Music

Although I have written operas before, the idea Lois Walden approached me with was a stark departure from my previous music: an opera about Clara Schumann, in terms of her relationships with Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Clearly, a stage work about three such historic composers would have to engage their music. I have been teaching their music in analysis classes for decades, and have written the occasional song in Romantic tonality, but I had not been much given to quotation of other composers. However, the idea of using my favorite pieces of theirs as groundwork and inspiration immediately appealed to me. In particular, since Clara’s music is by far the least well-known of the three, I felt an obligation to embed her music in mine, to make certain parts of the opera a collaboration with Clara. So far, my use of her music has already run the range from outright quotation to collage to far paraphrase to hidden underlying chord progressions. I do hope that classical music lovers in the audience will smile at the tunes they recognize.

At the same time, I am not a proponent of naturalistic drama. Lois and I shared a sense that while Clara, Robert, and Johannes can be revered for their music, their lives were kind of a mess. We wanted to look at them from a 21st-century viewpoint, and my way of doing that was to use an ironic 21st-century orchestration, with marimba, bass clarinet and electric bass, so that if the musical language was 19th-century, the sound of the piece would be anything but. We have a famous love triangle, but this is no Tristan – or if it is, it is a Tristan written by people who’ve been through therapy and have no intention of dying of unfulfilled lust. I think in the music and words we can look at our trio with a mixture of admiration, compassion, and amusement, and bring them to life not as they saw themselves, but as they would seem if they suddenly appeared among us today. --Kyle Gann