by Andrew Ford
Of course if people listen to A Singing Quilt and hear a ‘reconciliation piece’, then that is what it is. Music is made in the mind of the listener as much as in the mind of the composer. I was happy to find I had composed such a work, even if it hadn’t been my intention. This was an extreme case, but I often find that I don’t know what I am doing until I have done it, and from conversations with colleagues in all areas of the arts, this seems to be a common experience, particularly if the work has come out well. It’s that unselfconscious state, once more, and just as it can be brought about by the use of found material, like a folk song, or images such as paintings, so words can do it – it might be simply a title (as with Harbour) or a story (Rauha), but it might be the sound of voices, as with A Singing Quilt. It’s especially true when one is setting words to music. I know a lot of composers who go searching for words to use in vocal pieces. I find that words nearly always come to me.
Sometimes one text guides me to another and I end up composing music to a small anthology of writings, as Britten often did. In somnia, Last Words and Learning to Howl are all examples of pieces that employ texts from different centuries and cultures, St John of the Cross rubbing shoulders with A.D. Hope, Dorothy Porter with Emily Brontë, Sappho with Elizabeth Smart.
I already knew Elizabeth Smart’s writing from her novella-cum-memoir, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, when in 1982 I found a slim volume of her poetry in a Yorkshire bookshop. It was called A Bonus. Several of the poems were about the business of writing, and I thought they’d make a sequence for music. One was called ‘A Terrible Whiteness’ – which struck me as a good title for the cycle as a whole – and described ‘the horror / Of the blank page’, something felt by composers as much as writers.
I sent her a letter via her publisher but heard nothing back. Not every poet wants her hard-won words put to someone else’s music, and Smart’s words seemed especially hard-won. Since I didn’t have her permission, I gave up the idea. But in early 1984, on my first visit back to England from Australia, there was a reply from the writer. It turned out she’d been in Canada (she was in fact Canadian), standing in for Margaret Atwood on sabbatical, and by the time she returned to England I’d left for Australia. She said she was happy for me to set the poems to music.
A year later, I was back again in England with my five-song sequence A Terrible Whiteness, for mezzo-soprano and piano, just finished. I rang Elizabeth and we arranged to meet for a lunchtime drink at the Coach and Horses in Soho.
‘You’ll recognise me,’ she said, ‘I’m about a hundred and wild looking.’ And it was true. I spotted her as soon as I walked in. She was seated at a table, wearing a workman’s donkey-jacket. We got on well and plied each other with Bloody Marys, then went for pizza with two of her poet friends, Anthony Cronin and David Wright. I had a volume of poems by Christopher Reid in my bag – I was in the midst of setting some of them to music in Sacred Places – and Elizabeth asked David, who was deaf but had the sonorous voice of a prophet, to read one of the poems aloud. There was some sceptical talk about ‘these Martian poets’, but Reid’s ‘Numen’ met with the older poets’ approval. After pizza, Elizabeth and I repaired to her son Christopher’s flat, taking a small detour so she could show me the blue plaque to William Blake just around the corner. When we got to the flat, she dug out some carbon copies of new poems to give me, along with a dog-eared copy of The Mid Century: English Poetry 1940–60, which included the work of George Barker, the father of her four children. By now, we had hatched a plan to write some cabaret songs together. I mentioned that I’d been commissioned to compose something for the Dutch singer Marianne Kweksilber, and Elizabeth said she’d always wanted to write song lyrics, especially ‘The Grand Central Station Blues’.
It seemed too good to be true, and, alas, it was. Occasionally I would write from Australia to ask her how the lyrics were coming along, and sometimes there’d be a postcard from Elizabeth: ‘SORRY SORRY SORRY!’ Finally, after a silence of several months, a letter arrived from her son, Sebastian Barker, informing me of his mother’s death, ‘at my brother’s flat, close to where the poet Blake lived’.
One of the advantages of meeting Elizabeth had been the chance to discuss my musical setting with her. She liked the fact that the title song, which comes first, began with voice alone, the piano eventually joining in with tentative single notes, like a one-finger typist. She was also amused that in the central, third song, ‘Trying to Write’, the mezzo-soprano would be obliged to sing ‘Fuck off!’. (At the first performance in the foyer of the National Library in Canberra, Elizabeth Campbell sang the expletive with feeling, but at the Sydney Festival she sang ‘Get lost!’. When I asked why she’d chickened out, she told me she’d spotted her elderly singing teacher in the front row.)
Some poets whose words I’ve set to music have been less sanguine about the possible results than Elizabeth Smart. The venerable Anne Ridler graciously gave me permission to use part of her poem ‘Choosing a Name’ in Dancing with Smoke, a cycle of songs about childhood for tenor and harp, written for Gerald English’s seventieth-birthday concert (at which he performed thirteen world premieres). But when I sent her a recording of the performance, with Gerry and Marshall McGuire, she replied somewhat less graciously, saying how very much she disliked my music. Writers are often shocked by how their words sound when set to music, even when they are sympathetic to the composer’s work.
My meeting Elizabeth Smart had one other advantage. I was able to check a typo in one of the published poems, and so, on this occasion at least, avoid setting the wrong word. I wish I could say I’d never set wrong words, but there are several instances of my doing this. When the music is coming out just right, you are in the world of the piece, and a good set of words quickly brings on that longed-for unselfconscious state. Paradoxically, this means you might lose sight of the precise details of the text you’re setting. As the words turn into songs, the music takes over and you can begin to set words that aren’t really there. Some writers notice and correct you. Lorrie Moore pointed out that at the start of Learning to Howl, the soprano was singing ‘the sunflowers knocked bent by a deer’, whereas in her novella, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, she had written ‘knocked bent by deer’ (no ‘a’). But some writers are forgiving. Craig Raine, who, as a critic, has a reputation for eviscerating sloppy colleagues, has very sweetly never mentioned the fact that I accidentally omitted half a line of his poem in A Martian Sends a Postcard Home.
In writing music-theatre or opera, you have to change words. Sometimes there are simply more than you need for a particular scene; sometimes a word won’t sing. It might be that it has its stress in the wrong place for the music, or has too many syllables, or has the wrong vowel sound for the high note you want to write. I have had only cordial collaborations with my librettists, all of whom have been happy for me to change their words – wittingly or not. Not all writers are so obliging to composers. When Elisabeth Lutyens was working with Elias Canetti on an operatic adaptation of his play, The Numbered, she rang him one day to ask how he would feel about a line change. There was a loud crash at the other end of the phone, followed by silence. After a few moments, Canetti’s wife came on the line.
‘Elias has fainted,’ she told Lutyens.
Television writers make particularly good librettists, and part of it, no doubt, is that they’re not precious. Indeed, they’re used to network managers, producers, directors and actors riding roughshod over their scripts. At Victorian Opera’s headquarters for the first week of rehearsals on Rembrandt’s Wife, Sue Smith, one of Australia’s most celebrated screenwriters, kept marvelling at the fact she was being asked for her opinion. But there’s more to it than this. A lot of inexperienced librettists think they have to explain everything and that their words should be poetic and rather grand. In fact none of this is true, and TV writers know it. Television drama is about showing, not telling, and often the most compelling scenes have very few words, sometimes none
at all. As a TV writer, you must leave room for the camera to do its work, moving in slowly on a face or pulling back to reveal a room. In opera, the music does the camera’s work, and sometimes the composer requires only a few words for a scene.
A good libretto can take you over utterly. It will oblige you to work in certain ways, and some of those ways will be new to you. With Rembrandt’s Wife, I made certain decisions in advance, particularly that my ensemble of nine players would have some of the dark hues of Rembrandt’s paintings, bass clarinet, bassoon and French horn to the fore, as well as echoes of seventeenth-century music, lute and viols replaced by harp and low strings (there are no violins). Beyond that, though, I forgot all about the historical period and wrote the music that made best dramatic sense of the words. I was determined it would be a ‘singing’ opera, that’s to say there would be no speech, no extended vocal techniques à la Eight Songs for a Mad King, and as little formal ‘recitative’ as I could get away with. So although there are not many songs in Rembrandt’s Wife, nevertheless even the conversational music is quite melodic. My guide in this was Puccini.
I’ve never cared for the sound of Puccini’s music – all those sugary vocal lines doubled in the orchestra give me musical indigestion – and there are no traces of his style in my opera. But in the opera house I am always impressed by Puccini’s stagecraft, the way he doesn’t muck about but jumps straight into the action, and then the way drama pours out in a stream of melody. It would be hard not to find La Bohème more obviously tuneful than Rembrandt’s Wife, but from the point of view of musical drama Puccini was my model. Even so, the music for Rembrandt’s Wife is often quite tonal and occasionally, you’d have to say, romantic; at the first read-through I was astonished at its lyricism, and my librettist was gratifyingly teary. As with the shades of Ligeti and Lutosławski in Manhattan Epiphanies, none of this was intentional, because I wasn’t thinking about style. In Sue’s libretto I had found another source of unselfconsciousness, and the style took care of itself.
Opera composers are like directors. As the composer, you lift the librettist’s words off the page and breathe life and meaning into them – possibly a meaning the librettist never intended. Your music positions the text in time; you say how slowly or quickly a speech is delivered; you say which are the important words – by placing them on a high note or underlining them in the score or having a singer repeat them; you put in the pauses; you say how long there is for a singer to move from point A to point B, because you have composed six seconds or sixty seconds of music to cover it. And in attending to these things, in making the drama as vivid as you can, you forget about musical style. That’s what happened with Rembrandt’s Wife. ‘Lyrical’, ‘romantic’, ‘accessible’ and ‘unashamedly accessible’ were some of the critics’ adjectives. It was enough to make me wonder if I was still a modern composer. Fortunately, someone brought to my attention a blog post that called the piece ‘cacophonous modernism’ or some such. I was relieved.
Because opera composers do so much of the director’s job for them, it is small wonder that directors go looking for ways to stamp their personality on a piece. One of the most common tricks is to uncover what they believe to be the psychological subtext of a work, and make that the principal motif (so of course it’s no longer subtext). In Kasper Holten’s staging of Szymanowski’s King Roger for Opera Australia, the action took place in and around a giant head, because the director had decided the drama was in King Roger’s head. That sort of thing.
In Whispers, the music-theatre piece that Rodney Hall and I wrote in 1990 for Gerald English, a conductor attempts to rehearse the finale of Mahler’s fourth symphony and in the process reveals himself to be unhinged. The stage is a rehearsal room, the orchestra with their backs to the audience, the tenor/conductor facing us from his podium. All the music proceeds from Mahler, and at first the conductor seems simply to be rehearsing the piece, singing along as conductors will, especially when there is a vocal part and the soloist is late, which is the conceit in Whispers. Our conductor’s an unpredictable fellow, bumptious to a fault, who likes stopping the rehearsal to tell stories. From time to time he says or sings something that seems only to matter to him, but then conductors do that too. Gradually, as Mahler gives way to Ford, and recorded voices intrude, we realise all is not well, and by the end of the half-hour piece our conductor is a broken man.
Whispers is tricky to pull off, especially for the tenor, who, in addition to playing a man going crazy while singing difficult music, must actually conduct the whole piece. The first production, at Sydney’s Seymour Centre, was to be entrusted to Barrie Kosky, a 23-year-old wunderkind. He and I had had breakfast a few months earlier and got along well; the rehearsals also went well, right up until the one before the dress rehearsal. That’s when the eleven members of the Seymour Group who made up the ‘orchestra’ were fitted for their costumes. It seemed they were to wear pyjamas, as would Gerry, except that he would also be wearing a shredded tail coat. Rodney’s idea was that the piece should begin as naturalistically as possible, with players coming on in everyday clothes, as if for a rehearsal. Then, as the piece unfolded, we would gradually realise the conductor was deranged. Barrie’s Whispers, however, was to be set in a mental hospital. There would be no gradual revelation of the conductor’s state, no dramatic arc; the curtain would go up and the audience would think: ‘Oh, right, they’re all mad.’
Gerry, Rodney and I repaired to the kitchen of my terraced house, just round the corner in Chippendale. Rodney wanted to print pamphlets denouncing the production. He and I would stand outside the Seymour Centre and hand them to the first-night audience as they arrived.
‘You won’t have to do that,’ Gerry said. ‘If they don’t scrap the pyjamas, I’m not going back.’
He wasn’t being a prima donna; he was defending the work. For Gerry, it always came down to fidelity to the score, and there was nothing in this score about pyjamas. Moreover, after a full week of rehearsals with Barrie, and with the dress rehearsal twenty-four hours away, this was the first that Gerry, the star of the show, had heard about the costumes. He felt betrayed; this was not the production he thought he’d been working on.
I was given the task of conveying all this to the director and designer. Barrie argued his corner, but I explained that Gerry was simply not returning until the costumes were dropped. Barrie gave way with good grace, though really he had little choice.
Then came the opening night, and a new surprise. At the climax of the piece, with Gerry singing a wild vocal line, conducting the thorniest passage of ensemble music in the work and apparently going off his trolley, a loud hissing started up on stage, so loud it was hard to hear the music. All around the conductor’s podium, plastic sex dolls began to inflate. It was one thing to keep elements of the production secret until the final stages of the rehearsal, quite another to distract the performer during the premiere of a demanding new piece that required all his concentration. Gerry was furious. If the dolls inflated the following night, he announced, he would stab them all with his conductor’s baton. The next night, the dolls had gone.
Perhaps I should say that I have the highest regard for Barrie Kosky, and did at the time. I also like him personally, and our conversations on The Music Show over the years have been full of ideas and wise insights. If Barrie wants to stage Nabucco in a sea of shoes or interpolate Cole Porter songs in The Coronation of Poppea, I say good luck to him. Apart from the fact that these productions were theatrically compelling, Nabucco, Porter and Poppea can look after themselves. They existed before Barrie came along and will exist when he’s gone. But it’s different with the first performance of a brand new work. This is hardly the moment for reinterpretation. I was concerned that Barrie’s production would spell the end for Whispers. The critics, however, were kind, Rosemary Neill in the Australian concluding that a good piece had been sabotaged by wilful staging, and Whispers had a number of subsequent productions.
It had been Gerry’s id
ea that I write him a mad scene, and mine that we make him into a conductor, but usually the subjects of my operas and music-theatre pieces have come from my librettists. Graham Devlin proposed we use the life of Edgar Allan Poe and, later, creation myths bound by the Schopenhauerian notion of the ‘World Knot’ (in The World Knot, for Sydney Grammar School). It was Barbara Blackman’s idea to do a piece about Icarus (Parabola), though she had been inspired by hearing my violin piece, Like Icarus Ascending. Margaret Morgan suggested both Casanova (Casanova Confined, for Lyndon Terracini) and Freud (Night and Dreams), and Sue Smith came up with Rembrandt. But it was Anni’s idea that I ask our friend Cathy Strickland – another TV writer – to collaborate on a piece about William Crotch.
Anni has a remarkable knack of coming up with ideas for pieces. She told me the story that led to Rauha and has been a constant sounding board. Blitz, for instance, was a piece we dreamt up together. But usually she just announces her ideas, and they are always good.
‘What should I write next?’ I once asked her in a restaurant – this conversation always seems to happen when we’re eating. ‘What’s my next big project?’
