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All About Electra:
Marvin David Levy Talks About His Major Opus
Interview by Harlie Sponaugle
Written and edited by Robert Wilder Blue

The Metropolitan Opera commissioned two new operas to honor its arrival at Lincoln Center in the fall of 1966. The first to see the light was Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, which premiered on September 16, 1966 - opening night in the new opera house. History recorded the evening as an American version of a coronation, interrupted, unfortunately, by a performance of an opera. Whatever were the merits or deficiencies of Mr. Barber's work-and he hadn't considered the necessity for easy consumption-the evening was considered a spectacular failure.

The following spring (March 17, 1967, to be specific), the younger, lesser known Marvin David Levy saw his first opera, Mourning Becomes Electra, become a second sacrificial offering to the Met. Despite the overwhelming. shocking performances of Marie Collier as Christine and Evelyn Lear as Lavinia (both Met debutantes), neither audiences nor press were happy with Mr. Levy's version of Eugene O'Neill's second-rate play; although their reactions were motivated by opposing expectations-audiences found the opera too modern, critics not modern enough.

Thirty years later, the adventurous and insightful Lyric Opera of Chicago decided to reconsider Mr. Levy's opera and asked him to make revisions for a potential revival of the work. Their gamble proved successful. Mourning Becomes Electra was heard anew in a series of spellbinding performances and the opera world perked up its ears at its rediscovery.

Now Mourning Becomes Electra is enjoying another new production that will be seen in Seattle and New York (again). Last summer, composer Harlie Sponaugle spoke with Marvin David Levy about his major opus.

HS: You have said that the revisions of 'Mourning Becomes Electra' have haunted you since the premiere. After the production in Chicago, you felt that the audiences still weren't clear about the third act.

MDL: Yes, Christine, the Clytemnestra character, is a very powerful force in both the original Aescylus and O'Neill's trilogy. People seemed to think that the end of Act Two, after the mad scene, was the end of the opera. Even if they didn't think that, the tension that Christine created was suddenly gone and it was very hard to get it back. I knew about this problem for years and perhaps I should have done the major revisions before the Chicago production, but I didn't. There was so much else to do. Now I'm getting a little long in the tooth and I've got to finish this up, or I'll be revising it from the grave. But, I think I've got it this time."

I understand that now there is no third act.

That's right. We're breaking after the ship scene, when Orin murders Adam, and opening the second act with Christine's mad scene, when her son tells her that he has killed Adam Grant, her lover. Those are two very central scenes, and they were so strong that it robbed the audience of further involvement later on. Now they're split - the mad scene comes after the intermission, which keeps up the tension and keeps Christine in the show until the end.

We've actually done something even more than that. In the Aeschylus, there's a point at which Clytemnestra starts seeing ghosts. Taking that as a cue, I went back and initially thought that it would be interesting to have the dead Mannons welcome Lavinia back from her travels. I talked to the director, Bartlett Sher, about it, and he thought it was a thrilling idea. But he had another idea for Christine's ghost. So now when Orin is singing one last goodbye to his dead mother, just before he commits suicide, she's actually there, because she's not dead to Orin. He commits suicide in her arms. In the last act, you see all the dead Mannons sitting in the house waiting for Lavinia to return. We had another new idea for the final scene - the three inner walls of the house now close at the very end with a scrim that comes down. Lavinia really is trapped, she cannot get out, literally."

Is there new music for the ghosts?

There is. It's based on Orins' earlier dirge, "How death becomes the Mannons" and on Lavinia's lament, which was itself built on "How death becomes the Mannons."

It sounds quite spooky.

I'm very excited about it. It's gothic-it works. The only thing we worried about is whether we are going over the top, and I don't think so.

Your opera has evolved from an avant-garde piece when it was originally written, until now, when it's more of a 20th century bel canto piece.

When you categorize things like that, you're really trying to make connections in other people's minds. I'm very much steeped in opera from my childhood so all that enters into the way I think about it and write it. And yes, bel canto is a part of it, but only in the best sense -- whatever seems florid is written as emotional expressiveness, not just empty flourishes.

The original libretto was based on O'Neill's trilogy, so each act of the opera covered a full play. Obviously you couldn't use all of O'Neill's dialogue.

No, but it wasn't really a problem. It's not the words that you worry about so much in opera. You don't hear them anyway. You need what's behind the words. O'Neill was not a good dialog writer - a wonderful dramatist, but he didn't have much flair for language. The characters are strong and the turns of events are fascinating. It's the language itself that falls short. O'Neill himself knew that very well. He wrote to his publisher (and this is verbatim) - "Mourning Becomes Electra needed great language to lift it beyond itself. I haven't got that." And that's in print. I think O'Neill overshot the mark many times. In order to produce this huge work, he had to resort to hyperbole. It knocks you dead, there is just so much talking. It suffocates the play. If you look at his whole work, you find him experimenting with masks, with language, with asides-very effective techniques that divert you from the fact that he's no Shakespeare, which is fine. It's another way of doing things.

I read that the level of acting in the original Met production was quite astonishing and perhaps a little daunting to future potential productions.

At the Met, you had a director who had never directed opera. His background is in film and stage. I was writing Mourning Becomes Electra in Rome and I just happened into a theater that was showing a film about Electra in Greek with Italian subtitles. Talk about being confused. But I could see that whoever directed it-I didn't know whether it was an old movie or a new movie, whether the director was still around-whoever it was, I knew I wanted him. Because you could see that it was operatic.

Do you think for a minute that people in Italy go to see La Traviata and understand all the words? No, they understand some of them, but the point is you have to service the words in a way that the audience gets the idea without understanding every word. There were no titles at the Met [in 1967], and the audience knew very well what was happening. Now a lot of people really count on the titles. Even my own brother said, "I never knew what this was all about until I saw it in Chicago (with titles)." But I feel that surtitles take away from what's happening on the stage, and from what is the essence of opera-singing. They introduce another visual element into a form that should be completely aural, or at least mostly.

After you did 'Mourning Becomes Electra', you moved away from opera and did oratorio and musicals. What do you see as the relationship between American opera and American musical theater?

That's a very large subject and I've thought about it a lot. Musical theater is really quite different from opera. Opera is about one thing: singing. Musical theater is not; it's about the story, highlighted by singing. But even there, you're not so worried about the singing as you are about the lyrics. That's why Sondheim, for all his genius, is not really an opera composer. It's musical theater that he's writing and he knows the difference. I'm not saying that the day will never come when one can fuse the two. There have been attempts. It's a matter of form and content. Look at Les Miserables, for example.

Kurt Ollmann as Orin Mannon and Nina Warren as Lavinia Mannon in Seattle Opera's production of Mourning Becomes Electra (Act III).

Or 'Most Happy Fella'.

Yes, the form is operatic, the content is musical theater. But it sounds good.

How are your latest musicals faring? You just finished 'Grand Balcony' and 'Zachary Star'?

Zachary Star is kind of finished, but I have to go back and tidy it up. It's for children, but for adults as well. I ran the Ft. Lauderdale Opera for a few years, and it has a large program in the school system for introducing opera to children - new things, too, not just Barber of Seville. Apart from that, the entire repertory of opera for children was bankrupt of anything having to do with one particular subject - death. You might say, why do you want to do that? Because it's part of life. That's substantially what Zachary Star is - it's about a boy who is being brought up by his grandfather. Already his father is gone to war. They think his grandfather is about to die, and the story shows how the characters work together to get him through this life change. There are different kind of animals flitting through it, too. When kids go to the theater, they want to laugh, to have fun. So we'll see if it works. I think it will-that they will find it amusing-but subliminally, they're getting a message, too, that death is part of living.

Do you have any plans for another opera?

I think it's time for me to retire. As for a new opera-it's such an exhausting thing to do. In many ways it's gratifying, but in many ways it's not. So many people get their hands onto it and decide they know better. They take it away from you. Maybe it's better for the opera itself. But, it's a long and difficult process and unless I'm convinced it's going to work, I don't want to undertake it. Don't get me wrong, I've looked over the years for a subject that would interest me and there are very few that do. I have to be sold 150% to put that kind of blood into it. I'm not saying it won't happen, but not yet. I have a few ideas. I have Bartlett Sher scouting around, so we'll see.

Meanwhile there are some tentative plans to do Zachary Star in London. Someone has been talking to me about doing an opera treatment of an American western, but I'm not sure we need another spaghetti western. La Fanciulla del West might be enough.