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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue Irving Berlin’s Musical Theater
of War Performing Hawaiian by Kevin Fellezs Bernstein in Boston, conference review by Paul R. Laird Celebrating African American Art Song, conference reviews by Naomi André and Ann Sears |
Interview with Tom Cipullo by Doug Cohen
Tom
Cipullo’s Glory Denied, a two-act opera based on Tom
Philpott’s biography of Jim Thompson,1 a veteran of the Vietnam War who had the dubious distinction of being
America’s longest held prisoner of war, received its world premiere on
5 May 2007 at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts. A presentation of the Brooklyn College
Opera Theater, the production was directed by Richard Barrett and designed by
David Kissel. The story revolves around the relationship between Jim and
his wife Alyce, how they cope during Jim’s imprisonment, and their life
after his return at the end of the war.
The four singers in the opera
portray younger and older versions of Jim and Alyce. Younger Alyce was performed by
Melanie Curcio, Older Alyce by Gretchen Mundinger, Younger Jim Thompson by
Jan Heinrich Kuschel, and Older Jim Thompson by Scott Roche. The first act of the opera details Thompson’s
experiences during his nine-year ordeal in prison. Jim holds up to the pressures of
interrogation by dreaming of the ideal home life he left behind. Alyce, initially shocked by the disappearance
of her husband, eventually moves in with another man. In the second act Jim
returns to discover a world completely unlike the one he left in the early
‘60s. Everything has changed,
including his relationship with his wife and children. Jim and Alyce decide to try to mend their
differences, and to the public they put on the façade of the perfect
family. The pressures of the changed
times are too great, however; Jim wants the life he was denied while in
prison and Alyce refuses to become the subservient wife. On 28 March 2007 composer Douglas Cohen of
Brooklyn College’s Conservatory of Music sat down to speak with
Cipullo about his ambitious work. DC: A book review of Tom Philpott’s Glory Denied inspired you to create this opera.2 What was so compelling about that review? TC: I had wanted to compose an opera for a long time, but the economics of it are so impossible. Unless someone is beating down your door to do it, which certainly isn’t the case in this instance, why would anyone put themselves through it? As everyone knows, there are a million operas out there by very fine composers that are not being done. There are probably two million that have been done once and will never be done again. It’s an investment of so many years, and it really seems foolhardy. But there had to be just the right subject. When I found the story it seemed as if it had just been left out there for me. I had no idea that the actual statements of these people would furnish the libretto. I just thought “there is a drama here, there is something compelling about the story, there is something that is in my lifetime.” It is contemporary, it is topical. I just didn’t want to write an opera about a book from a hundred years ago I had no interest in. I wanted something that would be interesting to people alive now. DC: You have talked about the fact that you wanted to make this a human drama about two ordinary people who have something extraordinary happen in their life.3 TC: I centered it on the family relationship because that has the most drama for me. Jim’s wife had to have a very big role, and just the irony that she supplies by being so loved yet betraying him so badly—it is a very operatic conceit. DC: I’m curious about her betrayal. You say that you don’t pass judgment on the characters but you do see a right and wrong in this. I think she comes out looking rather cruel in your setting. You do present her point of view, but the justifications for some of her actions are not there. In the opera it sounds like she was very cold to him. Do you see that she was wrong in this situation? TC: Oh yes, she was very wrong. The author said to me that he and I see the tragedy in exactly the same light, that we seem to have the same viewpoint about Alyce, which is that what she did was very rotten. But, people do rotten things all the time. They do them to survive. During that time everyone did something that they regretted. That is my recollection of it anyway. Everyone wished that they could go back and do that time again and not make the same mistakes when our passions were so justifiably inflamed. DC: Well, they were both very young when Jim left for Vietnam. TC: But I mean the whole country. The people who were hawks would go back and say, “Gee, I wish I knew at the time what I was talking about.” Many of the people who were doves would go back and say, “Yea, I was right, but the way I treated certain people was wrong.” Many of the people … were against involvement but were so intolerant of our soldiers when they came home. I think a lot of people with that whole viewpoint would like to take that back. DC: Could you go into a little more detail about how you perceived that time? TC: To see the difference in the country from when I was a small boy in the early 1960s to the time I graduated from high school in the early 1970s, one only has to look at a high school yearbook. When this man came back from being a POW he must have felt like he was coming back to Mars because the whole country was completely different—the whole culture, the way people acted. I’m no historian but I cannot conceive of a time when there was a greater change in ten years in a culture. Whether it is drugs or permissiveness, the way people dress, it is stunning. DC: One gripping thing about Jim Thompson’s experience was his early capture in the War and his time in solitary confinement, but the focus of the opera is truly on the relationship between Jim and Alyce. TC: I don’t want to convey torture in music. There is a little bit about that in this opera but I don’t want to dwell on it. A person said something very interesting to me about the character of Jim Thompson. He could not be broken by the Vietnamese, he made it through all of that, but it was the disillusionment of his wife’s betrayal that hurt him in a way that nine years of Vietnamese prisons never could. That’s what really devastated him. Thompson died a couple of years ago. He knew I was writing this opera about him. He liked the idea, he loved music. I never spoke to him, but the man who wrote the book, Tom Philpott, did. He [Thompson] liked that idea very much. Philpott is a terrific guy. I wrote to him after I read the book and told him that I would like to make this opera and he was enthusiastic about it from the first. DC: Have you been in touch with Alyce? TC: No. I wonder what she would think? I don’t think she would be so happy. DC: How universal is the story of your opera? TC: I hope it is universal in the sense that anyone who has ever suffered some betrayal, anyone who has ever wrapped their entire being into believing in a person or a cause or a country or a time and had that circumstance come crashing down upon them—I think that they can identify with Colonel Thompson’s struggle. As with any historical drama, if you have lived through the time you have a certain richness of experience that makes the story more poignant. For example, I would bet that you and I, all we have to do is hear the words “Richard Nixon” and an association comes to mind for us that someone who is twenty-five years old will not have. Or if I hear the words “POW bracelet,” that means nothing to a twenty-five year old but it means something very important to me. Even the word “Vietnam.” So I hope it is universal but I also want to especially communicate to people who are around my age. DC: You have written that the last thing you ever wanted to do in creating an opera was to fashion your own libretto, yet you have done just that drawing on the transcripts of Jim and Alyce printed in the Tom Philpott book along with completely original texts for the catalogue aria and the end of the second act. How do you feel about your libretto? TC: It took me a long time. I have never confessed this, but I like it! There are some things that perhaps I could change. There are some flaws, but there are flaws in almost everyone’s libretto. When I studied with Thea Musgrave she would say that you have to write your own libretto because only you know what you need. So often I have heard really bad ones, but I do believe that she was right. The fact that this oral history has all of these vivid statements, which I can take, helped. It is the details of the language that often make libretti fall flat. These very dramatic people have a dramatic way of speaking. When Alyce says, “I don’t give a shit if you forgive me or not,” that is real. It is so real to me. As I mentioned in that Opera Today article, when I take these statements and put them in my own order I create my own drama by how they are juxtaposed. In this particular circumstance, with these tools I had, I am happy with this libretto. It is funny how certain things I just found. I needed something in Act Two, Scene One, and I didn’t have the right thing. Almost at the end I found that letter from young Alyce to her husband saying that today was gorgeous outside and all the snow melted except for that one place where the sun never shines. I said, “How could I have missed this before?” It is so perfect in how it encapsulates the whole situation and that became the end of that scene. One other reason we write our own libretti is to create the ensembles. Only a composer could figure out how that works, how to put things together. I should go back and look at those correspondence between Illica and Puccini and between Hofmannsthal and Strauss and see how many times the composer would send it back and say, “No, I need something here where they can all sing together.” The hardest things to write, but the most fun, are the ensembles. That is when you feel like you have done something. DC: Do you want to talk a little about the staging of the opera? I found very little about the setting in the score and wondered if you have definite ideas or if you are collaborating with somebody? TC: I had no ideas, and this being my first opera, it is amazing how much I did not know. As I was finishing up the first act I think I said to Richard Barrett, “Richard, I have no idea how this can be staged.” He said, “Don’t worry about it.” I know the opera is very dramatic, but because there is no linear narrative, it jumps around and is in this time and that time, I don’t have any idea how it can be staged. I trust Richard. When the Center for Contemporary Opera presented a semi-staged reading of it, Chuck Maryan did a great job directing it. He had a very simple, yet effective, staging in three parts, because all of the action happens concurrently. There was the actual prison cell where Thompson was held, on the other side of the stage there was a kitchen table where Alyce wrote her letters to him, and in the center there was this place where they would meet, where all of the characters would come together. It worked quite well. So the staging will be untraditional. I have always thought that it should have lots of images, whether those images are projections, how they will work, I don’t know. It is certainly an opera that would lend itself to TV, because that era is filled with images. It was the first television war after all. All we have to do is see a picture of Richard Nixon. We don’t even have to see his name—a picture of Nixon with his hands up in a V for victory sign, and we don’t know whether to laugh or gag. DC: Do you want to talk a little about the composition itself? I am actually a little curious, if you have no specific staging in mind: what was your idea behind the musical interludes? TC: Great question, and I’m going to drop a name. I was talking to Ned Rorem on the patio at Yaddo in fact. I said to him that I was writing this opera and didn’t say anything more about that. He said, “Leave lots of time for the music, leave lots of musical interludes.” I thought if he said it then it must be true so I put them in. How they will work I don’t know. I feel they are right musically, so if they are right musically they must be right stage-wise. DC: How will this work if you find there is not enough music in between? Will you add music? How adaptable are you? TC: I can’t add anything more. After five years it is what it is. I have been working on it for so long that if I go back to it I’m afraid I will lose myself. And when would we know? Probably not until the last couple of weeks. Everyone is asking me, “after the premiere are you ready to go back and do rewrites?” DC: And are you? TC: I don’t even want to think about it. It’s like saying, “If you recover from this fatal illness are you willing to go back and get sick again?” If I must, I must, but I don’t want to think about it. DC: So normally when you compose you don’t often revise? TC: Oh no, I revise, but I revise a lot before the performance. I am so slow. To just write a song, I might rewrite it over six times before I let anybody do it. With this opera I have been doing it for years, and it has had several incarnations from the time that City Opera did it at its Vox festival and then the Center for Contemporary Opera; it has undergone little changes already. DC: To go back a little to the story, and not to be too critical: you seem to gloss over Jim Thompson’s flaws in this opera. Alyce talks in the book about her suspicion of his homosexual activity before going to Vietnam and certainly it was confirmed by Alyce and Jims’ second wife after the war. TC: Interesting, you know if you read that really closely, his second wife didn’t discuss it, but there is a quote where Alyce says the second wife called her and confirmed it. Philpott doesn’t get that from the second wife, he only gets it again from Alyce. DC: But also Jim’s character as it comes out of his service record. Once he made a decision he wouldn’t rethink it. Certainly in his relationship with his wife he was the dominant person, he was the ‘right’ person. The relationship was on his terms. TC: That whole generation, it was always on the man’s terms. DC: How it worked out in real life was not always as cut and dried as Jim’s interpretation or realization of that ideal. TC: It is true, I did not make him a very negative character, but I had tremendous respect for him. I thought he had been stepped on enough and I didn’t want to step on him too. I feel like I knew him—I guess because I knew so many people like him who had a tough time adapting. You are right, but he is, after all, a victim. DC: The book review came to you just before 9/11, with the aftermath accelerating events here in the United States leading to the war in Iraq. Even though the current situation was not part of your original idea, has this turn of events in any way influenced you in your approach to this topic? TC: I don’t think so. I came across this in August 2001 and I was convinced I would do it immediately. Then I had such tunnel vision that I don’t think I even made the connection. Military… now we are at war again… I just didn’t make that connection. DC: Not even Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo? None of that? TC: It’s another example; I was just so blind to it. Once people pointed it out to me that we were at war again, of course, yes. There is a big difference between now and the 1960s, because the sacrifices of war are now relegated to the small minority and their families. It seems like 80 percent of America just goes on with their lives and almost doesn’t notice it. That’s part of the criticism, isn’t it? When Representative Rangel talks about bringing back the draft so that the whole nation will share the sacrifice that these people are making? In the 1960s everyone was afraid of being drafted, but now a relatively small number of servicemen and their families bear the brunt of the war. The sacrifice is not so deeply ingrained into the culture. DC: Can you say a word or two about the arias? TC: I had written a lot of the opera, and [singer and teacher] Paul Sperry said something very interesting to me. He said, “You know, operas take on a life by their ability to be performed in excerpts.” If you don’t have something that is excerptable, that is to say arias, it is much more difficult for them to enter the repertoire. So the first act has a number of ensembles and some pretty tunes, but the second act has five real arias that people can take out and do, and hopefully will leave humming to their friends. That is something that I want to pass on to all of the other opera composers of the world. DC: Do you want to talk a little bit about your approach for writing for voice? TC: I sing everything that I write. There is nothing wrong with showing off what a beautiful voice can do. If you are going to write an opera and deprive yourself of overt emotion, you are cheating yourself. If you are not going to have lyricism, there is no point in writing an opera. When I first started I did the dumbest thing, I made it for two bari-tenors. I don’t know why. I changed it to a high baritone and an outright tenor. I like that quality of a bari-tenor but what I was thinking I do not know. It is so hard to find people who can do that voice. Changing one part up to a tenor helped a lot. It is very easy to drown out voices so I try not to cover them. I try to put them in a place where they will be heard. My model might be Strauss, because at any moment the vocal lines are just so beautiful, they show off what people can do. Sometimes it is just about, “I’m going to give you a chance to show how great your voice is.” It is my dream that people will walk out of that theater, and they may not even notice me, but they will all walk out and say, “Did you hear those four voices? What exquisite voices those people had!” Notes 1 Tom Philpott, Glory
Denied: The Saga of Jim Thompson, America’s Longest-Held Prisoner of
War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). 2 David Murray, review of Glory Denied
by Tom Philpott, New York Times, September 2, 2001, Books in Brief:
Nonfiction, www.nytimes.com 3 Tom Cipullo, “Glory
Denied, the Genesis of an Opera,” typescript supplied by the
author. Published in Opera Today
(Spring 2006), the newsletter of the Center for Contemporary Opera,
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