Claire

Opera in Two Acts

1979

90 minutes

Libretto by Leven Dawson

For vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra

[Withdrawn, not available for performance]

Composer notes: While I was teaching at the University of New Orleans in 1978, poet Leven Dawson, a native of the area, wrote a libretto for me set in 19th-century New Orleans. Leven had a home in Waveland, Mississippi, and sadly he lost his life there in 2005 when hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the town.

The Libretto

Leven’s libretto had beautiful poetic language and an exciting story—a wedding reception, a fancy ball, a voodoo ritual, illegitimate children, a man with a wife and a mistress who are half-sisters, and so on—good operatic stuff.

Claire was Leven’s first dramatic work and my first opera, and with the hindsight I can see that we both made some novice mistakes. The complex story painted an interesting portrait of a decadent society, but it failed to establish a clear central character. The title character, for example, was a small child who never spoke or sang. And from a pragmatic perspective, there were major casting problems. One of these was that the cast was large, and Leven wrote major arias for some minor, single-appearance characters.

Leven wrote the libretto quickly, and when I tried to discuss practical casting issues with him, he told me he had never been capable of making revisions. When he was writing, words just came to him, and he didn’t know how to rethink them. Unfortunately, an inability to revise makes theatrical collaboration extraordinarily difficult.

The Music: A Stylistic Turning Point

I probably should have just stopped composing. Adding music did nothing to solve the opera’s structural, casting, and dramatic issues. But I tend to finish projects that I start, and I found the poetic quality of Leven’s writing inspiring. In hindsight I am glad that I kept composing. Composing the music created a stylistic crisis for me that led to a crucial turning point in defining my artistic identity.

Leven’s libretto contained both comic and tragic scenes. The opera’s poetic language was sometimes highly vernacular, and I followed suit by incorporating vernacular musical elements from American roots music (such as the blues). During the previous decade I had written several atonal works, and while composing this opera I occasionally switched between tonal and atonal materials when the libretto’s dramatic tone switched between comedy and tragedy.

Like Leven writing the libretto, I composed the music for this opera quickly. Then, after finishing the music, when I contemplated the opera as whole, I became uneasy and dissatisfied. I felt that by switching between tonal and atonal materials I had undermined the opera’s stylistic cohesion.

Furthermore, I was surprised to feel that the the most stylistically interesting and dramatically effective passages were those in which I had playfully incorporated vernacular materials. This was a revelation because during the previous decade I done a lot of stylistic exploration, but I had generally avoided vernacular elements.

Making Stylistic Commitments

I decided that in order to effectively evoke a wide range of emotional expression while maintaining an overall sense of cohesion, I needed to make some long-range stylistic commitments.

My interest in comic expression became a crucial factor in considering my aesthetic identity. I found it impossible to imagine setting comic texts without using materials that fostered clear expectations—expectations that I could play with for comic effect. And the more I thought about the combination of wide-ranging expression and cohesion, the more obvious it became that materials that fostered expectations could be turned and twisted to tragic effect as well.

My newfound interest in incorporating vernacular materials was also a factor. Vernacular materials all rely on some form of modal/tonal matrix, so I realized that by working within modal/tonal matrixes I could make use of vernacular materials by incorporating these materials into the compositional matrix. If handled tastefully and well, art-music tonal/modal matrixes enriched by vernacular influences can allow the kind of transformational alchemy that sometimes enriches the music of composers such as Chopin, late Verdi, early Stravinsky, and late Bartok.

Thus one of my long-range stylistic decisions was that I from then on I would always work within flexible modal/tonal frameworks. I decided that no matter how far I might twist and bend these frameworks for the sake of expressive effect, I would never completely break or abandon them. I felt that to do so would violate the subtle process of engendering and playing with expectations that offered a way to accomplish what I desired to do in terms of dramatic expression and cohesion.