Dormiveglia in Venice

First, the familiar ritual of crossing from the real world via the Ponte della Libertà to the Floating World; next, disembarking at Santa Lucia Station, thinking of the old violin professor’s farewell; finally, the people streaming down the graceful marble steps to the canal like water gushing in slow motion from a sluice. Limbo. At this point, stepping into any vaporetto, any ferryboat, will do: spoken Italian, German, Russian, very little English, the powerful, brutish diesel engine’s snarling as it is thrown into reverse, laughter trampolining off the water. I look up. Across the canal I see not a woman in a blue pea coat but a young girl in a white dress with a red ribbon holding an old man’s hand, her other hand shielding her eyes from the midday sun. Will I get off in Murano and visit the graves of Stravinsky, Nono, and Diaghilev at San Michele? Not this time; this time, only life in Venice. If a montage beat is notated in a screenplay with ellipses, then what is the musical equivalent?

The picture you always see on tourist websites: the Basilica della Salute. (p/c: Daron Hagen)

Welcome back then, to the transience of Venice; ave to its addiction to suggestibility; a nod to our old acquaintances misattribution, and the persistence of forgetting. A toast to memories receding and growing more untrustworthy — particularly here, where the sweat that pools at the base of your spine when you’re late, rushing, and lost feels like sickness, the hand pressing on your chest is not hot, but cold, infinitely patient and macabre. “Is this how this story ends?” you ask yourself just at the moment you’ve become pre-syncopal and you’re about to accept that you’re trapped in an M.C. Escher engraving where the tops and bottoms of the stairways meet up, the last of a dozen sunless, serpentine calles suddenly opens up to the Canal Grande and the full force of the sun hits you and you stop dead, you lose your place, the narrative derails, you go up, you hear something for the first time in the orchestra that you shouldn’t have because you’re not playing your assigned part, your clammy shirt seizes up around you like a moist, limp handshake, and you suddenly understand, after all these years, what Dylan Thomas meant when he wrote that “old age should burn and rave at close of day.”

Fondamente Nove. Not the acqua alta in which I saw stars but the bright blue sky, dazzling sun scattering diamonds on the Adriatic wave tips. Not cheap rye from a silent Acheron-type bartender on a cold, windy, rainy night, but a cappuccino on the house from the waiter at the charming café that has replaced it. Pointing to my phone: “è morto,” I tell him, drawing my finger across my throat. Then, I didn’t have a phone number; this time the phone (and its GPS) died on the vaporetto from Santa Lucia, forcing me to be here. This spot. “Prego?” he asks. “No. Grazie.” Not lire, but euros on the table in front of me. I pull out my book. This I must remember on my own.

The very light pressure I use when sketching with my lucky mechanical pencil. Deep breath. Very long exhalation. Eyes closed. Focus pull. First the faint, straight tic tac toe of a map, then, opening my eyes, I attach the names I can remember: R to next street. R on Boteri. L on Cordoni. L on del Volta. R on 1st street (on R). Boca. Scanning the page, thinking, did I even know what a Rack Focus was back then? Yes, but I didn’t think that way then: it was all raw and wet and cold and febrile.

No laptop; just this book. Checking in to the Casa Boccassini, I hand over my passport. “I’m sorry – Scusi,” I say, without thinking. In English she replies, “you think you’re sorry, I’m Russian” and we leave it at that. A cat jumps on the counter in front of me, purring. Ariel, who has succeeded the polydactyl mouser Muse, who got out the front door one night never to return, and who I learn was in fact not blind, it was the dog who was blind, but I never knew him, so I had combined them in memory.

Ariel, Casa Boccassini’s house cat. (p/c: Daron Hagen)

In the absolute silence of 4 in the morning, awakened by the dings of my sons bidding me sweet dreams as they go to bed in New York six hours earlier, I think of Katherine Mansfield’s critique of Woolf’s Night and Day not reflecting the atomizing effect of the war. But now there is no night, no day, no Day for Night; the 24/7 news cycle and the Internet has ended all that. And here we are, now hurtling once again nella fauce del cane. I send them both heart emojis and mute the phone. But I’m up. The fear of forgetting. Scribbling, fast, in this book: working the whole thing out as a screenplay in my dreams. Closing the book, I try to get back to sleep, but remain hypnagogic.

Dings from the group chat of my colleagues at the Bogliasco Foundation, where I’m writing a book about making operafilms. They’re sharing pictures of the sunrise in Liguria. Now I am experiencing dormiveglia (the liminal zone of being half-asleep or semi-conscious). I can access my dream, which is as clear as a film: it is Carnevale and, earlier today, the angry vendor who hisses, “you wait for the priests to pass” as he holds the lapel of my leather jacket as I try to pass him; the real priests first, then the people beating taiko drums, then the celebrators dressed as celebrants, then the plague masks. “Now you go.” A slow walk to the Accademia to buy a book and pastries for the gang back in Liguria at Pasticceria Toletta, touching the trunks of the sycamores and noting the unchanging changing light, and then a fermata to light a candle at the Chiesa di San Moise for Bernie before walking to San Marco, stopping for dinner at Ristorante da Ivo, specials written by hand on the wall, everything unchanged, reading Bazin’s essays and arguing in the margins as I have since my teens, the long walk back by memory to the Cannaregio, stopping to watch people and to catch my breath and….

The Courtyard at Casa Boccassini (p/c: Daron Hagen)

The rosewater used to launder the sheets gives the room “the loved one” smell. I can no longer bear it. The sun has risen. I must get out. Like the old days, I’ve nothing to pack but my book bag, so I draw the sweaty sheets up on the bed, check for my passport, and pick up the key I’ve accepted for decades. I descend the steps to the garden and sit by the empty fountain to write about the female pilot throwing the lever earlier on the vaporetto: Charon, I think, which is pronounced Karen, I muse, asking her for her name, which is Serena. Had to be. “Serenissima,” I laugh, “were you born here?” “Of course,” she says. I raise my left hand to orans position and silently offer a greeting to the spirit of my old friend Frederick Hammond, who first introduced me to this hotel when we taught together at Bard College and, year after year, stayed here while working on his Frescobaldi treatise. It occurs to me that I was right when I wrote in my memoir, “Yes, this is how this story finally ends.” This gentle riff is enough. Not Muse, but Ariel, marks my legs and I reflexively reach down to scratch her neck, seeing that breakfast has been laid in the room just off the garden. All here is as it was and shall ever be, though the names and people will change.

Ariel means lion of God, I recall while standing in the Basilica di San Marco on my way back to Santa Lucia, about 24 hours after arriving. Soundtrack cue Monteverdi's Lasciatemi morire mixed with Welles V.O. “Maybe a man’s name…” from F for Fake under slow pan east-to-west looking straight up into the basilica’s cupola as I recall the conversation I had with Ford Lallerstedt in 1998 about the way that this specific physical space shaped Claudio Monteverdi’s counterpoint and how that effect might be reproduced visually. I take a picture with my resurrected phone of the sun shining through the stained-glass windows. Why try to put this moment behind bars? I think, erasing it. “You wait for the priests to pass,” he said. “All used up,” Dietrich said to Quinlin. “So, then, why not?” sigh the stones of Ruskin’s Venice, and I take another picture, one with which I will begin a new story, a new sequence of shots, a new tune whose cumulative effect will be … will be to be.

Time and David Del Tredici (1937-2023)

It was always time with David. He bent it; he warped it; he turned it around back on itself; he lived outside of it; he could practically stop it with music; in life, he ran with it until he ran out of it.

The day in March 2019 that my memoir was published and offered up to the crickets I put all my handwritten diaries—over thirty years’ worth of scribbling—into banker’s boxes and sealed them up. I traded the false specificity of reportage for the even more subjective truth of memory. Now I must pour, as Ned Rorem and his teacher Virgil Thomson used to, through the index of my book to fix events in time. I recall reading the words that I wrote about David to him over the telephone and asking whether he thought they were okay before sending off the manuscript. (He did.)

So, on this March 2024 morning I tried to find my letters to David (and his to me) and discovered that I’d have to move two portable air conditioners, a box fan, and two suitcases to get to the file drawer in the storage closet in which letters from all the D’s in my life ended up so I gave up. They’re in there—all the postcards with Mad Hatters and March Hares stamped on them, words jumping off the page limned in multiple colors (he always had a glass or peanut butter jar filled with different colored pens and pencils on his desk at whatever artist colony or home he was working) with little, crazy asides added in at the last moment. Anyone who received a letter from David knew they could expect an illuminated manuscript of sorts. He took time to write them. They were vibrant, gossipy, funny, and sweet. His communications were always labor-intensive; details mattered: sometimes a sentence would march on in blue ink and end with a single bright red exclamation point.

Since I no longer particularly trust my own memory, I paged through my “Work Log and List of Themes,” a notebook I’ve kept since July 1976 (and which, ominously, is entirely filled up, with no more blank pages to accommodate new work—a nightmare scenario for someone as superstitious and obsessive as me), to determine which artist colonies (and when) David and I had had overlapping residencies over the years (since I always finished something and made note of where I was when I finished it) to fix some dates in advance of a chat with his biographer the other day. So, the chronology of this Mad March through Time is underpinned by the several vignettes that I included in my memoir and the (many more) exactly-dated marginalia (“Sang through this with DDT in the music room,”  or “Bowings revised per DDT,” and the like.) from my “Work Log.”

The central pillar of our relationship was our shared love of Yaddo, the storied artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, at which we met during June 1984. I was between studies at Curtis and Juilliard, footloose, fueled by an entirely impractical sense that it was my time. While being shown around the place by painter Nancy Brett, who was serving that summer as a Special Assistant to the President, I was led into the mansion’s Great Hall to the sound of a Mendelssohn “Song Without Words” wafting out of the spacious music room. I had arrived just before dinner and David, as was his custom, was relaxing by running his fingers through the piano repertoire for the pleasure of our, as he announced when Nancy introduced us, “fellow inmates.” That infectious, unforgettable smile! The mischievous grin. A sparkle in his eyes second only to Otto Luening’s. Nancy left us, and David, reaching for a well-worn edition of Haydn symphonies reduced to four hands, asked archly whether I wanted to be on the bottom or the top.

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Photographed by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 1990.

I was, as so many other musicians were, enchanted. I took the left side, hoping that hitting an occasional bass note properly might keep me in the game, and we were off. After a few minutes, I realized that he was gradually speeding up and that his left hand was dropping down between mine and adding bits of my right-hand part that I was leaving out to (let’s face it) survive. It was an exhilarating, joyous display of raw talent. My heart began racing. For a few more minutes I survived on adrenaline until, suddenly, he simply began playing everything up a step. That was it: I was thrown from the horse. He’d exceeded my keyboard skills and, laughing so hard that I teared up, I got up and told him that I had to unpack. “Welcome to Yaddo,” he said, laughing.

Former president of PEN, poet and author Richard McCann, filmmaker Sharon Greytak, painter Michael Flanagan, David and this young composer immediately became constant dinner companions. Over the years, David, Richard, and I remained close friends, and served for decades together on the board of Yaddo. It turned into quite an important summer for me, as I also met poet Gardner McFall, who graciously allowed me to set her poem, “Sonnet After Oscar Wilde,” which I sang immediately upon completion, with David accompanying. Twenty-three years later, Gardner, who was also by then a board member, bravely mined her own life story when she wrote the libretto of our opera Amelia for Seattle Opera.

David and I overlapped several times during the 80s at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and MacDowell—always the four hands, me sight-reading through whatever song he was working on and ending up laughing with joy; him sightreading whatever song I was writing and me singing them. “Why do we have to write for singers?” he would ask, “We know they can sing it beautifully; but isn’t it more fun to hear someone who can’t sing perform it?” (I couldn’t help but notice that the thought had come to him after accompanying me.) In 1990, David was serving as composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic, and, although he never took credit, likely made possible my music’s debut with the Philharmonic—a piece called Common Ground, which had recently been awarded the Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize.

The Tower Studio at Yaddo, where David Del Tredici often worked. p/c: Daron Hagen

When David went away on sabbatical during the 90s I’d teach for him at City University of New York. Composition lessons, of course; but also counterpoint and orchestration. I was also on the faculty of Bard College at the time (and for a couple of semesters, the Curtis Institute), and he enjoyed, I think, the fact that I, like him, didn’t consider myself an academic. “Teaching gives me physical pain, doesn’t it you?” he once asked as we packed his station wagon—he off to another colony, and me back to the Upper West Side and a semester of filling in for him. He was only partly serious. David could be a superb teacher. And when he went to artist colonies he—like me—always worked like a dog. We’d run into one another raiding the refrigerator either very, very late or very, very early—the only two “inmates” still awake and working and ask one another how it was going. “I can’t tell you or it will turn to shit,” I would say. And he would say, “I know. Hide the erasers.” If there was cheesecake or dessert of any sort to be had, we’d finish it together. Always, the next day, I’d be jogging it off; David would be pumping iron at the local gym.  I sent him five or six of my students when it was their time to move on over the years and don’t regret it.

Time together at the keyboard was something he shared with lots of other musicians, and I am sorry if I give the impression I was the only one who enjoyed the privilege. I loved him for the force of nature that was his talent, the grace with which he carried it, and the super-hard work that he did, year after year, to honor it. He modelled a working composer to me more than Ned or Virgil because he kept revising and improving everything. Like everyone who knew him, I am devasted by the irony that a man who exulted in the lifelong physicalizing of his music at the keyboard became afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease.

During a visit to Sag Harbor in the mid 90s, I recall him playing the entirety of his opera Dum Dee Tweedle and experiencing more keenly than ever how his obsessive use of melodic and harmonic sequences (either telescoping them to run faster through diminution, or more slowly through extension or metric modulation) skewed one’s perception of time. My memory’s a little foggy, but I think that when he finished, I felt as though he had been playing for about forty minutes only to look at my watch to see that 90 had elapsed. Repetition was talismanic for him as a composer, I think; it could summon emotional lightness or darkness. If tonality was redemptive to him, then his compositional apotheosis came through such a profound compression of harmonic and melodic movement that it felt dissonant—Liszt on steroids.

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DDT 80th Birthday Concert, Joe’s Pub, New York, NY March 2017. p/c: Tevi Eber

By the late 90s, we were performing fundraisers together for Yaddo—he would be paired with the extraordinary, luminous John Kelly; I’d pair off with Paul Sperry, or whomever was singing in whatever opera I was working on. I recall an event at Harold Reed’s, for example, where he performed his Acrostic Song (literally all over the keyboard) and I followed by accompanying myself in some simple, tender settings of Paul Muldoon’s poetry. “How can you be so simple?” he asked. “That terrifies me.”

When Muldoon and I underwent the premiere of our opera Bandanna in Austin in April 2000, David wept afterwards, told me that he knew what it had taken to summon so much darkness in the final scene. “Of course, nobody is going to get it,” he said. I was astonished when he said, “Tonight, you are my hero.” Stephen Sondheim is said to have decreed that, on opening night, one should simply note that a work is “brilliant” to the author. “Criticism later,” he is supposed to have said. I agree. I was touched that David stood by his assessment of Bandanna. I recall—listening together to the entirety of my latest opera, A Woman in Morocco at his apartment in Westbeth—David pointing out exact measures that I had forwarded musical arguments begun in Bandanna fifteen years before. “Diminished seventh chords are very dangerous because they can go anywhere,” he observed. “Yeah, either they can go Salome or Salome at the Super 8 Motel,” I replied, which made him giggle.

One of my treasures remains the fragment of manuscript that he gave me after a particularly athletic read-through of a song in 2002-ish that he subsequently dedicated to me called "Now You Know" during which I had broken down, laughing with tears of joy & disbelief. I think that he wrote "pre-Hagen sketch” on it because I told him that he was absolutely nuts to ask a singer to do something. Over dinner: "Do you DARE to accept the dedication of this song?" he asked. It is my ardent hope that he didn't change a thing on my account.

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I began to sense time beginning to run out on us as early as July 2005, when Gardner and I were at Yaddo working on Amelia and David accompanied me in the music room where we first met as I sang our first, trial aria to see how it landed with the other guests. In the aria, a father pictures himself as looking down on his loved ones from the stars after his demise. By the time the aria had been folded into the opera and premiered, my first son had been born. Came along another, and a move from Manhattan to the country. David and I saw one another less frequently. He still went to concerts—what a champ! But I had stopped. They didn’t feed my work the way that they did his. Ours became primarily a relationship of letters and telephone calls.

Still, Gilda Lyons and I would catch up with David every year at Yaddo’s annual meeting. Lord, how David loved Gilda, and how deeply they intuitively understood one another. We performed a version of David’s Acrostic Song together for him on a concert in Gilda’s Phoenix Concerts series in New York (alongside the world premiere of “Emily’s Aria” from Ned’s Our Town) that I had confected and he observed, with mock horror, “Now that you have had your way with my music, shall we continue to speak?” “Was it okay?” I asked. “It was wonderful, but why did you reharmonize me?” “Because I could,” I replied. The twinkle.

At the premiere of David Del Tredici’s “Herrick’s Oratorio” in New York City, 20 May 2023. p/c: Tevi Eber

I am still having trouble coming to terms with the fact that David is not down in the Village, pulling reams of notes out of his piano at Westbeth, or making little forts with walls comprised of different sorts of jelly jars and vitamin bottles at the breakfast table at Yaddo, or jogging in the woods at MacDowell, or lurking by the driers at VCCA in the wee hours looking for leftovers in the fellows’ refrigerator. When Cantori premiered his Herrick Oratorio in May 2023, it was a chance to say goodbye. David, a Catholic, ever the subversive, had woven Martin Luther’s Mighty Fortress into the finale of what was effectively his final public statement. I had driven in from the country for the premiere and was shocked, but not surprised, by the toll that Parkinson’s had extracted. As ever, his talent dazzled, and I told him so. “You’re up to your old tricks, messing with my sense of time,” I said. He had been, but the path we had traveled together, our shared Mad March, was running out. Nothing between us had changed, but everything around us had. He pulled me in close and said that he loved me and that I should take care of myself and Gilda and the boys. The twinkle was still there.

If I had not been walking out of the church with a friend I would have had to have stopped to steady myself, because, for the first time since hearing David play Mendelssohn before meeting him in June 1984, I felt that David’s time had run out. I was gutted. It wasn’t until an hour later, driving up the Palisades to the country, that I was able to reconnect to the fact that I am blessed to actually have some more time in front of me, with skinned knees and tree forts having given way to basketball and  girlfriends for my sons, and mid-career engaging Gilda. Music remembers absolutely everything, I thought, and it has its own relationship with time. Messiaen knew it; David lived it. To me, a talent like David’s is evidence of the Unseen. And now it is time for me to learn how to let David go. Because there are among us many more forces of nature like him who can use a hand: some of them are very young not just in spirit, but in fact. Help them; lift them up, I thought, the way that the simple fact that talent like David’s existed lifted me. I’ll close with that.

An Affair of the Heart -- Interview: Toronto Film Magazine

 TFM:  How did you start making films and what was the first film project you worked on?

 DH: Several years ago, I was diagnosed with a congenital, degenerative heart defect. I began looking for a story to tell in which I could explore reconciling my own mortality: what issues run through the mind of a fully expressed artist conversant with the relationship between art and life seriously facing the prospect of death? I chose Welles as my subject because he was an artistic polymath—writer, visual artist, actor, director, filmmaker—and a deeply-committed social activist who also strove to live a complete and fulfilling personal life. I have always believed as a theater person that (as architect Louis Sullivan posited) “form follows function.” 

 Consequently, it seemed obvious to me that Welles’ ebullient creative generosity and aesthetic range, intellect, and art required a many-layered dramatic treatment—one that fused images and sound on a deeper than usual level, wedded electro-acoustic and live music, live performance and film, opera and music theater, and jubilantly mashed-up musical and visual languages. I determined to build a multi-media piece that used the “bardo odyssey” of the great filmmaker Orson Welles (the film takes place as he lay dying of a heart attack) to do this.

 I knew that this deep dive was going to require more than a love of movies, an acquaintance with the writings of André Bazin, and access to some video equipment. The editing process is so important to any life, but it is central to a writer, composer, or filmmaker. I had scored some films, so I was conversant with that end of things; but my subject in Orson demanded that I not just imagine but feelhow it feels to edit film month after month. I had directed my operas professionally, conducted them, written their libretti, knew the ropes of live theater; but I had never directed a film, or managed a film production team. It turns out that the opera and film worlds are astonishingly similar. That’s how I came to start making films, beginning with Orson Rehearsed.

 TFM: Which musical genre and which genre of filmmaking fascinates you as an artist and why? 

 DH: I feel most comprehensively expressed as a composer of music interwoven with some sort of dramaturgical narrative. I’ve written eleven operas, yes, but I’ve written an awful lot of music for the concert hall—five symphonies, a dozen concerti, reams of chamber music and hundreds of art songs. Although I am a passionate collaborative artist, I admit to really liking the highly centralized and subjective control of the auteur model as defined by François Truffaut in his essays because it comes closest to the way that composers used to function in the opera world.

 TFM:  How does it feel to write, direct and then compose music for a personal style of indie film?

 DH: Absolutely wonderful. I have savored every second of the Process of making Orson Rehearsed: from discovery with the actors during the rehearsal and staging of the live component of the film, to learning how to live the life rhythm of a film editor; from the familiar process of scoring to film, to the unfamiliar process of shooting film myself to music already scored and seamlessly switching alternating between the two. My goal was not to document a live performance, make a music video, or an Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but to create a pathway toward a new genre which is not a hybrid but something more personal, more resistant to categorization—a film about opera, an opera about film.

 TFM:  What is the most challenging aspect of being an independent filmmaker in the film industry?

 DH: I don’t have an answer for that yet. My process as an artist is driven forward by continual reinvention and discovery, and I am just now learning the challenges of being an independent filmmaker. 

 TFM: How difficult is it to fund indie films?

 DH: To the extent that the world of an opera composer is similar to that of an independent filmmaker, I am familiar with the process of bringing producers and presenters to the table, hearing their vision, collaborating, making art with the artists and resources in the room instead of the ones in my head, and letting projects either unfold or evaporate, depending on things I can’t control. Funding is always a problem, of course. On the other hand, technology has made it cheaper to make films; so long as you have access to the tools and the skills to wear a bunch of different hats, you can arrive at the end with something that looks and sounds pretty good.

 In the case of Orson Rehearsed, the Chicago College of the Performing Arts served as a production partner in exchange for their students shadowing me as composer, director, and independent artist, as well as being cast in productions that combined both seasoned professionals and emerging artists. They shared costs with my New Mercury Collective, which is basically my sandbox, or, as Welles would say, train set, in which I build little sandcastles and operatic locomotives. I have more creative control than I do when I work with an opera company, but less money. 

“These films would, in effect, show us what was going on in the minds of the avatars in Welles’ mind—films within an opera that would become a film.” Daron’s editing notes detailing the synchronization of images in the three simultaneously-projected films-within-the-opera-within-the film for the “Everybody’s Shakespeare” sequence. At this stage, these took the place of storyboards.

TFM:  Tell us about the process of the production for Orson Rehearsed? 

 DH: First, I threw spaghetti at the wall for six months in Logic Pro. I created about twenty 3-6 minute long “think pieces” about specific events and elements in Welles’ life that he might think about while dying. These dramatic beats combined manipulated snatches of recordings of my own acoustic works stretching back to the 80s, sound effects, brief snatches of Welles interviews, loops, and newly-composed vocal lines—most performed by my wife, vocalist/composer Gilda Lyons, and some by me—and mockups of what would become acoustic instrumental lines.

 I chose to divide the character of Welles into three avatars: one young, one middle-aged, one dying. This allowed for ensembles and multiple points of view. They sang a libretto that combined newly-written material by me with words drawn from public domain sources and repurposed—Shakespeare, Welles himself, Emma Lazarus, and others. Gradually, these spaghetti-throwing sessions generated a core of about a dozen musical ideas that held the entire piece together.

 Simultaneously, I filmed dozens of high-def video scenelets that would serve as visual equivalents to the musical motives being tossed up during the work in Logic—a man’s hands typing on a manual keyboard in New Haven; a woman’s hands gliding over piano keys in New York City; a child blowing out candles on a birthday cake, or tracing the letters carved into tombstones in a graveyard; hail falling in Paris; waves breaking and the sun setting in Nicaragua; an elevated train passing by overhead in Chicago; the desert outside of Albuquerque, and on and on. These images ended up unifying the films projected onstage during the live production component of production, and also served as raw material to be edited into the final film.

 During the next six months, since the film was taking place in someone’s mind and would unspool in real time in the theater, I gradually arranged the essays into a sequence, dropping some, adding others, in order to create a psychological and emotional narrative that would take the place of physical action. I edited together all the footage into three sixty-minute films that would accompany the three Orsons in live performance. These films would, in effect, show us what was going on in the minds of the avatars in Welles’ mind—films within an opera that would become a film. I edited into this mix some licensed stock footage of a red silk scarf, film leader, the Statue of Liberty at sunset, some protestors, and a poignant skein of footage culled from a 40s newsreel of a boy walking away from the camera on a country road. This boy ultimately became a rather important “ghost character.”

 Once I had synchronized the electro-acoustic soundtrack to these films, I composed the acoustic chamber orchestra component that would be performed live by the Fifth House Ensemble at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago in conjunction with the electro-acoustic score, conducted by Roger Zahab. A trusted and admired colleague who generously (and bravely) agreed to my request that we eschew the standard “film to image” gear that is used for screenings of Hollywood films when orchestras show them, Roger (who had access only to a click track) marvelously coordinated live singers, an orchestra, and pre-recorded sounds in a theater entirely by ear. I asked him to do this because I wanted the risk, the excitement, and the flexibility of live execution that I have grown to feel as a conductor myself is the secret ingredient to great opera performance.

 Next, I stage directed the show with the immensely gifted and creative cast. Their performances were captured visually over two shows and a dress rehearsal by three stationary cameras and one roving closeup camera—sort of one step up from the usual archival video. The soundtrack audio was recorded in the house. I wanted the soundtrack to sound captured live in order to advance the dialectic of “live” versus “canned” and the combination of the two. Post-production, and live concert mixing can make everything sound so homogenous that nothing sounds “real” anymore.

 I left Chicago with about ten hours of audio and video and let it sit for nearly a year before diving back in. First, I ever-so-gently massaged the soundtrack and had it mastered. Then, I cut the performance film to the soundtrack. Next, I intercut the pre-shot films and the live performance footage (which I washed out into black and white to differentiate it from the pre-shot films) before adding a third layer of semi-opaque “ghost” images screened in red and blue that carried forward elements of both. I received important feedback from colleagues at this stage about what was and was not “landing”—Rabab Haj Yahya, H. Paul Moon, John Corigliano, and Todd Vunderink, among others. This last stage of the process slowly brought the film’s messages into clearer relief and allowed me to discover what the rhythm of the recurring images and music were trying to express. 

 TFM: What inspires you to work as an artist in society and what kind of impact would you like to have on your audience as a filmmaker and composer? 

 DH: Artists of conscience can speak truth to power and make a difference (for the better) by reminding people of their humanity and interconnectedness, the responsibility we have to one another. I try to do that. I am proud to serve on the faculty of the Chicago College of the Performing Arts of Roosevelt University because the institution’s values match my own. That generous, staunch support helps me to amplify my citizenship and hone my craft while sharing it with students.

 TFM: What is your next artistic project? 

 DH: I am directing a staged production of my opera New York Stories for Florida Grand Opera in the spring, and then directing a filmed version of my opera Shining Brow in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Westcott House with the Springfield Symphony and Think TV (the Dayton PBS affiliate).

 TFM: What do you think about the distribution of indie films and what do you recommend to emerging artists? 

 DH: I don’t know enough about distribution to make any recommendations. At present I am submitting Orson Rehearsed to festivals and learning about distributors. It is an art film for which there is a minuscule market; I never expected it to be commercially viable or “popular.” Still, it is garnering laurels (for which I am grateful and honored), and it might get some legs, however humble. After it has been shown at festivals, who knows?

TFM: Why do you make films? 

 DH: Really, it circles back to process for me. I’m just feeling my way forward as an artist and as a human, learning, going deeper into truths, and working to connect, and to make the bit of difference I can, as I am able. I’m very lucky to have landed in a place where I can discover and reinvent while collaborating with extraordinary artists.  

 This interview originally appeared in Toronto Film Magazine on 23 November 2020 when Orson Rehearsed was awarded the “Best Composer” laurel at the Montreal Independent Film Festival. You can read it there by clicking here.

Elegance, Intelligence, and Dignity: Remembering William Weaver

William Weaver was one of my closest faculty friends during the decade I taught music composition at Bard College. The eminent translator of works by Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, and Italo Calvino, among others, Bill also worked as a commentator on the Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts, and made exquisite libretto translations. His monographs on Puccini and Verdi  (The Puccini Companion, and The Verdi Companion) continue to serve as irreplaceable resources for me as an opera composer. Wednesday evenings when I wasn’t drinking with my department chair, I either spent with harpsichordist and Frescobaldi-expert Frederick Hammond, or over pasta and champagne with Bill and his emotionally mercurial Japanese partner Kazuo Nakajima at the house they shared on campus in which Mary McCarthy used to live. I learned more about dramaturgy from Bill over dinner during those years than from anyone else. To dine with him was, in a way, to dine with Callas and the rest; only two other men I’ve known could match his operatic erudition: Speight Jenkins and Frank McCourt. He also taught me how to make an exquisite Pasta Puttanesca in less than five minutes.

Bill also maintained a villa called Monte San Sevino (on to which he had built an addition with royalties derived from his translation of The Name of the Rose that he called his Eco Chamber) and an apartment close by St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. Over dinner in his Village pad in autumn 1995, Bill asked me, “Do you know any poetry by Jimmy Merrill?” I did. Merrill, one of my favorite poets, had succumbed to AIDS only the previous February. I had read The Changing Light at Sandover in high school, and it was my good fortune to have from memory his Kite Poem. I closed my eyes and recited it, concluding:

Waiting in the sweet night by the raspberry bed,

And kissed and kissed, as though to escape on a kite.

EC Schirmer's first edition of the songs.

Letter from Bill about the songs.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that Bill was weeping. “Did you know him?” he asked. “No,” I said. “I never met him.” Beat. “Well,” Bill sighed, looking down. “I have a proposition for you: I’d like to commission some songs in Jimmy’s memory. I also have a young protégé named Charles Maxwell—a countertenor—who I’d like you to hear. If you like his voice, then I’d like you to premiere them with him.” Flattered, honored, I agreed immediately. “But the rights—,” I began. “Oh, just ask Sandy McClatchy to release them,” he said. “He’s Jimmy’s executor.” I waited. “How much will you need for the work?” he asked. Uncomfortable, I looked down. “Let’s do this,” he said, smiling. He reached in his jacket pocket and drew out a little notepad. Ripping off a blank page and sliding it across the table to me, he said, “Why don’t you write down on this piece of paper how much you need?” I did as I was told, wrote down a number that I thought was reasonable, folded the paper, and slid it back to him. Smiling, he opened it, read the number, put the paper down, drew his checkbook from another jacket pocket, and wrote a check. Still smiling, he ripped the check from the book, folded it carefully in half, took a sip of his chianti, and slid it back to me.  I put it in my breast pocket without opening it. “Now!” he clapped his hands. “Let’s have some dessert!” An hour later, walking to the subway, I thought to draw the check from my pocket: he’d given me exactly twice the amount for which I’d asked.

I had at the time the impression that composing for a male soprano was pretty much like writing for any other singer, but I was wrong. Writing for Charles Maxwell, I learned just how much physical strength and stamina is required to sustain singing for any length of time an octave higher than men customarily do. An African-American born in North Carolina, he projected the intelligent, elegant, self-contained dignity of one who had endured and overcome bigotry at home before emigrating to Italy, where he completed his studies at the Instituto Musicale “P. Mascagni” in Livorno. We debuted my Merrill Songs together at the Danny Kaye Playhouse in Manhattan the following November on a Clarion Concert, thanks to Fred Hammond—Fred had taken over as director of them as a favor to his mentor, Ralph Kirkpatrick. I was so intrigued by the otherworldly appeal of Charles’ voice—it retained its brilliance and clarity even in the extremely high register without ever losing its volume—that I subsequently suggested to my librettist collaborator Paul Muldoon that we make the character of Vera in our new opera Vera of Las Vegas a female impersonator—personal reinvention was to be the core theme, and playing The Crying Game’s trope seemed an apt starting point—so that I could craft it especially for him. 

Bill died five years ago, not far away from where I now live, and I miss him dearly. This morning, as I scrolled through the latest McCarthy-esque prattling in the news, I thought suddenly of that dinner with Bill in 1995. I looked up from my chair and my eyes rested on the spine of his Puccini Companion a few feet away on the bookshelf. I felt gratitude for having had the good fortune to have witnessed firsthand the understated elegance of his transit through life. I felt gratitude for having been able to enjoy—over a hundred Metropolitan Opera broadcasts over the years, and a few dozen meals—his frank intellectual brilliance. I felt gratitude for the humble, gentlemanly dignity with which he confronted the challenges of both Art and Life.

This piece originally appeared in the Huffington Post. Click here to read it there.