About the Composer

And now, another song from The Ghost of Wu. “The Ways of the Young” is a bit more of a comedy number, although I’m afraid it might only be funny on paper.

By early in Act II of The Ghost of Wu, Wu Chao has succeeded in becoming Empress, having removed the Emperor’s first wife from the picture. But she is not satisfied. She’s been trying to convince her husband to decree that upon his death, Wu will assume the powers of the Emperor herself, instead of their son.

Kaozong insists on checking with his Confucian advisors, whom Wu views as stuffy and out of touch. In “The Ways of the Young”, we see the Confucians from Wu’s point of view: as foolish old men with nothing useful to say, and certainly no solutions.

Between verses of the song the Confucians toss coins and consult the I Ching for guidance in this matter. The answer, it turns out, isn’t particularly helpful.”

A word about the lyrics. This song, written in 2001 or so, marks the beginning of my journey from fixing other people’s lyrics out of sheer necessity (usually for musical reasons) to actually calling myself a lyricist and taking it on myself, which is a fairly recent development. In this case, a lot of the best material is from the original given to me by my playwright collaborator Donna Kaulkin, but that version lacked formal cohesion that I needed, so I fleshed it out a bit. Mainly, I claim the final verse, which I wrote because I felt the song needed a coda. It’s pretty flawed, but I like the way it ties everything up. I’ve gotten better since then.

The lyrics and MP3 can be found on the song’s own page. Check it out here.

Since I’ve been crowing about writing a musical, and have nothing to show for it yet, I thought it would be fun to blow the dust off of some songs from my last musical The Ghost of Wu.

The first song I’m presenting is maybe the most, uh, presentable, in that it’s just a song. Many of the others are elaborate ensemble numbers or involve bits of dialogue between verses, and that makes them a bit more work to listen to. I’ll get to them too, but it seems like a good idea to start with the simple stuff.

So, please have a listen to The World Rolls On. Audio and lyrics after the jump.

Pianist Jeremy Denk describes my neighborhood in San Francisco more eloquently than I ever could….

When the concert ended, a Chinese man drove me back to my hotel in a large black Towncar. All the way down Geary. There were Russian bakeries, Dim Sum joints, gas stations, spas, the whole beat hybrid of San Francisco deciding, block by block, whether it is a city or not.

It’s all true. The cultural mishmash along Geary Boulevard makes the Richmond District a fun place to live. One New York friend’s reaction to a cab ride along Geary: “Oh, I get it. You live in Queens.” Except, one thing Jeremy, if I may: San Francisco is a city, and that was decided a long time ago. Only a New Yorker would question that.

(via The Rest Is Noise)
Photo Credit: Kenn Christ

Last year I was very hard on John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic. I wanted to like it, but, while I admired the music, I was disappointed in it as drama. Having now seen the San Francisco Symphony’s semi-staged production of Adams’ new opera A Flowering Tree, I’m very happy to say that it doesn’t share most of the problems I found in Doctor Atomic. I was an Adams early adopter, and an obsessed fan in the 80’s, so I was relieved.

This is a beautiful and admirable work, and it’s the first of John Adams’ theatrical works that actually “works”. I think the reason must be that this is the first one that has, you know, a plot. The music is rich and colorful, and chock full of delicious Adamsy goodness. The music is so effective, and yes, dramatic, that I wasn’t nearly as irritated by Peter Sellars’ staging as I would have been otherwise. Much has been made, with good reason, of Adams’ musical depiction of the main character’s transformation into a tree, which occurs four times in the opera. In each case, the context is different, and Adams paints each transformation in a different way, the final one being a literally spectacular payoff at the very end of the piece.

Painting. This is what Adams is extraordinarily good at in his operas. The final tree transformation joins the hair-raising arrival of Air Force One in Nixon in China, The “gymnopedie” depicting Klinghoffer’s slow-motion descent in The Death of Klinghoffer and the final moment of Doctor Atomic as great examples of how Adams’ can create music that, when combined with staging and lighting, tells a story that words cannot.

Again, this was a “semi-staged” production. About a third of the stage in Davies Symphony Hall was dedicated to staging, with a platform cleverly placed above the orchestra for some of the action. The staging used an interesting, and sometimes very moving, convention of having a dancer shadow each of the characters. Unfortunately, there are several long orchestral and choral passages that were, I guess, unstageable. During these passages we’d have the singers standing or sitting motionless and the dancers doing very little. It’s still unclear to me what the significance of some of these passages is in terms of the storytelling.

A Flowering Tree also makes use of a narrator, which can be problematic when it comes to staging. What do the characters do while the narrator is singing? Like Doctor Atomic, whose libretto was slapped together from “found materials”, this suggests some sort of fear of having to actually write for the characters, which I find puzzling and disappointing. But in this case, Sellars handled this fairly well, I thought. I guess there was so little happening anyway, so the narrator fit in somewhat naturally.

The use of a narrator and the many how-on-Earth-do-I-stage-this moments had me thinking that this might be a better oratorio than opera, but in the second act as the story unfolded I became increasingly convinced. Whereas Doctor Atomic had no plot to speak of, and we never heard from the characters in their own words, this piece has an appropriately simple plot. We understand what the characters want, and we’re routing for them. Given this foundation for the first time, Adams shows what he can do dramatically.

Two items:

1. Am I the only one who didn’t know that Stephen Sondheim composed incidental music for the Public Theater’s current production of King Lear with Kevin Kline. (Thanks for the tip, Mom!)
2. Set your Tivo! Sondheim has a cameo in this Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons. It’s possible there’s something wrong with a world in which Stephen Sondheim and Andy Dick are on the same list of credits.