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In 2000, when the Pulitzer Prize committee announced its award for music, Lewis Spratlan's Life is a Dream, Act II (concert version) seemed an odd choice to some. The opera had been written in the late '70s but had never been produced (the story follows) until a concert of the second act was given in 2000. For more than thirty years Spratlan has enjoyed a successful career writing music and teaching composition, and even occasionally conducting and playing the oboe. Grove Music has this to say about Spratlan:

Spratlan's compositions span all genres and reflect an enormous variety of cross-cultural influences. His style draws not only upon the traditional western European musical heritage ranging from chant to modernists such as Schoenberg, Stockhausen and Ligeti, but also upon the musics of other cultures, particularly those of southern India and Latin America. The influence of composers like Musorgsky and Skryabin, jazz musicians including Monk, Mingus, Davis and Coltrane, and minimalists such as Reich can be heard as well. His style has been praised for its dramatic effect and vivid colour. … His music from the 1980s and 90s has become increasingly inclusive in style, often making references to jazz and other pop musics as well as various non-Western traditions, with each serving as a kind of expressive entity within the larger mosaic-like musical fabric. (Myrna S. Nachman, 'Spratlan, Lewis,' The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 7 March 2003).)

USOPERAWEB was curious to speak with Mr. Spratlan about his life and career and his as-yet unproduced opera. Over the course of two conversations we learned a little about him and his journey up to now. "I was born and grew up in Miami, Florida. My parents were something of a pioneer family who had migrated down there in the '30s when Miami was still a small town. My mother was a very fine pianist and teacher and played a somewhat important part in the development of serious music in Miami. She taught at the house and so I was exposed to music all the time. I remember when I was five or six years old making up a piano piece involving one finger from each hand called 'Walking on Stilts.' [Sings 'Walking on Stilts.']

"I started playing oboe when I was in the fourth grade and became heavily involved with the music program at the University of Miami because both of my teachers were there. My first oboe teacher encouraged me to compose while I was still in junior high school and he went out of his way to get pieces of mine performed. At the time I was in a kind of 'Debussian' phase and wrote a fair amount of quasi-impressionist music. I didn't have any particular professional aspirations in that direction, though; I just enjoyed it a lot. My subsequent oboe teacher had enough faith in me to make room for me as an assistant oboist in the University of Miami orchestra and I count that as an enormous part of my early music education. It was an unusual orchestra in that it was a part-university, part-professional orchestra and it managed to attract some really great conductors; Sir Thomas Beecham was there for a residency and Leopold Stokowski was there for a two-week period. Just sitting there in the middle of the orchestra and absorbing things was a very important thing for me, although I was naïve as hell at the time and had no idea what good training I was getting."

We wondered if the lack of formal theory or composition training at a young age actually allowed Spratlan more creative freedom in his music. "It's not something I've actually thought much about but I can see that it might have been an important factor in that I wasn't struggling with 'dos' and 'don'ts' of one sort or another. My first teacher, Dominique de Lerma, who was a musicologist and who went on to become a specialist in Mozart, would comment about what I did and say things like, 'This sounds a little bit too crowded here' or 'Are you sure you really mean this?' But it wasn't according to any kind of theoretical doctrine; it was all very much by ear. I wasn't really aware of trying to conform to any particular style or follow any rules in composing. I was very happy-go-lucky as a young musician, which was a good thing I think.

"Another important thing was that I started playing jazz at the piano fairly early on, which is, of course, all by ear. I was in the ninth grade or so and for a kid growing up in Miami, jazz was certainly not the thing. But I had a few friends and we really liked listening to records. Jazz was then and has continued to be tremendously important to me. Most of my music doesn't sound particularly jazz-oriented, but I think the kind of improvisatory impulse that is involved in jazz is really at the root of things."

What music or sounds inspired you when you were younger? "Tone color and music that stretched the ear absorbed me tremendously. This goes back to sitting in the middle of the orchestra. I remember constantly being intrigued by the way different instruments combined to make a particular sound and how the timbres played off one another- the distinction between timbres, the combinations of timbres, the subtle aspects of color - how in a prevailingly string passage the composer might have a French horn sitting there on a pedal point and how that transformed things. There was something in the harmonic coloration beyond sheer triadicism that was very intriguing to me early on also. I remember I went crazy when the orchestra did modern works. Schönberg [http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/schonberg.html]'s Five Pieces for Orchestra really blew my socks off. I'd never heard anything like it my life before and I just loved the riskiness and edginess of it. A considerably more conservative piece that made a huge impression on me was Paul Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber. I continue to feel that it is an orchestrally brilliant piece and one of Hindemith's best works. We played Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, and various Shostakovich pieces and [Stravinsky's] The Rite of Spring, which blew me away too. I remember that I didn't consider this to be particularly 'out' music; I just liked it a lot. It was only much later that I discovered how out there it was relative to the general listening public in this country.

"I was studying composition seriously by the time I was in my senior year in high school, but I went to Yale as an English major and didn't switch over into music until the first semester of my junior year. At that point, I just became fed up with the English Department. This was in the early days of deconstructionism and I watched as all my favorite literature was gradually lying in pieces on the floor. It was temperamentally the wrong thing for me. I was spending a huge amount of my time doing music and just decided to switch my major. I had taken several music courses and had studied an awful lot of scores. I exempted out of a number of required courses and was able to begin serious composition study my last year there with Mel Powell, who opened me up to an enormous amount of music that I hadn't known before.

"Drama certainly was a very big part of my cultural and literary interests. I read tons of drama - Shakespeare [http://www.shakespeare-online.com/] to Ibsen to the more recent plays - and went to see a lot plays when I was in New Haven. The Yale School of Drama was very active and I saw brand-new pieces as well as classical drama there. And I was very interested in stagecraft - the business of how you got somebody on the stage and off again and made it seem in the flow of things; the way lighting worked and how sets could amplify or comment on schematic things in drama.

"I will mention one important thing. It concerns a remark made to me when I was in graduate school by a dear teacher of mine, Yehudi Wyner. He said in a way I took to be prophetic, 'you really are a dramatic composer.' He was talking about something within the instrumental music itself, a way of thinking how things combined or how gestures presented themselves. It was a remark that impacted me strongly and stayed there and resonated. As it turns out I think he was entirely right. I do recognize a very strong dramatic impulse in my music regardless of whether it's for the stage or not."

Did you also have an attraction to the human voice? "I sang in church choirs and the first conducting I did was in a church choir in about the tenth grade or so. The choir conductor spotted something in me and gave me a chance to conduct children's choirs and things of that sort. I think that the voice is probably at the very heart of my composing. I would say that my music is tremendously vocal, even the instrumental music. There are people who would dispute that and say that it's angular and difficult, but I guess I have a kind of large idea about what's vocal. I connect very much with where a melody falls within the range of instruments or voices. I had a classmate who was a really amazing singer for that age I remember being really hooked on the voice. I composed my first song when I was in tenth or eleventh grade. It was on a Victor Hugo text and I wrote it for extra credit for my French class. I looked at lots of Webern songs when I was working with Powell. Webern is a fantastic vocal composer, although many would disagree with me about that. It's difficult music but I think it's fabulously expressive and I remember just falling in love with it."

"I've written vocal music all my life; the first opera, however, was not until I was in my thirties. I didn't listen to a lot of opera before that. I had developed a kind of lefty snobbism about opera and I didn't want to associate myself with what I understood in my very incomplete way as the world of tuxedos and $150 tickets and all that stuff, in the sense that here are these billions of dollars being spent to keep fat people with pearls happy. I felt it was a museum and I didn't want to go anywhere near it because there was no interest in the music of today. I had a very arrogant attitude which hasn't gone away completely.

"I also found that I didn't have the patience for opera. I mean to know opera well takes a huge commitment and I was way into my 30s before I even tackled Wagner. Before that I loved Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, but I didn't know many of the warhorses - La Bohéme, Carmen, and so on. I remember when Ligeti's Le grand macabre first came out I really dove into that. But I'm not an opera buff and I didn't spend a lot of time listening to the beloved chestnuts. I don't mean to belittle them - I just didn't pay a lot of attention to the canon. Also, I had not been tempted by any particular tale that I wanted to tell nor were there any important ideas rattling around that I wanted to develop into a libretto. I've actually gotten to know more opera since I wrote Life Is a Dream.

"There was one thing - in my senior year in college, I actually wrote a Broadway-style musical. This is going to sound pretty laughable. It was an adaptation of She Stoops to Conquer and laid in the Old West. The book was done by a buddy who was in the drama school. It was a very campy piece but it had wonderful storytelling possibilities to it. I remember trying to differentiate between the characters very keenly and I can look back at that as being a kind of test of my operatic chops.

"Opera finally came up when this commission from the New Haven Opera Theater appeared. Herta Glaz was the founder of the company. She was the wife of Fritz Redlich who was the head of the Yale School of Medicine. She had had something of a career as a mezzo or contralto. I never heard her sing but she was a very well regarded opera singer. She was an unbelievably energetic and resourceful woman who was the heart and soul of that company. She really made a go of it on a shoestring. She approached me about writing an opera and asked if I had anything I was interested in doing. I didn't and so she placed in my hands an English translation of Calderón's La vida es sueño. I read it that night cover to cover and it just absolutely gripped me. There was a timeless aspect to it. It was written in the 1630s and yet it felt unbelievably modern in regards to its exploration of alienation in modern life. If ever there were an opera waiting to be written, this was it. I felt on a mission from the moment."

Did you have a sense of how the piece would take shape as an opera? "Not immediately. First of all, it is a drama, not a novel. It's often spoken of as the Hamlet of Spanish literature - not because it mimics the plot of Hamlet but because it occupies that same kind of position within Spanish literature that Hamlet does in English. Schoolchildren memorize soliloquies from it and so on. Hardly had I finished reading it than I had a conversation with a fellow who ended up being the librettist for the opera, James Maraniss. It turns out that the sort of star-crossed aspect of this is kind of intriguing because Jim and I had become very close friends. We were living back to front with our wives and young children in the same apartment building in Amherst. I knew he was a student of Spanish literature at Amherst College, but it turned out that Calderón was his specialty and he knew this work intimately. We talked a lot about the piece over several days and it became obvious that he should write the libretto.

"It's a massive play - five acts if I remember. Well, no major drama can be set to music whole; it would collapse under its own weight. We went through the piece with a hatchet and tried to get at the essence of it. We ditched one entire subplot completely, but we were very careful to preserve certain of Calderon's big sort of soliloquy pieces where we valued the language enormously. They are so important in the play; they were the points where all the big moral issues got chewed over. They were these long, rather symmetrical structures almost like Baroque architecture and the form of these speeches eventually was a very direct determinant of the form of the music. We kind of planted them like pillars in the opera and developed a very fluid style of language to go around them."

But then the opera company dissolved. "Redlich got a position at UCLA, I believe, and they moved out to California. She couldn't find anybody to take over the company. It had been such a one-woman show that there was no heir apparent. There was not enough of a structure or enough of an organization so it collapsed. So, there I was with this very ambitious, demanding piece on my hands and I was literally three-fourths finished with it - including the orchestration. I wrote the piece in full score from the beginning and then reduced the vocal score later. There was no way I wasn't going to finish it without a performance. It was unbelievably disappointing.

"I began the task of trying to get another company to do it. It was published very early on by Margun Music in Newton, MA, the press that Gunther Schuller had founded in the late '50s, and we pedaled it like crazy for probably five years and there was not a nibble. In some cases there would be a response back saying, 'thank you very much, we'll be in touch with you if anything develops.' In the great majority of the cases there was simply no response at all. And I got very discouraged by it and I became very busy with other things and it just sat on the shelf.

"Then about ten years ago I met Roger Reynolds, a composer from San Diego who was doing a residency here at Amherst College. Back in '78 I had put together a little concert version of about ten minutes from the end of the second act of Life is a Dream and conducted it with the Amherst-Mt. Holyoke Orchestra. I had a tape of it and I played it for Roger and he was very impressed. He asked me how in the world I could live without hearing the piece? He said it was like a 25-year pregnancy. I suddenly realized he was right and that's what put a bee in my bonnet of getting at least a concert performance. I got to work on it and one thing led to another and finally the Boston performance was done in January of 2000."

When you returned to Life is a Dream were you tempted to revise or rewrite? "The very act of getting it down off the shelf scared me a lot. I thought, 'oh my God this is just going to seem like a tired, old horse if I drag it out now.' And the amazing thing is that it didn't. I actually sat down in a very responsible way and set out to update it and I ended up changing it hardly at all. I changed just tiny little things here and there - some of the scoring and I kind of sanded down the vocal parts a bit, making them less difficult, less athletic. But I would say 95% of that act is absolutely intact from what it was. It seemed just as right as it did when I was writing it. You know it's not like the music that I'm writing now. But I just asked myself , if we could pretend this had never happened and if I were given that text today, would I write it that same way? I think inevitably the answer is no. I'm a different person now and my style has evolved since then. But, even though I was sitting here staring back at this old piece from a considerably different vantage point, it was so whole and the suitability of the language to the music and the music to the language seemed so right to me that I was not really tempted to shift things stylistically. So, for better or for worse, it is what it is."

How does an opera that hasn't been produced win the Pulitzer? "A hell of a question. You'd have to ask the jury I suppose. The Pulitzer Prize is always done by tape or CD. Almost anytime a composer writes a big piece, he automatically sends a CD together with the score into the Pulitzer board. It's one of those things you do as a professional composer. When I sent it off I had huge misgivings about it in that it was only one act out of three. But for $2.50 worth of postage I thought I might as well do it. With no false modesty, I was floored when I found out about the Pulitzer. You never expect these things but I had particularly not expected it because of the fact that it was just a part of a piece and not even staged. But there we are."

What about life after Pulitzer? "Well, that has been another small disappointment. It goes in two columns. There has been a huge life after Pulitzer regarding other commissions. The San Francisco commission came along directly as a result of this. They must have admired Life is a Dream but they just didn't want to produce it; they preferred to commission me to write a brand new piece. Margun Music was bought out by G. Schirmer and I have an agent now at Schirmer, Norman Ryan, who has been working day and night to get this piece put on. I thought naïvely after the Pulitzer hit that I was going to be swatting them away like flies. It has not been that way at all. I did get the showcase by New York City Opera which I was extremely pleased with. They did a fantastic job on it. One has to hope that NYCO itself will develop some interest because of the excitement around that performance. I don't know what producers from other companies were there that day. There might be something that would come of that. And I've had one serious sustained inquiry from a company that I really can't name because it's just not far enough along.

"Putting on a new opera is a whole world to itself. Opera companies are very proud of themselves, particularly in the last ten years or so, to be able to point to all the new operas they are putting on. It gives them a way of saying, 'Look, don't criticize us; we're putting on a brand-new opera.' But I have to examine just what this is a lot of the time and they're often not very good. I want to resist sounding arrogant about this, but there is a kind of lowest common denominator aspect to an awful lot of stuff being written. I'm certainly not going to name particular pieces. My opinion is that opera company directors underestimate their audiences. They don't give challenging new operas a chance. Opera has an incredible tradition of being front-edge stuff when you think about it. The greatest operas are very in-your-face, politically and artistically. I am absolutely convinced that a piece that is dramatically compelling, even if it's in what the producers feel to be an abstruse or difficult style, will have success, which is, after all, what they're looking for. But there are too many opera producers who don't have the courage to argue back when others complain about giving the audience something they can't hum. I think that's a wrong attitude and I think it's insulting to the public.

"I have been told by a number of people concerning life after Pulitzer that opera companies tend to stay away from things that they did not commission themselves and that very well may be true. I'm encouraged and emboldened by the one overture I've had. It's not what you would call a major opera company but it's a very good one and they do excellent work and the music director is absolutely first-class and I would feel thrilled to have it done."

Lewis Spratlan and Constance Congden were commissioned in 2001 by San Francisco Opera to write a one-act, chamber opera. Their creation, Earthrise, an opera that explores the unknown consequences of human cloning and genetic manipulation, will be presented in 2004. To learn more, read the USOPERAWEB interview with Mr. Spratlan and Ms. Congden about the genesis and progress of Earthrise.