You say in the Preface that “Weep, Shudder, Die is an idiosyncratic book about the extravagant and alluring art of opera.” Indeed, it is perhaps the only book about opera that I have read that doesn’t really mention singing, except tangentially. What motivated you to write this book?
Weep, Shudder, Die didn’t start as a book. It began years ago as a short piece about the challenge of writing a good opera libretto. It was a poet’s reflection on working with two very different composers—Alva Henderson for Nosferatu and Paul Salerni for Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast. When I revised the printed version for a collection of essays, it kept getting longer. Finally, my publisher suggested it should be its own book.
What motivated Weep, Shudder, Die was my love for opera and poetry. The two arts are intrinsically related, though most people don’t see the connection. It is generally assumed that the major operas consist of great music and execrable texts. The libretti supposedly present implausible plots, exaggerated characters, and incompetent verse. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard opera professionals, including a few librettists, say that in opera, words don’t matter.
This opinion is sheer nonsense. Mocking libretti is a cliché professed by people who have never read a full libretto in its original language. You can’t judge a work of art by reading a plot summary. Imagine evaluating A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by reading a two-paragraph prose synopsis. A libretto is a dramatic poem. You can’t judge its quality from a badly cut, antiquated, and inaccurate translation.
Weep, Shudder, Die is impassioned common sense. I wanted to explain why opera was an art—like song—in which words mattered. It seemed odd to ignore half of what constitutes an opera. Would any opera lover be satisfied if opera singers sang the notes without forming words? The libretto is as important for singers as it is for the composer.
Was that revisionist idea about opera the plan of your new book? Was that why you have so little to say about particular singers?
I could have written more about singers, but there are hundreds of books about opera singers. I have a bookcase full of them. I wanted to explore some essential things that mostly went unexamined. In places like Fanfare, a magazine which I’ve read for 40 years, opera is usually discussed as a collaboration between the composer and the singers with a passing nod to the conductor. I love those reviews. They guide my purchases, but they don’t explain why opera itself moves me more deeply than most other arts.
I talk about opera as a magical collaborative art—not just between the composer and librettist, but also between two different arts. Music and poetry are both auditory arts. All poetry, including ancient drama, was originally sung. The word for poetry in Latin is carmen. That is also the word for song, spell, and magic. There is a primal connection between poetry, song, and sorcery.
Weep, Shudder, Die is not about opera singers; it is about the magical human act called opera singing. That’s why I borrowed my title from Bellini, who said, “Through singing, opera must make you weep, shudder, die.” Notice that Bellini didn’t say through “music” but through “singing”—the human voice intoning words.
Can you summarize the main argument of Weep, Shudder, Die?
I argue that the creation of opera depends on both the words and music. All operas begin with words. Better words inspire better operas. We all know that the most popular operas in the repertory were written by very few composers. Seven composers account for half of the top 50 operas, decade after decade—Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini, and Strauss. No one notices that seven poets account for about half of the repertory, too—Da Ponte, Romani, Piave, Boito, Illica, Hofmannsthal, and Wagner. Indeed, in the Italian-language repertory the connection is even more evident: Five poets wrote nearly half of the 50 most popular works. There were over ten thousand Italian operas created in the Romantic and verismo eras. How could a handful of poets account for most of the enduring successes?
The answer is obvious: Literary talent matters. The libretto and lyrics matter. The right poets, such as Da Ponte, Boito, or Hofmannsthal, inspire composers to artistic growth. In collaborative arts, great creative teams make most of the masterpieces. Mozart’s Italian operas were minor works until he met Da Ponte. Then, in quick succession, Mozart wrote three masterpieces—Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. We see the same magic of collaboration in the popular arts—Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood. The performing arts depend on effective and talented creative teams. Just because the audiences don’t know the names of the great screenwriters doesn’t mean that scripts don’t matter.
You are perhaps as close to a Renaissance man as I’ve had the pleasure of knowing: poet, literary critic, literary translator, essayist, librettist, and an important public figure for the arts in America when you were chair of the National Endowment for the Arts between 2003 and 2009. How do you combine so many things into one life?
I’ve had an unusual life. I didn’t plan it that way. I began with two life goals. I wanted to work in the arts, and I needed to make a living. Until I was 20, I hoped to be a composer. While studying music and German in Vienna, I suddenly knew—without any warning—that I would be a poet. Since then, I’ve never wanted any vocation but poetry.
The problem for a poet is how to make a living. For me, that problem was especially difficult. I was the oldest child in a working-class family of six. My father was Sicilian, my mother Mexican. Neither had much education. They were wonderful people, but impractical and quixotic. They both worked multiple jobs, but they were usually broke. Please don’t think we were unhappy. My folks lived in what Rodolfo in La bohème called lieta povertà, happy poverty. I knew that it wasn’t enough to make my own way in the world; I also needed to help my parents and siblings. That led to me to lead a series of double lives—balancing a practical job with a creative life.
Describe what you mean by leading “a double life.” It sounds sinister.
I’m probably the only person who ever went to Stanford Business School to be a poet. I had been at Harvard graduate school studying literature, but I felt the university was not the best place to be a writer. I followed the example of Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot—get a day job in business and write at night. I worked in the corporate world for 15 years with some success. By the age of 40, I had helped my two youngest siblings through college. I was also well known enough as a poet and critic that I decided to quit my job and make a living as a writer. It was a risky thing to do, especially with a young family, but it worked.
How did quitting business change your creative life?
My new freedom allowed me to do many new things, including working with composers. I found myself writing opera libretti, choral pieces, dance works, and song cycles. I collaborated with some of my musical heroes such as Dave Brubeck, Ned Rorem, and Morten Lauridsen as well as composers of my own generation such as Lori Laitman, Paul Salerni, Tom Cipullo, and James MacMillan.
I was happy as a full-time writer. I had no desire to do anything else. Then I was asked to lead the National Endowment for the Arts, which was in great distress. It wasn’t a job I wanted. I had no desire to become involved in politics. But it was important that the institution be saved. I spent nearly seven years rebuilding the agency, to the great amazement of Washington and the media. I could have stayed in public service, but I had to get out of Washington. It is a terrible environment for a writer. I had to return to my real life.
My success at the NEA brought me into a larger public life. I was offered wonderful jobs, including the leadership of two opera companies. I turned them down. But I still needed to make money. I had two sons in college. I found two congenial half-time jobs. For several years I ran the arts programs at the Aspen Institute. Then I taught poetry, music, and arts leadership at the University of Southern California. Along the way I also became California State Poet Laureate.
Underneath all this diverse activity, my life has been more or less consistent—a day job and a nocturnal vocation. It wasn’t the easiest way to live, but it worked. A necessary part of any creative life is to create your own life.
When and how did your interest in opera begin?
I talk about the odd and intermittent development of my passion in Weep, Shudder, Die. My personal history provides a backstory to my larger intellectual argument. Neither of my parents ever saw an opera, but my dad took great pride in all things Italian. That included Joe DiMaggio, Rocky Marciano, and Enrico Caruso. He had some old Caruso recordings, full of pops and scratches, which he would play for me. He also loved Mario Lanza. And so, my earliest experience with opera was watching my father, a man with little education, who worked as a taxi driver and chauffeur, enchanted by the voices of two dead tenors.
In second grade, I started taking piano and theory lessons from Sister Camille Cecilia. She gave me two lessons a week for a dollar. She soon had me playing Bartók’s children’s pieces, then Haydn, and eventually the easier Beethoven sonatas. (I was no prodigy, but I did practice.) My parents also inherited a large collection of classical records—78s and early LPs—from my Mexican uncle, who was in the Merchant Marine. He was an old-style working-class intellectual, an autodidact and Communist, who had left home at 14. He died in his late 20s. My mother kept the records for sentimental reasons, but I listened to them.
I studied music and learned woodwinds. I hoped to be a composer. As a teenager, I drove all over Los Angeles, attending concerts of modern music, including lots of operas—Britten, Orff, Henze, Ginastera, Prokofiev, Menotti. They were usually done in English. I didn’t care for the few standard repertory operas I had seen. I listened, but I couldn’t connect to live classic opera.
At 19, I went to Vienna to study music and German. Music was everywhere and very cheap. My neighborhood church performed a Haydn or Mozart Mass each Sunday. Standing room at the Musikverein cost 32 cents; at the Staatsoper, it cost 60 cents. I went to three or four performances a week. I preferred the modern works until one night—yes, there was a girl—when opera clicked. I fell in love at a performance of La bohème—not with the girl but with opera. I started going to the opera three times a week. The cost was $1.80 in total. I developed a habit I couldn’t afford in the U.S. That is probably why, years later, I became a music reviewer.
I was fascinated by Weep, Shudder, Die. We opera lovers tend to focus so strongly on the music that we give little thought to the librettos, but as you point out the libretto is an important part of the spark, or inspiration, for the composer. Could you speak about this for a bit?
A big part of the problem is the language barrier. Most people can’t understand the words. Oddly, we can love an opera without understanding the text. To a surprising degree, opera transcends language. Nonetheless, if we can understand the lyrics and dialog, we gain new depths of appreciation.
Can I say something obvious? The composers knew the languages they set. They reacted to libretti as poetic texts. They knew good texts from bad texts. Bellini didn’t want to work with any poet except Romani, whose verse inspired him. Once Strauss collaborated with Hofmannsthal, he wouldn’t work with anyone else. He never fully recovered from Hofmannsthal’s early death.
The poet Heinrich Heine said, “Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, less by assimilation than friction.” Without putting myself into Heine’s category of “great genius,” I have seen the impact I have on composers. After I started working with Paul Salerni, his style began to change. He incorporated a range of music he loved—jazz, Italian opera, and blues—into his compositions. He came into his own as a vocal and operatic composer.
I’ve learned something interesting from writing words for music. Composers want texts that imply musical forms, parts, and procedures. The poet suggests who sings (alone or in combination) at each point in the work. A text should offer the composer a creative plan. That stimulates music they might not have otherwise imagined. There is some back-and-forth between the librettist and composer, but less than people think.
It has become more common today than it ever has been to credit librettists in publicity and promotion—not, perhaps, for standard repertory operas but for new ones. For example, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, commissioned by the Met, is usually identified as being by Mason Bates and Gene Scheer. I presume that you are pleased at that development.
I’m pleased that for the first time American opera companies, big and small, are commissioning and premiering American operas. New works are essential for the health of any art. The operas in the standard repertory are at least a century old. A renewal is overdue. So is the recognition of the librettist as creative partner.
Let me make two observations. First, I’ve not been overwhelmed by the quality of many new operas. Most are estimable works, but few have left much of an impression. Contemporary composers, especially the academics, are still searching for a viable new language for musical drama. So many operas present a hodgepodge of styles. They seem more secure in their symphonic writing than their vocalism.
My second observation is that most of the new works are driven by the librettos rather than the music. Most new operas present large and visible themes, usually ideological. One has to go back to the age of opera seria to find works that are so idea-driven. There are some terrific libretti, such as Terrence McNally’s book for Dead Man Walking. In a different way, cool and detached, Alice Goodman’s libretto for Nixon in China was remarkable. But most of the texts seem perfunctory.
Why do you think that so many new opera texts lack distinction?
The libretto is still an unfamiliar form for American writers. Few poets know how to write for music or theater. Few playwrights know how to condense their material for opera or write memorable lyrics. Writers also don’t put their full talent into creating a libretto. They treat it as a second-tier project. Da Ponte, Boito, and Hofmannsthal never felt that way. They considered the libretto an important form. I often wince when I read the lyrics projected on the surtitle screen. They are so often flat and forgettable. Is it too much to hope that major new operas have lyrics as good as a second-rate Broadway show?
You write in some depth about opera in America, and about its relationship to music theater. You write eloquently about the work of Steven Sondheim, and how it straddles both worlds. Could you amplify that here?
Late in his career, Sondheim became the most important American operatic composer since George Gershwin. It surprised everyone, including Sondheim. Although he was a master of musical theater, he didn’t particularly like opera. Yet he created a specifically American form of operatic theater.
In the book, I trace a great unrealized tradition in American opera—the effort to merge the European tradition of classical music with our American forms of jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley, and Broadway to forge a new national style. The history of American opera shows a pattern of broken promise. It starts with Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, a mediocre opera full of enormous potential the composer didn’t live to realize. Then we have Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which suggested a future for American opera, which he too didn’t live to create.
Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti was a perfectly realized synthesis of opera and musical theater, but he pursued so many projects in his creative and interpretive career that he never repeated his early success. (There were similar efforts by Kurt Weill, Douglas Moore, and William Grant Still.)
Sondheim began by composing conventional musicals such as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He was a creature of Broadway, but he had an astonishing capacity for growth both as a composer and lyricist. He developed a complex and interior style for his songs and shows. The Broadway musical is the most extroverted art form imaginable. Sondheim was an introvert. He composed ironic and pointed songs. His lyrics were sharp, original, and often disconcerting. Midway through his long career, he abandoned the old Broadway form of spoken dialog broken by individual songs. His musicals gradually became through-composed and thematically unified.
Three of Sondheim’s late middle works—A Little Night Music, Into the Woods, and especially Sweeney Todd—provide examples of a new style of contemporary American opera. (It is ironic that none of these operas takes place in the United States.) Sweeney Todd is his masterpiece—a completely unified musical drama with memorable music and brilliant lyrics. There is no better American opera. Sondheim was evasive in describing these works. He said that they were operas when they were sung in opera houses and musicals when they were performed in theaters. Sweeney Todd, for example, changes when it is sung with operatic voices, but as the ecstatic audiences demonstrate, it has genuine tragic power.
All elite art forms have a tendency to become isolated and anemic. Contemporary classical music has become ingrown and self-referential since the mid-20th-century populist heyday of Copland, Barber, Piston, and Menotti. Classical music needs revitalization. I see young composers trying all sorts of things. They feel anxiety about the future of their field. Sondheim opened new possibilities for both tragic and comic opera. The trouble is, of course, other composers would have to find a lyricist as stupendous as Sondheim.
If the libretti of Il trovatore and La forza del destino were put on as plays without the music, they would certainly flop, and probably with a big thud. But you state that focusing on that misses the point. Could you talk about how those libretti, and libretti like them, serve the composer and the music he produces?
An opera libretto isn’t supposed to be a spoken play. If it were complete in itself, what would the composer do? A libretto is an evocative but deliberately incomplete text that invites the composer to fill it in. As Rossini stated, “How can I work without a libretto?”
Nearly all enduring operas have poetic texts. Literary quality matters. A poor text doesn’t inspire the composer (or the singers). The best libretti are lyrical, evocative, intense, and concise. They offer compelling characters speaking memorably in dramatic situations. The composer should be beguiled by the words, fascinated by the characters, and drawn into the drama. He or she should yearn to elevate the words into song and animate the scenes with music.
Prose drama moves differently from opera. Plays are talky. They offer great expanses of language that build slowly to a few climaxes. Opera is lyric rather than narrative. It prefers minimal exposition. It jumps from one emotional high point to another, propelled by music. The composer and the poet trust that the audience can fill in the gaps. Composers sometimes turn great plays into dull operas. They try to set prose drama to music. It overwhelms the music. André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire is so respectful of Tennessee Williams’s play that the opera is less lyrical than the original. William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge likewise labors under the weight of Arthur Miller’s powerful language.
Critics often mock the libretto of Il trovatore because it doesn’t behave like a realistic British novel. Luckily, Cammarano knew he was writing opera. He gave Verdi a short expository scene and then drove the drama forward at a thrilling pace. The audience doesn’t have to think its way through the plot; people feel its breathless energy. Il trovatore, which premiered in 1853, has never lost its place in the repertory. Either audiences have been stupid for 175 years or the naysayers are missing the point. I would even suggest that Cammarano’s supposedly defective libretto actually helped foster one of Verdi’s greatest innovations—the dramatic speed of his operas.
One statement in Weep, Shudder, Die that I found particularly insightful was this: “Song isn’t intellectual. It communicates physically and holistically. But song is most powerful when the listener understands and feels each word memorably reinforced by both the music and the human voice that performs it.” Reading that was a kind of “aha” moment for me. Opera, it seems to me, has a unique power to thrill and to move, and that is what you captured there. Could you expand on it a bit?
When we talk about art, especially music, we face a fundamental problem. Art is holistic. It speaks simultaneously to our intellect, emotions, intuition, memory, and physical body without asking us to separate them. Art is experiential, not intellectual; sensual, not abstract. But our critical language is abstract and intellectual.
No art suffers more from this dilemma than opera and its sister art, song. Most of what song expresses can’t be put into words. That is why we feel the power of songs in languages we don’t understand. Singing is a primal form of human communication. It exists in all cultures. And in all societies, song is related to poetry. They were originally the same art. Words were sung, chanted, danced as a special heightened form of speech, indeed a form of magic to enchant the listeners.
When we go to the opera, we return to a primal world. That is why it doesn’t matter if the work is in a foreign language. We know that the rites of magic and religion require a sacred language. (Catholics and Jews are raised hearing their divine rituals in Latin and Hebrew.) Isn’t there something stark and primitive about singers filling an auditorium with their unamplified voices? It is a feat that can only be accomplished by long training in the priesthood of art.
Magic uses words to change the physical world. That is why we go to the opera—to be transformed, to have our senses and emotions awakened, amplified, extended to the utmost. We want an enchantment to make us more fully human. The great operas enthrall us. We want the singers to hold us spellbound in sorrow, desire, or delight. That is why bad art is so painful. We open ourselves to it, and it leaves us dull and distant. Opera without magic is a negligible art.
I cannot refrain from asking you about your time at the National Endowment for the Arts. It was an era when certain politicians made a serious attempt to destroy the institution. At that time I was President of the League of American Orchestras, active in lobbying, and it was obvious to me that you played a major role in saving the NEA. Could you talk about both that experience, but also your belief in the importance of a government providing support to the arts and artists?
Leading the National Endowment for the Arts was the most exciting role in my life. It wasn’t a job I wanted. The NEA had been voted out of existence by the House of Representatives and saved in a diminished form by the Senate. Half the personnel had been fired. Washington assumed that the agency was doomed. The previous two chairpersons had resigned in controversy. The most recent chair, the conductor and impresario Michael Hammond, had died after seven days in office.
I had no interest in coming to Washington. I turned down the nomination twice. I finally accepted it because three things happened. My father, a Navy World War II vet, had died. The attacks of 9/11 had occurred, and my kid sister, who had joined Navy ROTC to pay her way through Stanford, was called up and sent to Afghanistan. I had never done any public service. I decided to do my part by going into the “Culture Wars” to save the NEA.
When it was announced that George W. Bush had nominated a poet to run the most embattled agency in Washington, I was considered a lamb being brought to slaughter. But I had a clear idea what needed to be done. It was useful to be underestimated by the Washington insiders. Against all expectations, we succeeded—mostly by ignoring all political advice and doing the obvious right things. We reinvented the agency. It needed to serve both artists and the public. We made its goal clear, distinguished, and democratic—to bring the best of art and arts education to all Americans. I knew we had to change the public conversation about the NEA, which had been mired in controversy for a decade. Being defensive was insufficient.
To the astonishment of our critics, we launched the largest programs in the NEA’s history. We needed to demonstrate our goals in positive terms. We started with Shakespeare in American Communities, which toured every state and even military bases. It brought millions of teenagers into their first experience of live drama. It also employed thousands of actors and crew. We raised the money as we went along. Then we followed with Poetry Out Loud, The Big Read, American Masterpieces, NEA Jazz Masters, and Operation Homecoming, which gave the troops and their families a chance to write about their wartime experiences. We built a bipartisan and bicameral majority. The budget went up every year. We created governmental and private partnerships that brought millions of dollars into arts and arts education. We brought our programs into every state and Congressional district.
I was approached about staying into the new administration, but I was exhausted. I had been working seven days a week and travelling on most weekends with senators and members of the House. I had given the agency my entire life for nearly seven years. I am proud of what we achieved, but I have never regretted leaving. Not many people escape from Washington alive.
From 2015 to 2018 you served as California Poet Laureate. Some people might take such a title as an honorific recognition, but you saw it as a responsibility to advocate for the art of poetry. Speak about how you filled that role.
There were few official duties for the state laureate. I decided that it would be a good thing to bring poetry to people who didn’t normally get it. I set out to do events in all 58 counties of California across an area nearly as large as Western Europe. The counties ranged from Los Angeles with 10,000,000 people to Alpine with 1,400. Most of the counties were small and rural, either in the mountains or in the agricultural belt of the Central Valley. I avoided the colleges and universities. I went to the public libraries, which were the only cultural institutions in these mostly small towns.
I participated in every event, but I only played a small part in most of them. I brought together local writers, supplemented by high school students who had memorized poems in the Poetry Out Loud program that I had initiated at the NEA. We often had local musicians take part.
The program was an immediate success, which grew over time. In some small towns, we had nearly everyone turn out, three or four generations under the same roof. In the Central Valley the audiences included farmworkers and their families. For many people, it was the first poetry reading they had ever attended. I never found a town so small that it did not have writers and musicians. The student recitations were hugely popular. I ultimately did 116 public events, culminating in a huge statewide gathering. My years as California Poet Laureate reminded me that there is a huge appetite for art among all sorts of people.
You published a translation of Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules) by Seneca the Younger. It is difficult for me to even imagine someone amassing such a complete understanding of Latin as to be able to do this. What motivated you to take this on, and what did you yourself learn from the project?
I am the last of a dying generation of Catholics who began learning Latin in childhood. We started as altar boys. My rough-and-tumble Catholic all-boys high school had excellent Latin. Curiously, I had almost no instruction in poetry until I read Catullus, Horace, and Virgil in high school. I did a bit of Latin at Stanford and Harvard, just enough to keep it alive.
As a poet, I was fascinated by the idea of verse drama. I loved Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster in English and Schiller, Goethe, and Hofmannsthal in German. (I also knew most of W. S. Gilbert’s songs by heart.) I wished that it were still possible to write poetic drama. There seemed only two ways left to do so. One was to write an opera libretto, the other was to translate a classic.
About the time I wrote Nosferatu, my first libretto, I was asked to participate in a series of new translations of Roman dramas. I chose Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and playwright, whose work intrigued me. His tragedies were considered too violent, ornate, and rhetorical—altogether too decadent. Classicists looked on Seneca’s plays as inferior imitations of Greek tragedy. But Shakespeare loved him, as did Racine, Corneille, Cervantes, and Lope de Vega. His only modern champion was T. S. Eliot. I felt that Seneca had been misjudged.
I spent a year translating Seneca carefully, line by line, as poetry. I wanted to craft a verse drama that would work on stage. The project was a revelation. Seneca’s tragedies were verbal opera—high drama moved forward by great poetic arias. We staged the play in Soho to full and enthusiastic houses.
From the quixotic project of translating The Madness of Hercules, I learned about a type of drama different from contemporary prosaic realism. Seneca wanted to overwhelm his audience with great torrents of musical language, to mesmerize them until they surrendered to his stark staging of ancient tragedies. The effect is strikingly similar to Wagner’s and Verdi’s notions of opera. I learned from Seneca that verse theater is about the sorcery of the human voice.
You have led a life that by any standards would be considered full, but knowing you I suspect you still have plans and wishes for the future. What are they?
I have two new prose books coming out this fall—Weep, Shudder, Die and a critical book, Poetry as Enchantment. Composer Lori Laitman and I also have a children’s opera in development for Lyric Opera of Kansas City, as well as several new productions of our earlier opera, The Magic Feather.
I plan to stop writing prose for a year or two. I want to write poetry full time. That is a luxury I’ve rarely enjoyed. In particular, I want to finish a long poem, The Underworld, which I began 10 years ago. The long poem is a difficult form to bring off. I’d like to write one that isn’t boring. The poem will take a few years to complete, if I can finish it at all. I’m still sharp at 73, but who knows how long that will last? It’s now or never.
And, yes, I also have a terrific idea for an opera.
Fanfare, November/December, 2024