Claire
Opera in Two Acts
1979
90 minutes
Libretto by Leven Dawson
For vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra
Composer notes: Poet Leven Dawson taught at the University of New Orleans and was a casualty of hurricane Katrina. In 1978 he wrote a fascinating libretto for me set in 19th-century New Orleans. It involves a wealthy man (Honoré) who has a daughter (Claire) by his African-American mistress (Clotilde). He marries a wealthy young French-American woman (Clarisse), who eventually learns that Honoré has a ongoing relationship with his mistress and daughter.
Enraged, Clarisse asks a voodoo priest to put a death curse on Clotilde. After Clarisse participates in a voodoo ritual to cause the death of Clotilde, the priest reveals to her that Clotilde is her own half-sister, the daughter of her father Camille and his mistress Marie.
Clarisse finds Clotilde’s apartment and discovers her dying with a fever. Clarisse reveals that they are half-sisters. Clotilde dies, and Clarisse, distraught with what she has done, kills herself. Honoré, Camille, and Marie discover the bodies. The opera ends with Marie singing a lullaby to Claire.
Claire was Leven’s first dramatic work and my first opera. His libretto was colorful, dramatic, and filled with beautiful language. However, while composing the music I could see that we had some difficult casting and structural problems. Unfortunately, as he himself then acknowledged, Leven was incapable of making revisions, and revisions are typically necessary in the process of shaping dramatic works.
Working on this opera helped bring my own compositional work to a crisis point. The libretto contained everything from a wedding celebration to a voodoo ritual. While some scenes were filled with pathos, in others Honoré and his friends often engaged in chauvinistic humor. I could and did invent music to express these various situations, but not without, in my opinion, creating unacceptable schisms in the musical language. I felt I had to solve this problem in order to compose for the theater, and to do I remade my musical vocabulary, starting first with the problem of how to handle comedy (see Laughter and Tonality and A Change of Worldview for more on this).
Since Leven’s death, I have occasionally thought about what I might do if I were to ever tackle rewriting the libretto myself. I feel the libretto is not clear about who the protagonist is, and none of the main characters are particularly sympathetic, so it would be a daunting task. I might choose to remove the issue of ethnic background, which to me may mask deeper issues regarding love, commitment, and faithfulness.