June 27, 2006
Carlson on 'Anna'
Composer David Carlson wrote to me over the weekend in response to my May 19 blog entry about his new opera, Anna Karenina, which will have its world premiere at the new Miami Performing Arts Center on April 28 of next year.
I'm going to quote a big chunk of Mr. Carlson's e-mail (with his consent) because it sheds some interesting light on the progress of this opera, how it's been structured, and the overall focus of the piece. I don't know how many other opera world premieres we've had recently here in South Florida, and that makes what Carlson has to say important.
First off, he says that the mockup of Anna that librettist Colin Graham did for Benjamin Britten back in the 1960s isn't what he's using for the new work:
...(Librettist) Colin Graham and I would be grateful if you'd help us fend off one misconception which seems to follow this opera everywhere: Colin did write a draft libretto, more of a treatment, for Britten — who was actually asked by the foreign service not to compose it for the Bolshoi after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia (although Britten the pacifist probably wouldn't have done the piece anyway, of his own accord) — but the libretto Colin wrote for me is not THAT libretto. It is a new one, tailor-made to our new vision of the piece.
That's not to say there aren't similarities— many lines are taken directly from the novel, for example, but it is so rearranged and reworked and reworded, some at my request for musical reasons, and some because Colin had changed his mind about this or that, that it is virtually a completely different libretto, and one obviously more worked-out than Colin's draft for Britten ever was.
The piece is in 19 "sequences,� with a prologue (pantomime — the station), and an epilogue (Levin and Kitty's happiness), which flow seamlessly, cinematically from one to the other. We have strived to tell the story of BOTH couples: Karenin/Vronsky and Anna, and Kitty and Levin — the whole point of the novel being the contrasting fates of each. To our knowledge, very few treatments — movies, ballets, operas — have conveyed the joy and love that the novel possesses; so we've tried to emphasize both the tragedy and happiness. And it doesn't end with Anna's suicide, any more than the novel does! . . .
. . . If I were to say anything about the style of music I've written for Anna Karenina, it is something like Rosenkavalier is to Strauss's previous works. There's a bit of grittiness to portray the downward spiral of the plot, but most of the music (is) quite Romantic, with modulating melodies, tonal (but no key signatures), highly chromatic and, I feel, bittersweet. It is an intimate piece as well, with very few flashy numbers or dances.
There is a half-hour orchestral suite from Anna being done on August 7 with Alasdair Neale and the Sun Valley Summer Symphony (in Idaho, no less), so there will be available a good representation of what the music will be, albeit with no singers....
As I said earlier, I think Anna makes a wonderful subject for an opera, and I'm eager to see this treatment of the novel. It's interesting that Graham and Carlson want to present the whole tapestry of the book, when it would surely be easier to focus only on the melodrama of Anna's tragic arc. But they're going after the contrast, which, if it's successful, should read theatrically like one of those PBS blockbusters drawn from enormous works of fiction.
As you watch, you follow some stories more intently than others, perhaps, but at the end you're left with an astonished, overwhelmed impression of life's great variety. That will be a serious challenge for Carlson and Graham, and it only increases my interest in seeing how this work comes out.
Posted by at June 27, 2006 8:22 PM
