I was fourteen years old in 1975 when my brother Kevin introduced me to Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip. Along with newspaper clippings, mental health records, and oral history, Lesy collected in this extraordinary book a number of photographs made from glass plate negatives burned by a turn-of-the-century Upstate Wisconsin photographer named Charles Van Schaik. My ancestors immigrated to Upstate Wisconsin from Norway during the 1800’s. I was at first shocked, and then deeply moved by the fact that the people in the pictures looked exactly like the ones in our family’s photo albums; the stories in the book were eerily similar to the family stories I had been growing up hearing. Here were stories to tell about the sort of people I knew in my genes. (One, in particular, is my namesake and ancestor Dorn, a Lutheran pastor who, after a stint as an inmate at the Mendota Asylum for the Insane in Madison, hung himself.) I began teaching myself to notate music a few months later, determined to one day write an opera on the subject.

In 1982, during the last few months of her life, my mother began writing a libretto for me inspired by Schaik’s photographs and Lesy’s book. It featured four characters: a mental patient, a psychiatrist, a town gossip, and the editor of a small town newspaper. They lived on farms and in small towns at the end of the nineteenth century. Mother died before contributing more than a scenario and the words for a single aria, so the opera became a memorial to my mother as well as the many other unsung farmers and laborers from whom I am descended. It’s the task of a lifetime. That is why Songs of Madness and Sorrow is the self-contained torso of a much larger stage work — an opera that I am still working on as I pen these lines during the winter of 2001.

The piece addresses the two main responses to the childlike feelings of helplessness, panic and rage created by the inhuman ravages of simple bad luck (Acts of the Market Economy) and epidemic diseases (Acts of God) in small Wisconsin towns at the end of the nineteenth century. These two responses are both paranoid in nature. One manifested itself in obsessive-compulsive behavior (which can make every person, from butcher to candlestick maker, more productive); the other was simple paranoia which arose from the realization that things hadn’t turned out, in reality, the way that everyone, even the newspapers, had said it would. This is the interesting point, because this normally abnormal reaction was caused by the discovery of truth, not the creation of delusion. While composing the piece in New York City during July of 1996 — the AIDS epidemic raging on and my life in a shambles — it seemed to me that things hadn’t fundametally changed since 1896.

I sought comfort and guidance by surrounding myself with the strangely familiar, late nineteenth century dignity that runs through the “found” texts that I, like Lesy, culled from period newspaper articles, advertisements, fiction, mental health records, and oral history. I spun these texts into an opera without a plot — a dramatic cantata. In place of a traditional narrative, the piece moves through a series of emotional landscapes. There are four characters: a Newspaper Editor, a Psychiatrist, an Advertiser of the “School of Magnetic Healing,” and a Lutheran Pastor (Dorn?), who opens the piece with an Invocation and closes it with a Credo (the only stretch of the libretto that my mother managed to complete before her death) and a Blessing. The tenor soloist portrays all the roles. Superficially, these characters may seem merely eccentric, but embraced compassionately for who they were (ordinary people, mainly) and the sort of world in which they lived, their humanity shines warmly, inspiringly through.