrator. Verdi has never turned my crank. I don’t find his operas terribly interesting musically. I have favorite arias and moments: I love the fourth act of Rigoletto, but I could do without the rest of it.”

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
(Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Preface.)

Oscar Wilde’s only full-length novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1890 in an abridged version and in 1891 in its complete form. The story is of the young, handsome Dorian Gray, who is fascinated with a portrait of himself painted by Basil Hallward; he wishes he could remain young and beautiful while the portrait aged. Dorian’s wish comes true, but for a dear price. Commentators have noted parallels to Wilde’s own life. Certainly its theme of obsession with youth and hedonistic living resonates today as fully as in Wilde’s time. (Consider also the numerous Faust operas, including The History of D. Johann Faust, The Rake’s Progress, Doktor Faustus, Faust, Mefistofele.)

Oscar Wilde

What was the novel’s route to the opera stage? “I had the idea to write an opera on The Picture of Dorian Gray almost from the moment I started composing, which is about the age I first read Oscar Wilde’s novel. What attracted me to it initially was that one of the themes in the book was Dorian’s search for perfection. He wants to experience everything – every sensation – and that was something I was very aware of as a child. Then there’s that moment when you realize it is not possible to read every book that was written or listen to every piece of music or meet every person or experience everything. That was a depressing realization for me as a child and so that theme resounded to me very deeply. What I love about the book is its richness. In the course of writing the opera it never got stale no matter how many times I came back to it. For me what really gave it the potential to be a terrific opera was it had a mythic quality and I think all the great operas have that kind of universality. It’s a morality tale, a horror story.

“No major composer has taken up the story so far. There apparently had been a previous operatic version by a Dutch composer named Hans Cox. I spoke to a Broadway producer once who told me that every year he gets at least three books in the mail on the subject of Dorian Gray. I know there was an updated version of the story done at an upstate New York University where the painting was turned into a virtual-reality computer program. There was a Dorian Gray musical playing off-off-Broadway at about the time my opera had its premiere.

“I had made one lame attempt to write an opera when I was in high school but got distracted very quickly and it never got anywhere. But later on I came back to the idea and got a draft of the libretto together; I wanted to be ready just in case the opportunity presented itself. Almost immediately a friend of mine, Henri Gronnier who was Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s boyfriend at the time, had lunch with John Mordler, director of the Monte Carlo Opera, who was complaining that there was a dearth of modern operas he felt comfortable presenting at Monte Carlo. Henri told him I was beginning an opera based on The Picture of Dorian Gray and John thought it was a fantastic idea. After hearing some of my music he made the commission. It was a freak incident: here was my very first opera being commissioned by a European opera house, which almost never happens. He was taking a big chance and I suppose I was taking a big change also, having never written an opera. But I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do with it, which is why I ended up writing my own libretto.

“I had thought about this for so long that to my mind the job of transforming the book into an opera libretto was very clear-cut. I found it to be incredibly poetic and completely right for setting to music. For my very first draft I typed out all the dialogue verbatim from the novel in play form. Then I took a chain saw to it and started cutting and reshaping and adding new material and transposing scenes and cutting characters. When things really got going, John Cox, who directed the first production, read the draft and offered some advice.

“My aim was to be faithful, but if you actually compare the libretto with the original, it has traveled a very long distance. Even when you hear most of the aphorisms, the phrases, you’ll say, ‘oh, that’s right out of Wilde’, but they are actually reworded to make them more musical. I got reactions from people on both sides. When it was premiered in Monaco, most of the press was unanimous in praise of the libretto, the transfer from the novel to the opera. When the American premiere happened, the press was very divided and a lot of people thought I was too faithful and had missed the spirit of the original out of being so faithful.”

What in the story inspired you musically? “The novel is structured very musically and it divided very neatly into two acts. Various themes and characters are recapitulated in the story and it excited me to create parallels in the music. My entire concept was to keep that sense of recapitulation. I was finding musical metaphors for the themes in the book and musical equivalents for the aphorisms that Lord Henry keeps coming out with. I deliberately constructed it in twelve scenes and used a twelve-note row to generate themes for Dorian and the painting, although it is not a serially constructed piece. I used the row tonally; it is really a very melodically accessible score. Each scene is in the key of the successive note of the tone row so that the entire opera in a way is a variation on this one theme – kind of a picture of the picture. The novel itself is really about form versus content, appearances versus reality, the outer beauty versus the inner evil. Using a twelve-note row to construct this lush, tonal, romantic work was, for me, almost a metaphor for the appearances versus reality theme.”

The piece reminded us of Richard Strauss’s operas. “There is a Straussian feel, although there is very little one could point to in the score that is a Staussian hallmark. Harmonically and technically it is very different, however that atmosphere is something that was quite deliberate. The one thing I did not want was for the music to be anachronistic to both the story and the period of the story. I also needed to start out the music in such a way you could hear the degradation and the corruption through the course of the opera until the painting reaches its final incarnation. In the penultimate scene, all of a sudden the music changes back to the consonant but with kind of a hollow feeling.”

Jeffrey Lentz as Dorian Gray. Opéra de Monte Carlo (1996).

Was it difficult to find the right tenor to play Dorian? “The role of Dorian is musically and dramatically quite demanding. I almost always try to think practically when writing, but in this case, the role of Dorian could not be any other way – it had to be a demanding, almost semiheroic role. Not that it needs a heroic tenor voice, but there are qualities of that in the role. He is onstage most of the opera. Plus it has to be a young, gorgeous tenor and there aren’t a hell of a lot of those types around. John Cox was being very specific in the physical types he wanted. I was still coming from the standpoint of not caring whether he weighed 350 pounds if he could sing the role. The musical concerns were most important to me. It was quite a grueling search to find the right person for Dorian. When we were at our wits’ end, Jeffrey Lentz walked into the rehearsal room – it was practically the last audition we did – and he was perfect in every respect. What was amazing was that John Hancock and Jeff Lentz in costume looked so much like Oscar Wilde and Bosey that it was scary, but very moving.”

Will we get the chance to see The Picture of Dorian Gray anytime soon? “I’m kind of surprised more companies have not expressed an interest in Dorian Gray. I have not pushed the opera very actively – I just don’t have time. I spend all my time just writing music. It’s there; it’s published for people to check out. A lot of companies are not interested because it has had its world premiere and its American premiere. There aren’t a whole lot of operas that get done again.

“One of the funny things about my career is that I have written a lot of vocal music and none of it has gotten out very much. It’s only recently that it has started being published. Susan Graham did a couple of my songs on her last tour. I’m writing a song cycle for the Marilyn Horne Foundation for Lester Lynch, a wonderful young baritone. My songs are finally beginning to get around and I’m hoping that will help the operatic side of things also.”

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
(Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Preface.)

What does it take for the opera world to prick up its ears at a new opera? “For me, opera is about the music. Yes, it’s the whole package when you’re there in the house, but for me an opera survives 95% because of the music. In the long run, there really aren’t a hell of a lot of operas that are convincing if you look at them purely as drama. Having just said that, when a new opera is done now, it seems to be judged more on the dramatic values than on the musical values. You’ll see rave reviews of some of the recent operas where they will say it is a knockout of a dramatic evening and the audience was drawn into the drama and what not and then there will be one or two sentences saying that the music was beside the point. It’s almost a reversal of critical priorities.

“What you have to learn as a composer is that no matter what you do, just because you are working in a particular style, there will be a group of critics who will hate you for what you are doing, no matter how well you do it. When you have spent 2½ years working on something and someone walks in the door and dismisses it in the most sarcastic and unhelpful way possible, that is bothersome. But, it’s something you have to get used to. It comes with the profession. I don’t read reviews anymore. I’m not interested in them – good or bad. It’s distracting and counterproductive. The people whose opinions I care about are the musicians and, yes, the audience. All art is communication and what I value is clarity – that what the artist is trying to get across is done in the most economical and understandable way possible. It might be complex, but if you are trying to express a complex thought you’d better be very clear about it. The audience’s reaction is important and I think the kind of undisguised contempt that a lot of critics have for the audiences today is disgusting, especially in a time when all the arts – classical music, recordings – are in such dire straits. It’s terrible to have people sending out the message that basically says, ‘don’t buy a ticket to this.’

“But I think American opera has actually been incredibly healthy recently. A number of new operas have gotten an awful lot of attention and been well attended and well received by the public. One success in the contemporary opera field is good for all composers of contemporary opera. There’s no reason for there to be any bad feelings because one composer has a huge success and another’s opera languishes. It’s hard to predict what exactly is going to catch on. We’ve had this problem in American for a long time regarding performing our own works. Every other country performs the works of their native composers. Since the Revolution there has been a sense of cultural inferiority that this latest trend in American opera seems to be coming out of finally. There is as a lot vital activity happening now in terms of new opera. It’s almost a movement here!”

Many views on Oscar Wilde
http://www.oscarwilde.com/
http://www.xs4all.nl/~androom/dead/story003.htm
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/wilde.html

A Post-Modernist Dissertation on 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'
http://members.lycos.nl/oscarwilde/

Not for the unbelieving
http://www.xs4all.nl/~wichm/oswilde.html

Oscar Wilde Photo Gallery
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/clarklib/wildphot/