Oh Boy, An Opera About Appomatox

[Ralph]

If only Pavarotti had lived long enough to portray GEN Grant in this opera, with Domingo as Lee.

*****

SFGate
Philip Glass' 'Appomattox' to have world premiere in San Francisco

Jesse Hamlin

Sunday, September 23, 2007
Philip Glass' "Appomattox" to have world premiere

Philip Glass was a young boy in Baltimore when all the men in the family went off to serve in World War II.

"My memory of the war is the women, the sorrow of women, the anxiety of women," says the celebrated composer, whose new opera, "Appomattox," delves into the final days of the bloody Civil War and the nature of the two opposing generals who crafted the surrender that ended the slaughter. Glass bookends the piece with a prologue and epilogue sung solely by women, among them the wives of Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln, and former slave Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln's psychic seamstress.

Commissioned by the San Francisco Opera, where it premieres Oct. 5, "Appomattox" centers on the historic meeting of Grant and Lee on April 9, 1865, in Wilbur McLean's brick home in the Virginia town of Appomattox Court House. But it also spirals into the future. In Act 2, the main action is intercut with scenes of racial strife from the Reconstruction and civil rights eras, which Glass and librettist Christopher Hampton see as the fallout from the nation-rending conflict that killed more than 600,000 people.

"The Civil War is the biggest story we have. It's our story, America's story," Glass says. Grant and Lee spoke of reconciliation, "but what they were hoping for didn't happen. The civil rights movement grew out of the Civil War, there's no question about it. The war never really ended."

An energetic man with blue eyes and tousled brown hair, he's sitting on a couch at the Opera House in a green shirt and black trousers, answering questions and asking a few. He riffs for an hour on his new work and the far-ranging projects and collaborators - Allen Ginsberg, Twyla Tharp, Paul Simon, Yo-Yo Ma, Ravi Shankar, West African musician Foday Musa Suso and others - that have kept his fires burning for decades.

Glass's 70th birthday is being celebrated in the Bay Area with a string of performances and events honoring the prolific composer, whose catalog includes more than 20 operas, among them the landmark 1976 "Einstein on the Beach," a poetic abstraction created with director-designer Robert Wilson, and the stirring 1980 work about Gandhi's nonviolent struggle, "Satyagraha." He's written symphonies, concertos, string quartets and dozens of film scores, from Errol Morris documentaries to features like "The Hours" and "Notes on a Scandal."

Friday at Herbst Theatre on a San Francisco Performances bill, Glass will play piano in a recital of his solo and chamber pieces, including his new "Songs and Poems for Cello," performed by cellist Wendy Sutter. Percussionist Mick Rossi joins them Friday and Oct. 9 at Stanford, where Glass' ensemble offers the West Coast premiere of his "Book of Longing," based on the poetry and art of songwriter Leonard Cohen (Stanford Lively Arts co-commissioned it).

"Everything we're doing here was written in the last 18 months," says Glass, who composes every day when he's not on a plane. When he found himself awake this day at 4 a.m., he climbed out of bed and rewrote things from "Appomattox" that didn't sound right at rehearsal. He likes to work at the piano, but the little hotel table will do.

"I've done this for 50 years," he says with a laugh, "so I can hear a little bit. I can pretty much visualize the sounds." He's been tweaking the vocal lines for "the battling baritones" of Lee and Grant, sung respectively by Dwayne Croft and Andrew Shore, and the orchestration. Dubbed a minimalist because of the trademark repetitive structures on which he built much of his hypnotic music, Glass has emerged as something of an orchestral colorist in the past decade or so (a double-bass clarinet plumbs the depths here). He's used the long rehearsal time opera affords to develop his palette.

"I've got a lot of colors in my box that I didn't have when I was a so-called minimalist," Glass says. "I got them the old-fashioned way - I went out and learned how to do it."

The cast of this opera wears period garb and sings in 19th century American English, but in a stark contemporary production directed by the daring Robert Woodruff (making his San Francisco Opera debut), designed by Riccardo Hernandez and conducted by Glass associate Dennis Russell Davies. Glass got inspired to write it after reading about Grant and Lee.

"I was struck by their character, their moral stamina," he says, by the dignity and generous spirit they brought to the negotiations that sealed Lee's surrender. Hampton's libretto draws on the letters the generals exchanged before they met - just hours after the South's final, failed attempt to break through the noose of the Army of the Potomac after months of horrific fighting - and what they said that well-documented day. Grant let the defeated Confederates take their horses home to help them plant crops to sustain their families through the winter.

The unimposing Yankee had arrived at Appomattox in mud-stained battle uniform and boots, in contrast to tall, elegant Lee in his new dress uniform with ceremonial sword. Grant is often portrayed as a drunk whose life was full of failure - his businesses flopped, his presidential administrations were rotten with corruption - but Glass sees more.

"Grant was a man of tremendous intellectual scope," he says. "It occurred to me that there are no people in public life of his and Lee's stature. I don't mean just in America, where we always have to beat up on ourselves, I mean globally. We don't have statesmen anymore, we have politicians."

The music sometimes suggests the sounds of the period - fife and drum, the distant rattle of sleigh bells, the percussive clip-clop of horses - but it's pure Glass in its sonic layering and propulsion. Woodruff, who directed "Sound of a Voice," the 2003 chamber opera Glass wrote with librettist David Henry Hwang, says: "He's using elements of Americana and elements of Philip Glass." The opera is set in 1865 but "uses a contemporary theatrical vocabulary, so it speaks to the moment we're alive, too."

The chorus sings a civil rights ballad Glass and Hampton wrote with Bob Dylan as one of the reference points. It's an ode to Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young black man who died eight days after being shot in the belly by an Alabama state trooper during a 1965 voting-rights demonstration. And there's a tune Glass wrote to a psalm that freed slaves sang to Lincoln when he entered the fallen Confederate capital of Richmond.

"But I didn't set it to music the way it would've been heard in a Methodist church," Glass says. And the marching anthem he wrote to words sung in 1864 by a black Arkansas Union brigade doesn't use "quaint chords." The score "alludes to vernacular music, and yet at the same time I feel it's still personal. I've done work in the fields of popular music and art music and I think I know where that line is."

He's written an aria - "a kind of classical opera moment when everything stops and somebody comes out and sings a song" - for Julia Grant, who sings of her husband's travails (Glass suggested Hampton change the word "bourbon" to "whiskey" because it's easier to sing).

The only music he didn't write is "Tenting Tonight," a Civil War tune heard in Act 1. "We don't have those kinds of songs anymore," Glass says. "You have protest songs, but you don't have patriotic songs about Iraq or Vietnam that soldiers sing. I wanted the trajectory of the opera to be from something written in 1864 to something written in 2007."

Glass sought out Hampton, a noted English dramatist and screenwriter who wrote the play "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" and adapted it for the movie "Dangerous Liaisons," because the composer wanted to bring a fresh, non-American eye to the subject. Hampton has an ear for American English. He co-wrote the book and lyrics to the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Sunset Boulevard," wrote an American version of his English translation of Yazmina Reza's play "Art" when it came to New York and collaborated with Glass on the 2005 opera "Waiting for the Barbarians."

"I really knew nothing about the Civil War, except what everybody knows," says Hampton, a genial, soft-spoken man with long blond hair. "I'd never read anything but 'Gone With the Wind,' " he adds with a smile. He quickly got up to speed, reading books by Shelby Foote, Bruce Catton and other Civil War historians.

"I particularly became interested in the black perspective on this war, which was supposedly being fought on their behalf," says Hampton, who wrote the words before hearing a note of music. Slavery was abolished, of course, which was huge, but African Americans "didn't find themselves in a very good place." In fact, in many ways, quite soon after the Civil War, real institutionalized racism began to rear its head.

"I was very keen on the idea of exploring the contemporary resonances of all this. I thought what Philip said about the civilized nature of (Grant and Lee) would be made even more interesting if contrasted with the unforeseen catastrophic results that come from any such well-intentioned arrangement. The damage done by this appalling war was going to resonate all the way down to today." The writer calls Act 2 "quite savage," which he hadn't imagined it would be when he wrote it.

The next day, he and Glass hear the singers and orchestra rehearse the piece together for the first time. The composer seems a little surprised, too. "It's very dark," he says. "It's war. Is there anything worse?"

[Corlyss_D]

Philip Glass' 'Appomattox'

Oh, no! Spare us!

[david johnson]

hmmmm...i've been there.

dj

[Donaldopato]

Great story for an opera...but not by Phillp Glass.

[some guy]

Thanks for this, Ralph.

I always like to hear of new projects, even of people I don't particularly like. My likes just aren't that all-fired important. Plus, even if, for instance, I hate Einstein on the Beach--and I do--that doesn't mean Appomattox won't really wow me.

Besides, if Einstein on the Beach is any good, odds are I'll end up liking it some day, too, eh?

Anyone here heard more than the half dozen famous ones of those more than twenty operas? More than twenty? I had no idea.

[Joe Barron]

This sound like the opera Charles Ives should have written. It would have been the perfect subject for him. Glass, on the other hand …

[jbuck919]

The cast of this opera wears period garb and sings in 19th century American English

This intrigueth me unto the utmost extent of bewizzlement.

[Ralph]

The cast of this opera wears period garb and sings in 19th century American English

This intrigueth me unto the utmost extent of bewizzlement.

*****

One aria for tenor (Union) starts,

"Oh grape shot, oh grape shot, will our volleys evicerate you so much."

The bass (Confederate) responds, "Oh no, doncha do that, we is almos' finished anyhow."

[Corlyss_D]

Thanks for this, Ralph.

I always like to hear of new projects, even of people I don't particularly like. My likes just aren't that all-fired important. Plus, even if, for instance, I hate Einstein on the Beach--and I do--that doesn't mean Appomattox won't really wow me.

Besides, if Einstein on the Beach is any good, odds are I'll end up liking it some day, too, eh?

Anyone here heard more than the half dozen famous ones of those more than twenty operas? More than twenty? I had no idea.

Some,

Your ever-present expectation of finding a pony underneath the pile that constitutes "modern classical music" is an inspiration to us all.

[some guy]

Inspiration or consternation??

(I know there's also another joke lurking there in that word "pile." Not sure I want to be the one to unbury it though. Ponies do have to eat. And then...)

Anyway, as you may come to find out some day, "modern classical music" is a whole field of ponies, running wild and free. Those brown clumps on the ground that you're afraid of stepping in are only part of the picture!!

[Corlyss_D]

Inspiration or consternation??

Oh, inspiration to be sure. You are indomitable.

[diegobueno]

Glass is a composer I want to like, though he disappoints rather too often. But I hope this opera turns out to be a keeper.

Glass is essentially a theatrical composer, and his music doesn't really come alive on recordings (I've noticed this about Britten too). It needs to be experienced in the theater.

I was very impressed with his cinema/opera Belle et la Bête set to Cocteau's film with the soundtrack turned off. The score is written so that the singers sing in synch with the screen characters' dialogue. He has a very precise sense of timing.

[jbuck919]

Glass is a composer I want to like, though he disappoints rather too often. But I hope this opera turns out to be a keeper.

Glass is essentially a theatrical composer, and his music doesn't really come alive on recordings (I've noticed this about Britten too). It needs to be experienced in the theater.

I was very impressed with his cinema/opera Belle et la Bête set to Cocteau's film with the soundtrack turned off. The score is written so that the singers sing in synch with the screen characters' dialogue. He has a very precise sense of timing.

Oddly, I have the opposite opinion about Britten, who bears no resemblance to Glass and for what he is bears up fairly well under recording, especially since he relied on an artist (etc.) of the level of Peter Pears, but I do agree that minimalism doesn't work well on CD.

The same is true of some non-musical theatre as well. It is generally agreed that Brecht is a theatric and not a reading dramatist, which is ironic since of course he was the libbretist for the Three-Penny Opera.

[living_stradivarius]

Why so much antagonism towards Philip Glass? I'm not a huge fan of his, but his work in "A Beautiful Mind" was excellent.

[some guy]

Why so much antagonism towards Philip Glass? I can't speak for the new music haters, but for us new music lovers I think it's that Phil's music is often, um, too easy. Too "pretty." And he favors (has favored) such a small handful of tricks. I don't have enough music theory to name them, but you know instantly that a piece is by Glass because it's the same patterns, the same arpeggios, the same chord changes, over and over from piece to piece.

His early stuff is pretty interesting, I think, but once he got into that almost pop sounding groove, I mostly lost interest. I still have many CDs of his music. And sometimes I play them with great delight. And sometimes I just sit there thinking "shut up! SHUT UP!!" That love/hate thing I mentioned earlier.

I think diegobueno speaks for many of us (new music lovers, that is) when he says "Glass is a composer I want to like, though he disappoints rather too often." (I have friends who make Corlyss's and jbuck's derision sound like praise, by the way. I'm inclined to agree with those friends theoretically while retaining an early fondness for the guy.)

I just looked back over my post, and I see that I've answered your question with a rather roundabout version of "I dunno." Sorry!

[living_stradivarius]

Stanford's giving out 500 free tickets to students to the opera. I'm game.

Glass is also coming to talk with us. Are there any questions people are dying to ask?

[Ralph]

Stanford's giving out 500 free tickets to students to the opera. I'm game.

Glass is also coming to talk with us. Are there any questions people are dying to ask?

*****

What's his view about treasonous secession?

[Auntie Lynn]

If time and the river permit, I may run across the street tomorrow night, flash my backstage pass and take it all in...