Words Without Music: A Memoir (45 page)

If the theater hadn’t been making that renovation, I would have had a full orchestra complete with violins, and
Akhnaten
would not have achieved its unique sound. Finally, the part of Akhnaten would be sung by a countertenor, a high male voice. His first note doesn’t come until the third scene of the first act, and when he finally opens his mouth and the audience hears him, out comes the sound of a mezzo-soprano. I wanted the audience to think, at that moment, Oh my god, who can this be?

THE TRILOGY OF
EINSTEIN/SATYAGRAHA/AKHNATEN
was completed by 1984, and finally performed in 1986 twice as a complete cycle by the Stuttgart Opera. My life as an opera composer had really begun by the early 1980s, and opera composing remained thereafter a regular part of my work. During those years I undertook another practice which was meant to protect and even facilitate the life of these new works. Once an opera was completed, I arranged for it to have two different productions in the same year. I had noticed that generally it is difficult, if not impossible, to judge the quality of a new opera apart from its initial production. In fact, they are not at all the same. A mediocre opera can have a brilliant production and the reverse is equally true. It’s for that reason that it might take decades for the quality of an opera to be fairly understood. My solution was to have two productions of a new work done more or less at the same time, or at least in the same season. I didn’t expect that the same people would see them both. But, at the least, it would double the chances of having a successful “first night” and might provide a better vantage point from which to judge the work.

Still, surprising things could happen.
Satyagraha
had two good productions in 1980—one directed by David Pountney and conducted by Bruce Ferden in Rotterdam, the other directed by Achim Freyer in Stuttgart, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. Not many people saw both, but I did and it was an important learning experience for me. I began to understand how the variables of a production—design, direction, casting, and performance—could so decisively impact a work. But knowing more didn’t automatically lead to greater success.
Akhnaten
, for example, was a big roller-coaster ride, first with the production directed by David Freeman and designed by Bob Israel that was well received in Houston, generally dismissed as a failure in New York, but hailed as a huge success in London.
Akhnaten
, in the memory of English operagoers, was a big success. In the memory of New York operagoers, it was a complete disaster. On the other hand, the Achim Freyer production in Stuttgart was a success from the first night and stayed that way thereafter.

This is what I know about new operas: the only safeguard for the composer is to have several productions. Of course, the score—and that includes the libretto—has to be strong. Then the matters of directing, designing, casting, performing, and conducting come into play. With these many variables, the results can vary tremendously. However, if the work survives, say, its first decade (and most operas will never get that far), we might begin to form an idea of the quality and stature of the work in its third or fourth production. If we think through the process carefully, that is exactly what has always happened in the history of opera. Take
Carmen
or
Madame Butterfly
, or even
Porgy and Bess
, all of which had very shaky beginnings. And yet, all three have had thousands of productions since. What has happened is the following: at some point, when the productions have reached a very, very high number, the work itself has separated from
all
the productions and has taken on an independence of its own. It has now achieved a kind of platonic reality, as if it now can exist all by itself. Of course, that is an illusion as well, but an illusion that has become consensual and, therefore generally shared. I doubt whether any composer has lived long enough to have seen that happen to his or her work, with the possible exception of Verdi, who did live a very long time and happened to be, besides, an outstanding genius composer.

DURING THE YEARS WORKING ON
SATYAGRAHA
and
Akhnaten
, I had begun reading Doris Lessing’s work, starting with her first novel
The Grass Is Singing
and continuing with
The Golden Notebook
. After that I read the entire five-volume
Children of Violence
series, ending with
The Four-Gated City
. When the
Canopus in Argos: Archives
series, which has been erroneously labeled as her science fiction novels, began coming out, I read them practically as she was writing them. These new books immediately struck me, and right away I began thinking of work that I could make with them. In one way they were close to the work on social and personal transformation that had occupied me with the first opera trilogy. Especially in
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
and
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
, I found the characters both more fragile and, ultimately, more resilient. I knew I had to meet this remarkable writer.

As it turned out, John Rockwell, a well-known writer and critic in the cultural world, knew Mrs. Lessing’s work and how to reach her, and he made the first contact through Bob Gottlieb, her editor at Knopf. I then wrote to her directly and asked if I could meet her. I didn’t say anything about an opera, just that I was a composer. She agreed to meet and suggested I let her know when next I would be in London.

“I’ll be there next week,” I immediately replied.

This was during the time that Ida was in the nursing home in Baltimore. Recently she had been in and out of a coma. We had no idea how long she would last, but I took a chance and flew to London. The morning after I arrived, she passed away, and I called Mrs. Lessing and told her I wouldn’t be able to meet her for lunch as planned. However, she thought that since I had a few hours left in London, we should go ahead and meet anyway.

Doris was then in her midsixties, a woman with gray hair gathered in a bun. She had bright eyes and was lively in her movements. She did not have a matronly appearance, but more the look and dignity of an academic or an intellectual, which she decidedly was. There was nothing sharp or mean about her. She could easily be anyone’s favorite slightly elderly aunt or cousin. From our first moments together, we slipped quickly into an easy, firm friendship.

“I’m glad we could meet, but why have your plans changed?”

“A death in my family. I’ll be taking a plane late this afternoon.”

“Who?”

“My mother.”

“Oh. . . . Did you know her very well?”

I was completely stunned by her question. We spent the next several hours, until I left for the airport, talking about my mother. She was a good listener and, though she was younger than Ida by ten years or more, I already thought of her as a woman of my mother’s generation.

On later visits we eventually got around to talking about doing an opera based on
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
. Doris had a house in West Hampstead where she lived with her son Peter, a man about ten years younger than me. From then on, when I came to London, I would stay with her. Her home was full of books and paintings. Some might call it bohemian. For me it was always just comfortable. I knew she had lots of friends in London, but I hardly knew them.

One of our favorite things was to take a cab to nearby Hampstead Heath and walk around the flower gardens. We often had lunch in the little restaurant there, or sometimes in one of the Indian restaurants near her house. We spent our time talking about books, theater, opera, politics—everything and nothing. When I was visiting her shortly after she was given the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, she told me she had no idea it had even happened and was coming home one afternoon to find her street filled with press and police. She thought there had been a robbery of some kind in the neighborhood and was taken completely by surprise to find out they were all there to see her.

During the 1980s and ’90s, when Doris was in New York, she would spend part of her visit with Bob Gottlieb and his family and part at my home with my family. On one visit, she arrived with a sprained ankle and only got around with great difficulty. During her stay with me I was in the midst of rehearsals and recording and had to leave the house each morning. Doris was sleeping on a couch in our downstairs living room and said she would be fine there all day, but she would be happy to have a few books to read. I knew Doris was famous for being a speed reader who always knew everything that everybody else was writing, so I left her a stack of at least ten to twelve books—all young American fiction writers.

When I got back about four that afternoon, Doris was sitting up reading a newspaper.

“Doris, did you get through those books?”

“Oh yes. Read them all. Some pretty good stuff in there!”

The premiere of
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
took place at the Houston Grand Opera in 1988, and Doris stayed in Houston for quite a lot of the rehearsal period. The local Jaguar dealer had lent me a white convertible, and after rehearsals Doris and I would load it up with as many cast members as possible and head out to look for local Tex-Mex food. We ended up in some rough neighborhoods, but I think our Jaguar somehow afforded an unexpected protection. No tourists would be dumb enough to travel around Houston the way we did, so we must have seemed very smart, well connected, or both.

At some point during the rehearsal, real friction began developing between the opera director and our designer, Eiko Ishioko, whom I had worked with only a few years before on the Paul Schrader film
Mishima
. I told Doris during one rehearsal that I was very concerned that these difficulties were getting in the way of their work.

After not making any comment for some time, Doris said, “Can’t you see what’s going on?”

“No. What do you mean?”

“Those two are having a lovers’ quarrel.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The director and the designer, of course. They are obviously coming to the end of a romance, and Eiko will not be pushed around by him.”

“No, no, Doris, you’re making that all up.”

“Oh, you can’t see anything!”

“No, you’re making it up, just as if it were happening in one of your books.”

“You’re hopeless!” she countered.

I never found out whether Doris’s suspicions were correct, but in any case things got worse before they got better.

Doris and I would work on two operas together, based on her novels
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
and
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
. She loved spending time in the theater, and, as long as she was able to travel she came to as many rehearsals and opening nights as she could. That could also include auditions and discussions with designers. She didn’t say much about the music, though I do think she liked it, and she trusted me to work with her words. In 2008, when she was in her nineties and wasn’t leaving her house much, she came out to the English National Opera to see
Satyagraha
. She was still getting around by herself then and even refused to let me leave the theater to help her get a cab to take her home.

I saw Doris for the last time not long after that, and then in 2013, she died. Because I met Doris the day my mother died, she is, in my mind, still somehow connected to Ida, though I don’t have the words or insight to unravel that connection.

During the almost thirty years of knowing Doris, besides the two operas we had completed, we had begun talking about a third based on
Memoirs of a Survivor
. The main character of the story, an older woman living alone in postapocalyptic London, was perhaps a little too close to her. Still, we were slowly moving ahead. Up to this point, however, it appears that these words are my “Memoir” and I have become “the Survivor.”

AS MENTIONED EARLIER,
the elements of music-theater and opera are music, image, movement, and text. These are the earth, air, fire, and water of performances, all of which will have some of the four. But only in music-theater, film, and opera do all four exist in a more or less equal way. Over the past forty years I have now written twenty-five operas, among them:
Mattogrosso
(1989), by director-writer Gerald Thomas, with designer Daniela Thomas;
The Voyage
(1992), commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus reaching the Americas, directed by David Pountney, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang; and
Waiting for the Barbarians
(2005), directed by Guy Montavon, with a libretto by Christopher Hampton.

The joy of working in the world of opera is impossible for many composers to put aside, and I am no different.

MUSIC AND FILM

I
N THE MIDDLE OF WORKING ON THE SCORE FOR
SATYAGRAHA
, I GOT A
phone call from a filmmaker named Godfrey Reggio.

“Hello, Philip. I’m a friend of Rudy Wurlitzer’s. I’m calling you about a film I’m working on. I’ve spent the last year listening to all kinds of music and I’ve decided that I need your music in my film.”

“Thanks, Godfrey. I would be happy to meet you, but I don’t write film music.”

That was true, with the exception of the film about Mark di Suvero, which I had recently completed, in 1977.

The next day I got a call from Rudy himself.

“Phil, this guy has come here from Santa Fe and he’s not going to leave New York until you look at his reel. So just go look at it, say no, and he’ll go back home. Besides, I’m sure you’ll like him.”

A day or two later I met Godfrey at Jonas Mekas’s Cinematheque on Wooster Street. Godfrey had a film montage about ten minutes long that would eventually become the opening of his film,
Koyaanisqatsi
. He told me that he had made two versions, one with an electronic score from Japan (he didn’t mention the composer’s name) and the second with my music. After viewing both reels he said, “As you can see, your music works much better with the picture than the electronic score.”