daron aric hagen

Presenting contrasting emotional and psychological states simultaneously is the trump card of contemporary opera. Simultaneity aggravates some listeners, who prefer opera to consist of a singer, a tune, and an orchestra playing an accompaniment pattern, preferably with the tune doubled in the orchestra.

The singers were rarely doubled in the orchestra in Brow, and there was almost always another line, some sort of obbligato accompanying each character. This line was like the sound-track accompanying the images on film stock. It conveyed a parallel stream of information—the character's true motivations and feelings may not have been fully expressed in his vocal part, but rather in the oboe solo that accompanied him, because he was lying (to himself or another character) or in a state of denial. The orchestra assumed at various times the roles of each character's subconscious, omniscient narrator, or disinterested bystander; occasionally it just accompanied. A listener could either ignore it, be just attuned to simultaneity enough to be aggravated by it, or revel in it.

Shining Brow was intended to entertain casual music lovers, intrigue and inspire further study from mainstream opera fans, and to be a source of ongoing, deepening pleasure for opera aficionados as they delved deeper and deeper into the piece. The score was intentionally affable on its surface; its sophistication was in the extent to which its underlying complexity was concealed. This aesthetic was consistent with my personality and values as a person; and with the Midwestern value system shared by the opera's characters.

Composing operas is not a science; it is an art which calls upon the composer's ability not just to empathize with but to live through the story's characters: Brow's inebriated newspapermen sang a barbershop quartet because these men sounded this way in my imagination, based on their educations and the time and place in which they lived-a place in which I happened to have been reared. The characters demanded the sort of music they needed to sing, not the other way around.

That the piano trio should accompany an onstage cocktail party at Taliesin with a set of off-kilter variations on one of the themes from Der Rosenkavalier struck me then (as now) as historically appropriate—just what a well-off, musically-literate couple who had just attended the première of the Strauss opera (as Wright and Mamah Cheney did) might have requested of their hired musicians. That Wright should have misremembered the 'presentation of the rose' music from the opera in order to remind his mistress of their love in an offhand fashion as he walked away from her struck me as what a man like him might do; that Mamah shall have been a sophisticated enough woman to exactly quote the Marschallin's music back at him to not just show him that she knew he was pitching her second-hand woo but that she remembered the source better than he struck me as one way this intelligent couple might have sparred.

I imagined Wright baring his most intimate feelings to the same sort of music with which I bare mine: clear, tonal, diatonic, direct, nearly folk-song in nature. I intended for one of the century's great modernists to identify, at heart, with folk tunes and Americana. Wright was accompanied by plush, tonal harmonies in the arietta 'And her scent was it musk' and in the final aria 'I think of the balsam fir.' He often sang in a floating, vulnerable falsetto; this was in intentional to contrast to Sullivan, whose tenor was intentionally supported throughout, and Cheney, who was lofted into falsetto only when expressing weakness. Use of extended range for dramatic and psychological ends—especially in the male roles—required the casting of singers who were willing to take vocal risks which occasionally strained traditional opera fans' conception of 'good' vocal writing or 'vocal beauty.'

The gentle lyricism of Sullivan's 'I cry out from the slough of despond' was intentionally similar to Wright's 'internal' music. I was submitting that Wright and Sullivan had consonant souls—it was their personalities and life decisions that compelled them to lead such different and dissonant lives.

Mamah Cheney heard her 'translation' of the exquisite faux-Goethe 'Hymn to Nature' as a Protestant hymn because that is the music she knew and loved. The Chef was without music, apart from the 'coherent reality' shared by the other characters. Offstage murders are always scarier than onstage ones. Explaining why Carlton went berserk would have been as wrongheaded as trying to do anything but ask questions about Wright.

Shining Brow was about Wright, but it was not a traditional biographical story. Like stripping away layers of an onion, Muldoon and I explored his character first through negative space and then gradually revealed him at the opera's core. Accordingly, the first act concerned itself primarily with the tragic effect his behavior had on the lives of Cheney, Mamah, and Sullivan. The largest set piece of the first act was Mamah's fifteen minute scena; the counterweight was Wright's disastrous second act press conference in which he alternated his internal thoughts with external pronunciamentos. From then on the focus tightened on Wright until he was left very much alone.

Sullivan, in the prologue of Brow, was meant to remind any serious operagoer of Captain Vere at the beginning of Billy Budd; the townspeople and workmen's chorus intentionally made a nod to the ensemble writing for the Borough in Peter Grimes; Wright's final forty-five seconds were intended to bring to mind Peter on the beach at the end of the same opera. When Wright's melodic motive is coupled to 'Suburbia' from Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti I am making a dead-serious comparison between Wright and Bernstein; when that is answered, later by Sullivan alluding to music from Marc Blitzstein's Regina the comparison between the relationship between the two composers and the two architects and two composers is made clear. The many musical allusions in the score and literary allusions in the libretto explored the central argument between Sullivan and Wright—what constitutes 'borrowing' in Art, and what constitutes 'purloining?'

Like many operas, Brow was constructed of numerous musical motifs that were constantly developed by being placed in new contexts, whether by being wedded to new words, new rhythms, or keys, subjected to elongation, diminution, or combination with other motives. Most motives did quadruple or quintuple duty, representing not only a character but a phrase (or several phrases) of poetry, a concept associated with that character and the evolution of those characters and concepts.

Bitonality and polytonality served as the harmonic building blocks for Brow. Characters interacted through the interaction of the 'home keys' in which they were written.

Wright was identified with the tritone (often used in opera to portray the extraordinary, the eccentric, or the ill-omened), arrayed both horizontally and vertically, and a rising motif which includes the tritone. The augmented fourth and diminished fifth, so crucial in tonal music to the act of modulation, was used to portray the mercurial nature of Wright's character, his inborn need to modulate others out of their own keys and into his—a sort of harmonic seduction. His home key was B-flat major (a tritone from Mamah's home key of E major), and he was associated throughout with the woodwinds.

Mamah Cheney, whose home key of E major is historically associated with the idea of Heaven, radiance, and grace, was associated with the strings throughout. When Wright sang his final aria after her death his transference from the winds to the strings signified his identification with her; when the Maid delivered her aria it was likewise to the accompaniment of strings and two bassoons—Wright and Mamah were in the orchestra. Mamah was identified with the melody of the 'Hymn to Nature' and the love aria 'There is no balm in Gilead' with which the first act closes.

Louis Sullivan's home key was A minor, a half-step below Wright's. The fateful tolling A's with which he was associated arise from his Catholicism, the time he had spent and lost, the brooding, repetitive, circular nature of chronic deep depression; he provided the opera with Wright's chief victim and moral conscience. He was associated with the percussion section—especially the tubular bells and timpani.

When the timpani played, it bridged between Sullivan and Edwin Cheney, whose home key was C major—the relative major of Sullivan's home key—and  the obsessive rhythms expanded into ostinatos. A stolid, religious man himself, Cheney was associated with the brass. His aria, 'My mouth is full of nails' moved from the brass into the strings when he sang about his wife; he was dogged by a shrill E-flat clarinet when he sang about Wright; the tolling bells returned when he identified with Sullivan, and so forth.

Catherine Wright was associated with the falling motive do-si-sol-re, which was also associated throughout with the concept of home, connubial transport, and duty. The melodic rise of a ninth followed by a long trailing descent was associated throughout with mourning, loss and destruction—whether of a person, a place, or a relationship.

The words that began and ended the opera, 'So much so,' sung initially by Sullivan and finally by Wright, were set to nearly identical music—that is, to an oscillation between A and B-flat. The oscillating musical figure, combined with the words, were spun to comic effect at the beginning of Act two, when the chorus of reporters echoed Sullivan's and Mamah's words to a somewhat altered musical line. (Cheney and Mamah oscillated between G and G-sharp; Cheney literally 'bringing her down' from major to minor.) Wright's reprise of Sullivan's utterance reinforced his identification with his old teacher; he fell downwards to a G-sharp at the very end, indicating that Mamah's spirit was hovering over him and would continue to do so; for the moment he 'lost' himself harmonically as so many characters had 'lost' themselves to him, and as Mamah had lost herself (to identical music) at the end of the first act.