Oregon Music News

Last Tuesday, I joined several journalists and opera bloggers in a roundtable discussion with Philip Glass at Portland Opera’s headquarters. Bob Hicks (Art Scatter), Marty Hughley (The Oregonian), Brett Campbell (Willamette Week), Stephen Llewellyn (Operaman), Bob Kingston (dramma per musica) and I got to pepper Glass for 30 minutes with a variety of questions. We found Glass to be witty, self-deprecating, and a fascinating fellow. What follows is almost the entire roundtable discussion. I jumped in right away to ask Glass the first question.

JB: Can you tell us something about the production history of this opera? It was premiered in 1993.

Glass: We did it at the American Repertory Theater in Boston. That is a theater company. Bob Brustein, who was the head of it at that time, liked the idea of bringing opera in. They didn’t even own a music stand, so they had very little idea of what they were doing. I did three pieces: The Juniper Tree there, Orphée there, and a piece with Bob Wilson. We brought in our little orchestra; so the orchestra we had for Orphée was smaller. I didn’t have a big string section. I had two violins, one viola, one cello, one contra bass. The idea was that we would turn those sections into larger groups, which we did do. It was done in Germany – the same music exactly but with a fuller string section. However, I was grateful to have a chance to premiere the works in Boston.

The big problem is to get the first performance, and the next big problem is to get the second performance. My strategy was to do two productions in different places in the same year. Therefore, I’d try to get the second production underway immediately, and get them (both places) to divide the cost of the commissions. I did this with Akhnaten and with Satyagraha, and with these Cocteau pieces.

JB: Then many years passed until the Glimmerglass production. Why wasn’t this picked up sooner?

Glass: I’ve pondered over this question many times. What happens when you have a premiere is that everyone gets excited and writes about it. Then the next year comes and everyone is interested in the next new thing. They don’t care about what happened last year. It’s partly the editors are not interested in spending time on things that are not premieres. The usual wait is about eight or ten years. Eight or ten years later, people have forgotten the piece and are ready for a new production. Then, after that, the gap is much narrower and other productions of the same piece follow more quickly.

The hurdle of the second performance is that you’ve had a premiere, and editors want news. Eight or ten years later that piece can become news again. You can then pretend that it’s an established piece.

[General laughter from everyone]

Funny things can help the composer. This year is the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth or death. I’m from Baltimore so I’m supposed to know these things. Anyway, someone told me that there were five new productions of The Fall of the House of Usher in five different countries – all in the same month – the month of November. So I just hit the jackpot with his birthday. My Fall of the House of Usher was written for three voices and a set of instruments; so it doesn’t surprise me that it has been done so often.

I’ve written a lot of operas: small ones, big ones, lean ones, fat ones, and blonde ones, and brunette ones. All different kinds. You do it that way. If you get up early in the morning and work all day and live long enough, there’s someone doing one of your operas somewhere. It takes stamina more than ingenuity.

JB: And you are going to record this production?

Glass: Yes, it’ll be a beautiful recording. I heard the rehearsal last night, and I have to say that this is a beautiful company with a wonderful conductor. We had been trying for years to do Orphée in Austria where there’s another conductor who likes the work. And it would’ve been easier because of the money, but they’ve been too busy. So, now it’s in Portland. I came to hear it and I said ‘Oh, this is the recording.’

SL: I was talking to Chris Mattaliano who has been in New York doing the stage direction for Esther, which was also premiered 16 years ago. Is it easier for opera boards to raise money for a premiere?

Glass: Chris deserves a lot of credit for reviving that opera. By the way, I knew Hugo Weisgall. He was from Baltimore also or at least taught there. Esther is static-aphonic 12-tone music. It’s much more difficult to listen to than my music. Weisgall taught at Juilliard when I was there, but I didn’t study with him. He worked with the Juilliard Opera Theater in the 1960s.

Orphée is much more accessible. We have love duets and tragedy. We have people walking around blindfolded. All sorts of goofy things happen, and it’s very theatrical, and it’s a beautiful production. We’ve got the whole production from Glimmerglass and it had a good run there.

BH: Can you talk about the Cocteau connection?

Glass: I saw Cocteau’s films as a very young man. I was 15 or 16, living in Chicago, I was at the University of Chicago. I was going to the Hyde Park Theater, not too far from where Obama was living before he became our President. These movies were new back then. I think that they influenced me partly to live in France. I went to France in the summer of 1954 to learn French and didn’t succeed. I finally did learn in 1962 when I went back to study with Nadia Boulanger after my Juilliard years.

At that time, France was where you wanted to go if you were a painter or a writer. All of the American writers had been there whether it was Hemingway or Fitzgerald. There was a great history of expatriate artists in France: jazz musicians. Ornette Coleman told me that he went to Europe like clockwork. France was a great center for collaboration among artists. In the 20s and 30s, there were Stravinsky, Cocteau, Darius Milhaud, who was passingly a teacher of mine as well. Great experimental theater work comes from that period. The theater that comes afterwards, that springs up in America in the 60s and 70s, we are the continuation of the work done in Europe that had been interrupted by WWII.

So, when I was a kid, you dreamt of going to France, and I did. And I had a great time. The Paris that I knew from 1954 was not all that much different than the Paris of 1952 when Cocteau made these films. It never occurred to me that this great filmmaker was living in Paris and I could’ve met him. When I went back in 63 and 64, I remember sitting in cafes with the likes of Richard Serra and waiting for Giacometti to come in for a cup of coffee, which he did, because we knew where he had his coffee. But I was looking for Beckett and Serra was looking for Giacometti.

So, I had a lingering romantic, love-affair with French culture. Eventually, I got over it, but not until I had written three operas based on works by Cocteau.

BC: Were they nostalgic memories or was there something about Cocteau?

Glass: It’s both. Certainly nostalgia is part of it. Cocteau addressed the most important themes, that any person… Shakespeare or whoever could address. He’s talking life, death, immortality, and art. That’s pretty heavy stuff. Then the model of Orphée is a very thinly disguised version of Cocteau. It’s basically an autobiography. He’s talking about an aging artist, who has been ignored by the young people.

The story of Orphée has been made into more operas, novels, and plays than nearly any other story. There’s an interesting twist to Orphée, because he goes back to his dumb wife. The libretto says that he has to go back to his daily muck. So he becomes an artist and an ordinary man. This is an important part of the Cocteau story. He is not an artistic snob at all. He’s telling us that the artist has feet of clay. Artists are human beings. They make mistakes. They have stupid families. They have stupid lives. And, in regards to immortality, it’s not the artist who is immortal. It’s their work that is immortal. If we get caught up in the romance of the story, we may miss that.

MH: In the film, Orphée seems to be more in love with his art than with his wife. He always seems to be going back to his radio.

Glass: I would fault Cocteau with that. I think that Cocteau didn’t like girls all that much.

[Laughter]

It’s not a small thing. I think that he thought of domestic life with a kid as a nightmare. When he sends Orphée and Eurydice back to the ordinary, he sends them back to a world that he himself would never contemplate. He never had a wife and a kid. He really thought that was the pits. So his idea of human suffering is what most of us are trying to do.

MH: Yet the notion of immortality being in the artist’s work does tie in with his obsession with words.

Glass: That’s a really important part. The artist and ordinary people share the world that we live in. When we get up in the morning we put on our pants one leg at a time. Artists don’t walk on water. One of the things I like about the opera is that Orphée has a dumb wife and dumb life and he’s worried that some young poet is displacing him, and there’s a feminist against him. The feminist is a real character – right from the 1950s. I knew that because when I first got married, I got married to a woman who I didn’t realize was a feminist. She was a wonderful director, JoAnne Akalaitis, and we got along fine. But the only way to survive my marriage with her was to become a feminist. I became a feminist, too!

[Laughter]

That’s when you can’t fight them, you join them. But Cocteau makes the feminist character into kind of a bitch. So Cocteau has his own perceptions and brings them right into the story.

Yet the ending of the opera is very curious, because Orphée asks his wife if they are going to be together and she says yes; and he says forever? And she says yes, forever. And she’s lying. That night she has him tied down, and leaves him.

Cocteau was a complicated person. He put everything into that story. It has all of these little nuances. It tickles your imagination to see this thing and all of the weird things that go on.

BK: There is a lack of resolution at the end of the movie that leaves a question.

Glass: According to Auric, Cocteau didn’t put the film music where it was meant to be. It is Auric’s music, but Cocteau played the director’s trick, which directors always do to film composers.

The reality is that the film belongs to the director. The opera belongs to the composer. That’s the rule. Composers like opera because they get to say I want this director, I want this singer, and so on.

BC: You went outside the establishment to set up your own ensemble. Portland is a indie rock town, but we do have a thriving classical music scene. Do you have any advice for young classically trained musicians?

Glass: My advice has always been that you are better off by yourself than going through the establishment. Basically, the establishment’s price is too high. I never taught school, but I did give talks at schools. And every school seemed to have a composer there teaching counterpoint. There had been lots of applicants, and he got the job. He’d be at a university in some forlorn place, and I’d ask him, “What are you doing here?” He’d say, “I’ve got to pay my bills.” It’s funny, but I never worried about that. I had day jobs until I was 41 so I didn’t worry about that.

In fairness to the young people today, in the 60s and 70s, you could make a living much more easily. I could work three days a week and raise a family. You can’t do that anymore. A young man or woman who comes to New York has to get a place with three other people. Now the economic conditions are much harsher.

I have to be careful about advising students to do what I did. In the case of Nico Muhly, I thought that he was so talented he wouldn’t have any trouble. He didn’t need to be wasting his time at school. Nico worked for me for eight years while also attending Juilliard, and he is a really gifted, young man. There’s no technique that he needs to be taught. Basically he just needs to put his ideas in the sun and water them three times a day.

I did feel that the music establishment is a self-serving organization. It’s a membership-driven organization that takes care of its members and screws everyone else. I was never a part of it, and I did just fine.

In my studio, I have two or three apprentices. They stay for two or three years. We pay them. At a certain point, they are trained well enough that if someone else can pay them more, we call that graduating.

[Laughter]

The studio is sort of like the atelier system with a painter and apprentices. Assistants did the big picture and the painter put in the trees. Rubens did that.

BC: You had a mentor with John Cage.

Glass: Yes and no. John and I knew each other quite well. He had residencies but was never on the faculty at a school. More important mentors came from the jazz world. The jazz world really was the avant-garde world. Those are the people who didn’t make any money and lived for their art. Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, and John Coltrane – these were dedicated people, and not just black people but white musicians also. It wasn’t a case of race or gender even. They didn’t have the protection of the academic world – at least not until recently. Some of them can be in teaching positions now.

BC: Cage set up a percussion ensemble. Was that in a way a model for you?

Glass: We liked each other very well, and I saw him many times. But he used to say to me. ‘Philip, too many notes!’

[Big laughter]

Glass: And I would say to him, ‘John, I’m one of your children whether you like it or not.’

Cage was independent, and I liked that about him. Nancarrow was, too. A handful of people were. You may ask what is dedication. Dedication is worrying about your art and not paying the bills. You do it somehow, I know, but it’s very hard now in the current economic climate.

MH: In the jazz world, there’s sort of the idea that if you make life easier that changes the music.

Glass: I have to say that there may be something to that. But in my line of business, anyone who can make a living you just have to say Hats Off. You might think that success compromises integrity. But integrity is a very deceitful commodity. For Paul Simon, integrity is writing popular music. You can’t say that he lacked integrity because he had a lot of hits. These are complicated questions, and we tend to be judgmental about things. We idealize certain people who had a hard time and did their art, and I do that too. But that might be a deception that we play with each other. I know some fantastic players walking around the streets of New York, and they’ll tell me ‘Nobody knows who I am, but I’ve played with this guy and that guy.’ They can’t get across the border to Canada, because the Canadians think that they are street people.

—

At this point, our roundtable came to an end because Glass wanted to spend part of the afternoon working on a new composition. So, we thanked him for giving us his time, and he signed my CD of his music (Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra), posed for pictures, and chatted for a few more minutes.