In two weeks the first-night audience will feel the force of two ennobling obsessions: the shady parvenu Jay Gatsby’s fixation on Daisy Buchanan, which drives him to amass a fortune he cares nothing about, and Harbison’s fascination with a great American novel. He began planning an opera based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1924 masterpiece 18 years ago, couldn’t get dramatic rights and ended up with a “Fox-Trot for Orchestra” called “Remembering Gatsby.” Not until 1992, when he got the Met’s commission–it has staged just three original operas this decade–was he able to work in earnest. He owes this long-deferred coup both to his own skills and to a backlash against such “minimalist” operas as Philip Glass’s 1983 “Akhnaten” in favor of more conventional works. Now “Gatsby” will be remembered as the last 20th-century opera, edging out William Bolcom’s “A View From the Bridge,” which premiered in October at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. (Next year “View” will go to the Met and Chicago will do “Gatsby.”) Understandably, these two works–both based on American classics, both mixing period pop music with mainstream modernism–have been paired like Sosa and McGuire. But “Gatsby,” with tenor Jerry Hadley and soprano Dawn Upshaw, will win the media’s home-run title, if only because the Lyric Opera’s not the Met and Arthur Miller’s not Fitzgerald.
Harbison first read “Gatsby” in high school and responded most to the suspense. “I remember in the Plaza hotel scene worrying about how it was going to come out.” But he came to realize that the true mystery was the title character. “I was always groping to get a sense of what Gatsby was like,” he says. “His voice is very hard to hear, he’s not described very vividly and he doesn’t do a lot. Fitzgerald said that himself–that he never ‘caught’ Gatsby.” For one thing, we get our information about Gatsby mostly from other characters. For another, he spends the whole book trying not to be exposed as who he is: the hustling roughneck Jimmy Gatz, imperfectly transformed by his idealization of the wealthy, inevitably unworthy Daisy. Gatsby’s elusiveness works in the novel, says Harbison, “but for dramatization it’s an essential problem. I had to make him the main character, and then I realized he hardly says anything. I had to write more lines for him than for anybody else, and let him put forth his own information–and misinformation.”
But making Gatsby a viable operatic character took more than words. As Harbison tells it, musical moods began to collect around his characters. “Gatsby formed around the image of him looking out at the green light on Daisy’s dock–that sense of spaciousness–and his vocal lines began to move upward.” Similarly, Daisy’s music “seemed to gravitate toward triple meters, partly because that suggestion of waltz time seemed to fit her nostalgia for her Southern upbringing–the fancy balls.” This is the stratospheric level of Harbison’s creative process; closer to earth, he studied ’20s records by Jelly Roll Morton and Paul Whiteman to get the sound of the onstage dance band right, and debriefed a Boston banjo player on how the instrument works in the rhythm section.
Few details, whether musical or dramatic, escaped Harbison’s scrutiny. Set design? “I didn’t want the interiors to have every teacup on the shelf. I thought it would defeat the illusionary quality of the story.” Props? “In that scene where Gatsby throws all the colored shirts on the bed–one of the strangest inspirations in the novel–I wasn’t sure you had to see the shirts. The production folks think you do.” In the book, a character reads aloud from an unspecified story in The Saturday Evening Post; in the opera, it’s Fitzgerald’s own story “Winter Dreams.” Was that actually in the Post? Harbison thinks for a second. “I should know the answer to that,” he says. This week he’ll be doing last-minute fixes in the score–he’s already lengthened one interlude to make more time for a set change–and worrying about the balance between the orchestra and an onstage radio. “It should be a nice rowdy presence,” he says, “but it shouldn’t obscure things.”
If you’re an opera composer, though, such problems are what you live for. Gatsby famously believes in “the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”; Harbison seems OK with being here now. The real problems will begin after the last curtain in Chicago; high-profile new operas, like Bolcom’s “McTeague,” tend to be produced once or twice, and then disappear in favor of yet another “La Boheme” or “Magic Flute.” But at this point, Harbison says, “that genuinely doesn’t matter. I mean, I’m really happy to have these productions.” He can even see some justice in his exclusion from programs in favor of the immortals. “I can’t argue that my best string quartet–probably my Fifth–is better than any of the Haydn Opus 50 quartets. It’s the same in the opera house: to get a subsequent performance, you’re displacing ‘Traviata’.” We’ll see if he’s this philosophical in a year. Right now, though, he seems to be one obsessive who realizes–as Gatsby never does–that today’s the day, and the work itself is the reward.
title: “A Tale Of Two Obsessions Making Gatsby Sing” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-25” author: “Marilyn Miller”
Audiences will feel the force of two ennobling obsessions: the shady parvenu Jay Gatsby’s fixation on Daisy Buchanan, which drives him to amass a fortune he cares nothing about, and Harbison’s fascination with a great American novel. He began planning an opera based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1924 masterpiece 18 years ago, couldn’t get dramatic rights and ended up with a “Fox-Trot for Orchestra” called “Remembering Gatsby.” Not until 1992, when he got the Met’s commission–it has staged just three original operas this decade–was he able to work in earnest. He owes this long-deferred coup both to his own skills and to a backlash against such “minimalist” operas as Philip Glass’s 1983 “Akhnaten” in favor of more conventional works. Now “Gatsby” will be remembered as the last 20th-century opera, edging out William Bolcom’s “A View From the Bridge,” which premiered in October at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. (Next year “View” will go to the Met and Chicago will do “Gatsby.”) Understandably, these two works–both based on American classics, both mixing period pop music with mainstream modernism–have been paired like Sosa and McGwire. But “Gatsby,” with tenor Jerry Hadley and soprano Dawn Upshaw, will win the media’s home-run title, if only because the Lyric Opera’s not the Met and Arthur Miller’s not Fitzgerald.
Harbison first read “Gatsby” in high school and responded most to the suspense. But he came to realize that the true mystery was the title character. “I was always groping to get a sense of what Gatsby was like,” he says. “His voice is very hard to hear, he’s not described very vividly and he doesn’t do a lot. Fitzgerald said that he never ‘caught’ Gatsby.” For one thing, we get our information about Gatsby mostly from other characters. Gatsby’s elusiveness works in the novel, says Harbison, “but for dramatization it’s an essential problem. I had to make him the main character, and then I realized he hardly says anything. I had to let him put forth his own information-and misinformation.”
But making Gatsby a viable operatic character took more than words. As Harbison tells it, musical moods began to collect around his characters. “Gatsby formed around the image of him looking out at the green light on Daisy’s dock–that sense of spaciousness–and his vocal lines began to move upward.” Similarly, Daisy’s music “seemed to gravitate toward triple meters, partly because that suggestion of waltz time seemed to fit her nostalgia for her Southern upbringing–the fancy balls.” This is the stratospheric level of Harbison’s creative process; closer to earth, he studied ’20s records by Jelly Roll Morton and Paul Whiteman to get the sound of the onstage dance band right, and debriefed a Boston banjo player on how the instrument works in the rhythm section.
Few details, whether musical or dramatic, escaped Harbison’s scrutiny. Set design? “I didn’t want the interiors to have every teacup on the shelf. I thought it would defeat the illusionary quality of the story.” Props? “In that scene where Gatsby throws all the colored shirts on the bed-one of the strangest inspirations in the novel–I wasn’t sure you had to see the shirts. The production folks think you do.” In the book, a character reads aloud from an unspecified story in The Saturday Evening Post; in the opera, it’s Fitzgerald’s own story “Winter Dreams.” Was that actually in the Post? Harbison thinks for a second. “I should know the answer to that,” he says. If you’re an opera composer, though, such problems are what you live for. Gatsby famously believes in “the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”; Harbison seems OK with being here now. He can even see some justice in his exclusion from programs in favor of the immortals. “I can’t argue that my best string quartet–probably my Fifth–is better than any of the Haydn Opus 50 quartets. It’s the same in the opera house: to get a subsequent performance, you’re displacing ‘Traviata’.” We’ll see if he’s this philosophical in a year. Right now, though, he seems to be one obsessive who realizes–as Gatsby never does–that today’s the day, and the work itself is the reward.
