daron aric hagen

In 1994 I had just written a song cycle for a young male soprano named Charles Maxwell, based on James Merrill's poetry and commissioned in Merrill's memory by Umberto Eco's translator William Weaver called Merrill Songs, and had fallen in love with not just the actual sound of this young man's extraordinary falsetto, but the idea of a career spent singing not in one's 'natural' octave but an octave higher, in the female range. The Danny Kaye Playhouse in New York City, where together we premiered the cycle, is a pretty intimate place; one can sense the audience's mood quickly and clearly.

The moment Charles began to sing I felt the audience's cool, disapproving discomfort; after a few measures, I felt it begin to warm up a little bit into curiosity; by the end of the first song, Charles' artistry had won them over and he had their attention and a good deal of their empathy and compassion. How hard he had to work to simply be on an even footing with other singers, I thought, as we began the second song. It wasn't until the third song that I began to notice certain audience members sitting forward in their seats because their disbelief had been suspended and they had begun giving themselves over to the deeper truths Charles was addressing as an artist. By the time he launched into Merrill's harrowing account of illness and physical decay, I had the impression that people were engrossed, and that the performance would be an artistic and audience success. When the audience rose to give us a standing ovation at the end I felt gratification as a composer, of course, but far greater fulfillment as a musician living an examined life, having observed firsthand for the first time what I imagine male sopranos go through nearly every time they perform.

***

When Paul Kreider at the University of Nevada Las Vegas proposed that I write an opera for their faculty and students, the experience with Charles was still fresh in my mind. Vegas, built of sand, surrounded by sand, is as false and as true as anywhere—certainly, a staging ground for the Art is Life conundrum. I thought it might serve excellently as the setting for an opera. I tapped Paul Muldoon, with whom I had just written a very different sort of opera, Shining Brow, to serve as co-conspirator and collaborator.

The eponymous role of Vera Allemande ('true song'), an African-American transvestite lap dancer from Las Vegas, was my idea. I knew that I needed, at the center of any examination of true lies, a character that embodied the themes of our opera, and a voice type that did the same. Vera is a female impersonator in the story; but, just as a contemporary male soprano (as opposed to a castrato) is not trying to sound like a woman but rather to create an idealized sound in the female vocal register, Vera dressed as a woman to reveal the deeper truth of her nature through artifice. 'Truth,' Vera sang during her eleventh-hour torch song, 'is a business that needs illusion, some sleight of hand if it's not going to fold or belly up.'

What always makes working with Paul such a pleasure is the extent to which he understands the possibilities for pivoting suddenly from the business at hand into a galaxy of allusions and seeming non-sequiturs and back again; it enables him to first disram, then cut to the point as quickly and in as deadly a fashion as, a misericordie ('mercy')—what knights in the High Middle Ages called a stiletto. One might say the 'subject' of the opera we ginned up called Vera of Las Vegas is the relationship between appearance and reality. What kept Paul on track, he says, during the creation of Taco and Dumdum (both IRA volunteers), was 'the realization that the nightmarish nature of the piece is grounded in, true to, Taco and Dumdum's nightmarish experiences in Northern Ireland, where appearance and reality are extremely difficult to establish, where an expert on the tragedies of Euripides may turn out to be a trigger-puller.'

What kept me on track, riding with Paul on this runaway train? Every note of the effusively eclectic score derives from a single D-A-B-flat (B is a traditional way of expressing the letter 'H' in music; I flatted the B because I liked the sound) motive grafted to a rhythmic cell. The melodic motive spells out the initials of my name-proof of how intimately I identify with the ideas I chose to manipulate; the rhythmic cell sounded like the way these words read: 'ba-dum-BAH.' This was my sestina, and I wrung from it exactly as many changes as Paul did from his, by agreement and design.

About the libretto Paul said, 'I'm thinking of the sestina, the form that rings the changes on the same six end-words in each of its six-line stanzas. This time, the changes were rung on a great thirty-line stanza that, despite its affinities with a juggernaut, allowed me to jitterbug." And dance we did, telling a fantastical story dreamed up together in his office at Princeton, me scrunched up in an easy chair with a pad of paper and an architectural plan of six sections of ten minutes' duration each, and another pad with things I wanted Paul to address in the libretto and I in the music scrawled in short, cryptic notes, Paul with his feet up at his desk, periodically rising to walk around the room while talking, pulling books off the shelves and fondling the spines, tucking them back in.

Some of the thoughts I jotted include: 'Kundera wrote of compassion being the Devil's gift in Unbearable Lightness ... What is Vegas, 'the thing,' pace W. Stevens, 'or the thing itself?' ... Vera = virtu = Captain Vere ... to be truly subversive, Vera must sound like pop music, be organized as rigorously as pli selon pli ... disarm and entertain with cocktail piano, slip the knife in with the words ... these folks are like Auden's bunch in the back of a cab in Age of Anxiety ... Auden, Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee all living together ... Madonna's a bore; it is her production values we study and adore ... Didi, Gogo, Dumdum, Taco ... strippers in stiletto heels singing quintuplets in three quarter time while being sexy ... Vera must reveal her heart to soft seventies folk rock ... dancers never count anything remotely similar to what composers think they will ... all my former teachers will hate the music I write for this show; that's a good starting place ... I will please nobody with this score ... this is a piece that must sound on the surface eager to please but in fact not give a damn ... remember why critics hate Lenny's MASS while remembering what it is about that piece that makes people love it ... one must seem raw while in fact being infinitely polished ... fiction always wins because it is packaged better ... people always think they 'get' music-especially when they don't ... stamp on the hand gets you readmitted, stamp on the arm means you escaped ... Is Vera Garbo?' And on and on.

At the time I was being dragged down by sentimentality and nostalgia-a self-destructive, sentimental view of marriage, and a self-defeating nostalgic attachment to the way I, after such forcefully formative years at the Curtis Institute and at Juilliard, thought that a 'serious' composer should behave and compose. I knew from the first moment that in order for our new opera to succeed I would have to be ruthless about writing the sort of music that these characters demanded to sing, the kind I was yearning myself to sing. I couldn't write music 'just pretty enough to please the Midtown crowd,' as I wrote to Paul in a letter, 'and just ugly enough to command the grudging acceptance of the Academy' if I wanted to get not just to the character's truths but to my own. 'This piece,' I quipped to Paul later in the same letter,' won't get me a teaching job the likes of which I have just quit at Bard, and I don't want one anymore.'

In the preface to the vocal score I wrote, '[these] four characters in are deeply alienated individuals suffering from denial and an inability to connect emotionally with one another.' At the time I began suggesting ideas to Paul for our 'Las Vegas project,' I was drowning in a loveless relationship, my descent into the depression that culminated during the composition of Bandanna accelerating, my identification with the need for the characters that Paul and I ultimately penned pretty acute. 'Their 'truths,' I continued, 'are buried in pasts to which they return in increasingly spasmodic, acid-trip-like flashbacks... it's a slow-motion spiritual meltdown. These people are desperately unhappy, entertaining themselves in order not to have to face the fact that they feel dead inside.' The last words summed up my personal situation.

'The role of ruthlessness itself-the sort of pathological ruthlessness that even the mildest of writers can reveal when having to choose between truth and decency—this, I would say, is primary,' said Lynn Freed. '... The revelation, through the story, through the characters in the story, of the human condition itself-its loneliness, its familiarity. Is there a safe and decent way to accomplish this? I don't think so. If it is done right, someone will be hurt.'

Vera is a ruthless score. It is not safe; it is angry, uses the power of music and words to reorder truth, to expose lies, to understand. It is about worthy subjects: trouble and love-in fact, the Troubles and, in my opinion, the death of love. In it, I lay claim to the seventies folk rock I wrote and played as a pre-teen, the Broadway mannerisms I come by fairly, having worked there, the cocktail piano licks I ran my hands through as a twenty-something in a hotel lobby. It goes for broke because its characters are broken. Nevertheless, it is completely without sentimentality or nostalgia. It is fiercely ironic in the classic sense that there is an incongruity, discordance or connection that goes beyond the most evident meaning, and that in the expression of our meaning we use language that normally signifies the opposite-inevitable, considering the characters, the setting, and the story. In this case, for example, the lightest of pop music is wedded to the deepest emotions, the confession to a murder is married to the gentlest of melodies and the most disarming of accompaniments.

***

My continuing relationship to Vera as a piece that is periodically revived and rethought and with which I am necessarily reacquainted when I see a new production, can be summed up in the following story: in Oregon, at a reception after a youth symphony concert at which one of my pieces was performed, a young man of about fifteen approached me with a book in his hand that he had liberated from a local library. It was Ned's Nantucket Diary.

'Would you sign this for me?' he asked.

'Why, for all love, do you want me to do that?' I asked.

'Well, you're in here, a couple of times.'

'So?' I asked.

'That means that you have met Ned Rorem.'

I saw that he was creating himself out of whole cloth, that his task would be ever so much more difficult than Charles' onstage at the Danny Kaye Playhouse. It was also clear that Ned's book had come to him at a crucial moment, and that it had helped him. That I existed meant that a Real Life Ned existed somewhere, and not just between the covers of a stolen book. It meant that perhaps it might be possible to be who he wanted to be or become.

Judging from some of the letters I've received over the years, the fictional theater work Vera of Las Vegas has given solace to a number of persons in the throes of personal invention or reinvention. Written from an unhappy place, it seems to help people. They understand it; that is more important than whether they like it or not.

'First,' I said, drawing the boy aside and giving him a hug, 'return the book to the library. Then, order a new one online. Send it to me. I'll take it over to Ned's place the next time I see him and ask him to sign it. Then I'll send it back to you.'

A few weeks later, the book arrived. I took it to Ned's and, over chocolates and tea, told him the story and acquired his signature, along with a dedication to the boy. I was intrigued to see not a flicker of satisfaction on Ned's face upon hearing the story. If anything, I think it made him feel sad. I think I understand why.

The book was duly sent to the boy, who I now recall no better than the Vera I created so many years ago, or the Daron that Ned created in his diaries so long ago as a minor character.