Wheeler1

By: Paul Joseph Walkowski
OperaOnline.us
While ”Democracy, an American Comedy”, Scott Wheeler’s latest foray into opera [he previously wrote a one-act opera titled ‘The Construction of Boston’] had its world premier at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington, D.C. in January, 2005 bringing the book to stage and then from stage to opera was a major undertaking which, in this case, saw its genesis not last month but with two novels: one published anonymously in 1880 titled “Democracy – an American Novel” and another published in 1884 titled “Esther”. The latter was published under the ‘nom de plume’ Francis Snow Compton.
As it turns out, both novels were the work of one author: a Harvard historian, journalist and novelist, and if that’s not impressive enough, he was also the grandson and great grandson of two American presidents. He was Henry Adams. (1838-1918)
Interestingly, because of the political nature of “Democracy”, and the delicate position of Mr. Adams in academia, the publisher didn’t release the name of its true author until after his death. So while Henry Adams could enjoy the success of his novels wile he was alive, he could never acknowledge that he was their author or take credit for the artistic effort he put into them.
Adams was a traditionalist, we are told, and his story of two strong-willed idealistic socialites, Madelaine Lee and Sybil Ross (Esther Dudley in the play) who leave New York for D.C., determined to make a better life for themselves as they maneuvered around the political dealings and lies of the time, might have been just a little to close to the character and personalities of people in positions of power. Thus explains Adams’ desire for anonymity. Adams’ novels, while fiction, touched on themes of political corruption, patronage, bribery and some old-fashioned greed from people in public office who, well, shouldn’t have been where they were.

THE BEGINNING:
In 1973 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published “The Love Suicide at Schoffield Barracks” along with “Democracy & Esther” in one volume written by Romulus Linney, and in 1974 Linney, a playwright, transformed Adams’ “Democracy & Esther” into a play. In 1976 it was published again separately as a comedy drama set in the late 1800s.
And there it sat. A good work, and by some standards an above average work waiting to be discovered again in another medium, another day.
We fast forward to several years ago and find composer/conductor Scott Wheeler looking about for a new work to write when in 1997 a friend recommended he look at “Democracy” by Romulus Linney. Wheeler says he was familiar with Linney’s work, having just completed Linney’s ‘Jesus Tales’, “and I realized that this was an amazing writer, and I was thinking: I wonder what he has in plays that might turn into an opera.”
Wheeler had discussed his interest in working with Linney one time before, he says, but couldn’t find the right vehicle in any of his books, so the idea was abandoned, but not forgotten. And then his friend’s recommendation came along. Wheeler’s interest was piqued, he says, “so I began poking around again and came up with this one [Democracy], and he [Linney] said ‘yeah, that one might work’.”

Why Democracy? Wheeler says that besides it being a good story, Linney “had done a great deal of the work for me. He had taken his characters and [given] them a plain spoken quality where what they had to say came across in really elegant prose” meaning “not many words.”
“You don’t need very many words when you sing,” Wheeler explains, especially for a comedy/drama “because singing takes longer, and if you set an entire play to music with lots of words in it, you get a four hour opera that nobody wants to see or do because all the jokes fall flat.”
Democracy intrigued him: the story was pure Americana, he says, with roots and substance. He wanted to do it.

THE NEXT STEP:
Wheeler considers himself a “text based” composer, meaning he doesn’t write the score first, but rather likes to read and understand and digest the text to get a sense of what is going on around the characters. “Many composers are music as opposed to text based, and that’s not to say anything against them; they’re great composers. But the idea that you can take a piece of music and do a different text to it, well it’s hard to imagine how that would ever work in my music, because it’s all so related to a particular text.”
“With an opera” he says, as opposed to writing for a string quartet where the first thing you consider might be the theme, “the main thing [to consider in opera] is the stage. Who’s on stage? What are they doing and what kind of music is going to be going on?” This isn’t the case with all composers, he notes. “There are a lot of people who are writing what they call opera” he points out, but they “are not really writing for standard opera singers or a standard opera orchestra.” He points to Philip Glass’ ‘Einstein on the Beach’ as an example. “When he started writing opera,” Wheeler says, “it was more for a choreographed spectacle with a kind of new music rock band. It’s very different than the idea of people singing their hearts out in classically trained style in a compelling musical drama.”
While the new opera may have worked for Glass, Wheeler says, it wasn’t what interested him. “He was approaching it from a completely different angle and saying: ‘you know, this could also be opera’, and it was all very interesting and invigorating for the whole field of opera. But I wanted to do something that could be done for a real opera company.” Wheeler emphasized the latter point.
Wheeler says he listens to the cadence of the text “and I start exploring.” In Democracy, for example, set in the 19th century, he says he asked himself what the characters would be doing and what they might be listening to in that period. ”If it’s a party at the White House, and it’s a party for President Grant [which is what you will see in the first act] and all these people are there, what would be happening? And I thought of marches and waltz’ naturally, and I thought of the lyrics of the people.” And because it all occurs on stage, he says, he had to consider the surroundings as well. “What time of day is it? What are they doing? And I start playing around with ideas until I get something that seems to work for both how the stage is going to be and what the singers like to do.”
If it all sounds formulaic, it’s not. Wheeler says a good composer needs to be ready for change. “You try to be as open to any possible kind of music you might need, and then you change it radically so that the next scene is interesting and different, because it’s about the stage. Everybody sitting in the audience has to be involved in the play and the music has to lead them.”
For “Democracy” Wheeler says, he looked at the structure of Mozart’s ‘Cosi fan Tutti’. “The structure of this play has a real analogy to Cosi fan Tutti,” he says. “Two sets of lovers and an older gentleman who acts as a catalyst. And there are minor characters that revolve around the two main love stories and the love stories have ambiguously happy endings. So in a sense Cosi is a shadow of my piece in its structure and I saw that right away.”

BUILDING THE SCORE:
Wheeler says he hears things tonally, “even twelve tone music that I’ve performed”, so when he began composing a score for ‘Democracy’ he says, he experimented some but stayed close to the familiar. “Does it have dissonance? Sure! Does it have funny rhythms? Sure! But the audible, rhythmic impulse is noticeably as sane as you would find in many classical or standard repertory work. I’m talking as Britten does: rhythms that are from our common experience. I’m not trying to invent musically, but it is possible that if you’re clever, you can recombine them in a way that you say: ‘boy, that’s not like anything I’ve ever heard before’.”
The key to good music writing, he says, is writing for the moment that the librettist has created. “I want to make sure that this moment is very tender; that this moment is very funny; that this moment is agonized and that people move on and the play moves on. The dramatic motion in this opera” he explains, “is pretty quick”. But not so quick that it escaped the attention of the opera’s sponsor, Placido Domingo. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
When Wheeler began to conceptualize the score he realized that he was on to something that was sounding pretty good to him, at least. He decided to approach his friend Patricia Weinmann. who was running the music scenes program at the Boston Conservatory at the time and ask if she might be interested in working with him to showcase a new opera he was working on. “I said: would you be willing, if I wrote you a couple scenes, to put them on for an opera scenes program? And she said: ‘what a great opportunity for my students. Sure!’ So I wrote about fifteen minutes of music for two singers she had for me – a soprano and tenor, and they performed it, and at that point we all said this is really going to work.”