AMELIA: A Listener’s Guide (Part 7 of 7)

Act Two Scene Three concludes this song and story, which has featured so much death, with a birth. Originally, the creative team thought about ways of representing the birth onstage, visually; but they chose instead to let music lead the way. Amelia’s labor, and the birth itself, are represented musically by an extended orchestral interlude which erupts into an a cappella nonet when the baby’s life begins.

Daron Hagen wrote four orchestral interludes for scene changes in Amelia, following the model of Benjamin Britten, whose orchestral interludes include the four glorious “Sea Interludes” from Peter Grimes. This final interlude, which tells the story of the baby’s birth, was the most challenging one to write: Daron Hagen told me he ended up writing it three times. His first draft was written before the birth of his son; he rewrote it after his son was born and he had first-hand experience, if not of Amelia’s version of the story, at least of Paul’s. He then wrote it again, after dozens of women who had had children heard and gave feedback on it at a workshop in May 2008. Hagen learned, for instance, that there comes a moment in every woman’s labor when she has to give up, has to say “I can’t do this.” That psychological turning-point, giving up and relaxing, is necessary in order to release a hormone which then completes dilation. You hear that little story very clearly in the orchestra, when piano repetitions of the heart-monitor motive yield to timpani tapping out the SOS motive and strings surging upwards in quick little “lift off” scales.

The baby emerges when a texture of rumbling sixteenth notes, scales rushing upwards, and soaring wings gives way to nine singers on a glorious triple forte E major chord. The voices are bass (the Father), two baritones (the Doctor and Paul), tenor (Dodge), two mezzos (Amanda and Amelia), and three sopranos (Young Amelia, Aunt Helen, and The Flier). Their nonet, as complicated in its way as the fiendishly difficult ensembles in Verdi’s Falstaff, concludes the opera. Hagen, who says that he did in fact hear a jubilant ecstasy of voices breaking free from orchestral gravity when his son was born, admits that his musical device here “is the obvious way to do it; the trick is, can we do it well?” As of this writing, the singers and Maestro Gerard Schwarz are still figuring out how to do justice to what Hagen has written, with its jazzily syncopated rhythms, close harmony between vocal neighbors, and unforgettable tempo marking “Unreeling like a montage of kisses!”

Join us at Seattle Opera on May 8, and in the weeks that follow, to find out what it sounds like for yourself.

AMELIA: A Listener’s Guide (Part 6 of 7)

The heart of Amelia is Act Two Scene Two. Structurally, this scene contains the golden mean: that moment, not quite two-thirds of the way through, where (mathematically speaking) a climax or turning-point feels most natural. Left, the mathematics of the Golden Mean create beautiful natural shapes. Richard Wagner always deploys his shattering musical climaxes at the moment of the Golden Mean, whether you’re talking about a prelude or orchestral interlude or an entire opera.

The climax of Amelia takes place in a hospital, a few days after the pregnant Amelia collapses at her husband’s office. Because the drama of this scene is extremely complicated, the scene is organized musically around three set-pieces:

Theme and Variations
After an expository passage in which we meet several new characters--Amelia’s Doctor and Aunt Helen, plus a real-life Father and Boy who remind us of Daedalus and Icarus--Hagen organizes the first section of the scene as a Theme and Variations. The theme is Aunt Helen’s hymn-like arioso “Oh, stars flung wide across the dome,” a prayer she sings upon learning from the Doctor that the Boy (Amelia’s neighbor in the hospital) is likely to die from the injuries he sustained in his great fall. The first four variations support the comatose Amelia’s conversation with her dead father; but the final variation turns out to be Aunt Helen’s version of the Navy hymn.

Quintet
When Amelia tells Dodge, “I’ll let you go now,” we begin the Amelia Quintet. The singers are the Father, Aunt Helen, the Boy, Dodge, and The Flier; the voices enter in fugue, because, as Daron Hagen puts it, “There’s nothing more terrifying than a fugue!” There’s something mechanical about the inevitability of the fugue--intensified in this particular fugue by an ostinato, an unsettling repetitive figure which we hear over and over again in the accompaniment:



Musical example by members of the Seattle Symphony

This ostinato cell is the sound of the Boy’s heart monitor beeping away; the pinched high B flat is actually played by a dead-stick Vibraphone, meaning the percussionist hits the bar but never releases his mallet. The machinery in the music sets up an atmosphere of eerieness, while the five voices in their fugue lament the imminent death of the Boy; he repeats the cry, “Father, don’t leave me!” while his Father reassures him and encourages him to “Cast off your fear.” Following the Quintet, the boy’s heart-monitor flatlines (computerized sound effect) and an attempted resuscitation fails. Watch the singers being trained by staff at Harborview Medical Center to perform this scene accurately here.

Amelia is about loss and recuperation. This quintet plays a crucial thematic role, sheltering as it does in music the emotional impact of a tragic death. We meet in this opera four characters who cross the line between life and death: The Flier, Dodge, the unnamed daughter of Trang and Huy, and the Boy; but the music only stops to mourn the loss of the Boy. No one can mourn The Flier or Dodge, because no one knows what happened to either of them; Trang and Huy’s daughter dies in a wartime action sequence of senseless violence, one without time for grief. The Boy’s death comes where it does because we need to mourn those we’ve lost. The creative team who wrote Amelia have each in their own lives had to grieve for those they’ve loved and lost, and when we hear the Quintet, each of us in the audience will be right there, in that scene--because it happens to all of us, sad though it is, it’s what makes us human, mortal.

Letter Aria
But the true Golden Mean of Amelia is the aria that follows the Quintet, the piece known as the “Letter Aria.” Paul sings it; deeply shocked by the death of the boy, he fears that Amelia, too, may die. He is imploring her not to die, a cappella, when he finds under Amelia’s sheets, miraculously, the last letter Dodge wrote from Vietnam--even though Trang burned that letter thirty years earlier. So the aria is Paul reading the loving last words of a husband and father as he bids farewell to the wife and daughter he loves most of all. Right, one of the real-life letters from Dodge McFall, senior, that inspired the Letter Aria (courtesy of Gardner McFall).

Like every moment of Amelia, the Letter Aria operates on many levels: it is Dodge, comforting Amelia; it’s Paul, comforting Amelia; it’s Dodge, comforting Paul; it’s Paul, having his first and last encounter with his father-in-law; it is someone without convictions learning from someone else what is worth dying for--and what is worth living for. Musically, the Letter Aria is a gentle Andante, with pulsing hymn-chords in the orchestra and long lyric phrases for the baritone; it moves from the key associated with Dodge (and his military trumpets), Bb major, to Ameila’s home key, E major; and it climaxes in a full-voiced high G and then ends on a pianissimo high E. Seattle Opera’s beloved late Director of Education, Perry Lorenzo, told me when we first heard it two years ago he thought this brief, powerful aria had the potential to replace Billy Budd’s “Billy in the Darbies” aria as the standard English-language audition aria for baritones.

Having mourned those we’ve lost, and found renewed strength and confidence from magical words of comfort, it’s time now for: the landing of Amelia Earhart! The Letter Aria is followed by a brief scene in which The Flier gets out of her Lockheed Electra, looks around, and assesses that wherever she is, it’s an OK place. Metaphorically, this means that Amelia is ready to give birth. The scene concludes with her emerging from her coma, refusing Caesarean section, and declaring: “I can do this.”

AMELIA: A Listener’s Guide (Part 5 of 7)

Act Two Scene One of Amelia takes place in the office of Amelia’s husband, Paul, who is an aeronautical engineer. Although the opera isn’t specifically set in Seattle, Speight Jenkins has commented that he thought Amelia might speak powerfully to residents of Jet City, with its large Vietnamese community and deep connection with Boeing. When Daron Hagen originally pitched Jenkins on the opera, it was about flight, using the image of flight as a metaphor for the human condition. Everything that goes up must come down: liftoff is like birth, landing (or crashing) like death; living itself can be like trying to maintain level flight while the wind is pushing you up and gravity is simultaneously pulling you down. Hagen wanted his opera to work like an ourobourous, the old mythological image of the serpent consuming its own tail: a balance between liftoff and touchdown, male and female, birth and death. Icarus crashes to earth as Amelia’s daughter is born, Dodge and The Flier both go missing and both are found, the end of one thing is forever the beginning of something else.

An abstract way of thinking, to be sure, and if it takes a while to see the pattern, well, that’s maturity. That’s our protagonist’s growth in Act Two, and in this first scene she really hasn’t got it sorted out. This nine-months pregnant woman bursts into her husband’s office, breaks up a meeting, freaks out, and collapses into a coma. Amelia can’t stand not knowing; not knowing what happened to her father, not knowing what happened to Amelia Earhart, not knowing what her husband does for a living. She can’t take the risk involved in letting go of earth and soaring skywards; and she’s not ready to be a mother, since she can’t get out of her own head and see things from other people’s points of view. Her music in this scene is agglutinative: she steals music belonging to all the other characters and uses it herself. Structurally, the scene is a duet which Amelia turns into an aria, which then becomes a mad scene. Kate Lindsey, for one, is excited by the opportunity: “Mezzo sopranos NEVER get to play mad scenes! This is great!”

The scene pivots from duet into aria at the moment where Amelia quotes Melville: “All wars are boyish and are fought by boys.” Hagen and McFall are well aware of the many recent American opera librettos that were constructed by patching together quotations from a variety of different sources; they even mock themselves for doing it, when Paul sings (immediately following Amelia’s Melville quote) “Who said that, who?” In addition to this quote, the libretto quotes Edna St. Vincent Millay, “O world, I cannot hold thee close enough. / Thy winds, thy wide grey skies” and Robert Louis Stevenson, “Up in the air I go flying again, / Up in the air and down;” it takes text from Dodge McFall, Sr.’s real-life letters, and from the final transmission of the real-life Amelia Earhart; and of course, there’s the Navy Hymn.

But even more of the quotations in the libretto happen because the poetry works motivically; the characters of Amelia are constantly quoting each other. Amelia’s aria, in Act Two Scene Two, pivots into mad scene when she quotes something her father told her in Act One Scene One (and which Daedalus repeated to Icarus in Act One Scene Two): “Imagine a feather pushed up by the wind, climbing through sea-mist and clouds.” Dodge was ready to sail off into the unknown blue in search of adventure: “Fear is worth feeling to know that sky.” But Amelia cannot follow him: she fails to complete the quote, and instead the orchestra tumbles down a four-octave chromatic scale, in sixteenth-note tritone chords marked triple-forte and marcatissimo: crash! Amelia is left alone in the clouds, with no airplane to support her, and sings her ensuing mad scene a cappella.

AMELIA: A Listener’s Guide (Part 4 of 7)

The third scene of Amelia takes place in Vietnam. Whereas many of the other locations in the opera are places where we Americans in the audience might feel at ease--a suburban home, an urban apartment, an office--the Vietnam scene is not supposed to feel cozy and familiar. I expect Daron Hagen’s music for this scene will once again prove the old axiom: music always trumps picture. Set Designer Thomas Lynch and the Seattle Opera Scenic Studios have created a truly awe-inspiring set for this scene, with a dazzling backdrop where sunbeams break through the clouds onto verdant mountains and a river meanders away into the distance. But Amelia and her mother Amanda have come to this village to confront their worst fears, to try to find out what happened to Dodge; so the music destabilizes the beautiful location, helps us to feel their anxiety, their isolation, their reaction to the upsetting memory of extreme violence and terrible tragedy relayed to them by Huy and Trang.

Music possesses great power to reassure or to disturb. In this scene, Hagen only has to play three notes:

…and we are disoriented and troubled. This motive features the tritone of G-C#, or diminished fifth, the interval once known as diabolus in musica because of its demonic character: it’s as wrong as a sound can be, according to the old rules of Western music, and the prettiest set in the world doesn’t stand a chance against those three notes. Hagen uses that motive, plus another, a little musical curl:

…not to characterize Vietnam, or the Vietnamese, but to show us how out of place two affluent 1985 American ladies are in this North Vietnamese village.

Costume Design for Vietnamese Village Children by Ann Hould-Ward

Once upon a time, Western opera composers loved throwing together musical clichés about Asian countries for operas with ‘exotic’ locales. Much has changed since then, and nowadays an American composer like Daron Hagen wouldn’t presume to write music about the Vietnamese experience, although he does use a melody (for Trang’s startling final statement) from a well-known Vietnamese folk song. It was important to Hagen that his Vietnamese characters, Huy and Trang, be presented sympathetically in the opera; the audience must believe in them and like them. So he wanted to get their musical utterances exactly right.

David Won as Huy and Karen Vuong as Trang are among the eight singers in the production who sing in Vietnamese (Rozarii Lynch Photo)

A challenging task, when you don’t speak Vietnamese! Vietnamese is a tonal language, so the intonation of every statement is part of the statement’s meaning. The word “con gái,” for example, means “daughter”--if the speaker bends the pitch upwards on the second syllable. (If you don't pronounce the pitch bend properly, you could very easily end up saying “chicken” instead.) When Hagen wrote the music for the scene, he worked closely with several Vietnamese language advisors who helped him craft each musical utterance of the Vietnamese characters; they sometimes spent up to an hour on a single sentence, getting the ups and downs exactly right.

The Vietnam scene, with its flashback to a memory of horrific wartime violence, is probably the most gripping and dramatic scene in the opera from the point of view of plot. Musically, it never expands into lyrical beauty and release, because comforting music wouldn’t tell that story. Amelia was crafted, by McFall and Hagen and Wadsworth, as gesamtkunstwerk. That is, they chose to include in their opera only scenes which would have an emotional impact even in pantomime: losing a loved one, crashing a plane, escaping from prison, a nervous breakdown, resuscitation, death, birth, and this terrifying scene in Vietnam. The idea is, the story itself carries power: what you see onstage, the music you hear, and the words you understand are all ways of approaching that story, doors that can open to you its emotions.

This scene, with its morally impossible situation and agonizing dilemma of good and evil, may be the closest Amelia gets to the drama of Benjamin Britten. Hagen references Britten, as a matter of fact, twice in this scene. With his eclectic and allusive brain, he’s more than happy to quote or allude to other composers (indeed, he loves the operas of Richard Strauss because of this very feature), and here he acknowledges using a chord from Britten’s Billy Budd and a line from Peter Grimes. The ‘diad,’ a polytonal cluster juxtaposing Bb major with B natural minor, represents the struggle between good and evil, heaven and earth; in the soul of Billy Budd’s Captain Vere, the struggle between Billy and Claggart; in Amelia it indicates Dodge’s indeterminate status--alive or dead? Tragic figure, but because of fate or of human volition? Dodge’s solo line in the Vietnam scene, “I have faith in God, I have faith in my country, I will do my duty,” sung on a quiet monotone and marked by Hagen “Otherworldly,” similarly mimics Peter Grimes’s first line, “I swear by Almighty God,” referencing that character’s way of being beyond the reach of human events. In English and American opera, the most powerful, emotionally expressive moments can in fact come through restraint--when a character restricts himself to singing all his text on a single pitch.

AMELIA: A Listener’s Guide (Part 3 of 7)

Scene Two of Amelia takes place three decades after Scene One, in the ninth month of grown-up Amelia’s pregnancy. The scenes are linked by orchestral interludes, like scenes in Benjamin Britten’s great operas, and this first interlude, a sweepingly romantic piece based principally on Dodge’s soaring melodies about the allure of flight, tells the story of Amelia growing up.

One of the things that happened as she grew up: her voice changed. Young Amelia is a soprano, but adult Amelia is a mezzo. Says composer Daron Hagen of his choice to write the part for a mezzo: “The words of this opera are very important to me, Gardner has written beautiful words, and I want the audience to understand them coming from the singer’s mouth, even before they read the titles. That means Amelia has to be a mezzo. When a soprano goes up to where her money notes are, above the staff, it’s impossible for the audience to understand the words.” The decision to make Amelia a mezzo paved the road to other decisions: Amelia’s husband, Paul, is a baritone, because if he were a tenor his range would overlap with hers; while such an overlap might be OK in a Rossini comedy, it wouldn't work in a story about a mature married couple. And since Paul is a baritone, that means the other leading man, Dodge, is a tenor. What’s more, the minute Daron Hagen first heard the voice of Kate Lindsey, whom Speight Jenkins had engaged to create the role of Amelia, Hagen knew he wanted to use English horn, viola, and bassoon in the orchestra to resonate with the rich colors of Kate’s voice.

This second scene takes place in Amelia and Paul’s bedroom. But it opens with two characters who you might not expect to find in an American home in 1996: Daedalus and Icarus (left, as painted by Frederick Leighton). As happened with the shifting times and realities of the first scene, the music of this scene binds together the two disparate realities so that a pair of duets can become a quartet: Daedalus and Icarus are making wings out of feathers and wax, in order to escape the labyrinth, while Amelia and Paul’s discussion of her dream (of course she’s been dreaming about Daedalus and Icarus) evolves into flirtatious marital bickering. Hagen’s use of musical motives makes it clear that Icarus is just as much a projection of Amelia’s feelings about herself and her father as is The Flier. Icarus tends to use a motive that resembles fluttering wings:



Musical illustration by members of the Seattle Symphony

While The Flier uses this sound of rumbling engine and soaring airplane wings:

Amelia herself uses both these motives, as well as the SOS rhythm and the Navy hymn. Everything we hear in the opera is the musical landscape of her soul.

The bedroom scene features the four characters mentioned above (Icarus is a high tenor and Daedalus a bass), but it’s really Amelia’s scene. She sings a beautiful arioso to Paul about her dreams, and then (when he has left for work) an aria exploring those dreams further, “Why think of the blue canary I had at six?” The relentless descending scales of this aria contradict the surging motion of the many rising scales we hear elsewhere in the opera: Amelia, when we meet her in this scene, thinks more about how planes land (or crash) than how they lift off. Before she can be a mother, she must learn to rise up and gaze at the stars again.

Costume design for Paul by Ann Hould-Ward

AMELIA: A Listener's Guide (Part 2 of 7)

Act One Scene One

Even though I wrote at length yesterday about musical motives, you don't need to analyze the motives in Amelia (or in any opera, for that matter) to enjoy its music. As you listen to the first scene, allow the many motives to get planted in the soil of your subconscious, so they can bloom later on, and instead direct your attention to the scene’s four big musical set-pieces:

Young Amelia’s Apostrophe to the Stars (“Oh, stars flung wide across the dome”)
The opera opens with a little girl gazing up at the starry sky. She sings a brief aria whose four-square poem and block chord accompaniment may remind you of the Navy Hymn; the music sings of her love for her father as well as the allure and romance of flight. Listen as her voice soars up to a high C at the words “Unbound by earth and troubles of day.”


Costume design for Young Amelia by Ann Hould-Ward

Dodge’s Lullaby (“Dear Amelia, may you sleep”)
We learn very quickly that the little girl’s father is missing in action in North Vietnam. Yet he is onstage, tucking her into bed, singing her a lullaby--a memory of the last time she saw him, the night before he left for his second tour of duty. Daron Hagen composed this piece, which showcases the beauty of a lyric tenor voice, after studying photos of Gardner McFall’s father--the real-life Dodge.


Photo of Gardner and Dodge McFall, senior courtesy of Gardner McFall

The Dream of the Flier
Young Amelia is a soprano, as is The Flier, and their two soprano voices overlap as Young Amelia falls asleep and dreams herself into the final moments on earth of Amelia Earhart. Hagen chose a high soprano for The Flier because the character is always way up in the clouds. The orchestral writing in this nightmare-scene also features wide open spaces between the rumbling mechanical sound of the engine, way down in the bass, and floating wings way up high. (The moment that always takes my breath away is when The Flier, recognizing the inevitability of her fate, sings the music Young Amelia used for the romance and beauty of flight.)

The Lullaby Doubled
The first scene closes, after Young Amelia wakes from her nightmare, with her mother and father reprising the lullaby from before as a duet. Since we’ve now learned that Dodge is gone, this is the first of the many surreal ensembles in the opera--when music makes the impossible possible.

Amelia’sopening scene does lots of work in less than 25 minutes: it introduces a lot of characters and themes, breaks our hearts, terrifies us, and reassures us. It also shows how this musical drama is going to work: layers of realities piling up on top of each other, rhyming with each other across time or from another dimension. When, in the space of one bar, The Flier (crashing into the Pacific) sings a high C and Young Amelia (waking from her nightmare) and her mother Amanda (distraught with grief over the loss of her husband) each sing a high A, we sense their connection--while reacting, more viscerally, to the threefold sound of those powerful voices.

AMELIA: A Listener’s Guide (Part 1 of 7)

Speight Jenkins has often said, “When we present a new opera, what we really ought to do is to play it through, take bows and applause, and then tell the audience, ‘OK, now we’re going to play the whole thing a second time.’ Because no one, no matter how musically intelligent you are, can possibly hear everything in an opera on a first pass through.” Listening to a new opera—or indeed, any piece of music—the first time is like laying down tracks for the railroad; that first time, your brain is busy mapping out “how the song goes.” Hearing it then a second (or third or fourth or—in the case of some Wagner fans—the fiftieth) time is more like enjoying a train ride along well-worn tracks.

That said, we’re only going to perform Amelia once a night! If you’d like to start thinking about it before opening night on May 8, keep your eyes on this blog; I’ll be looking through each of the opera’s six scenes, and hopefully give you a few things to listen for in each one. (My familiarity with Amelia comes from having access to the rehearsals, plus an unforgettable day when composer Daron Hagen showed me the inner workings of the score page by page.)

Speaking generally, Amelia is an opera in the tradition of Puccini, Strauss, and Britten, the most popular opera composers of the twentieth century. It’s full of arias and ensembles showcasing the emotions of the characters (and the beautiful voices of the singers); plus, the entire piece is built from a core vocabulary of musical ideas, terms, phrases, and images. But unlike our standard Seattle Opera fare, Amelia is an opera in the American language, about American lives and American issues. Librettist Gardner McFall and Composer Daron Hagen (pictured above with Speight Jenkins; Ken Howard, photo) are making poetry and music about their experiences: losing parents, having children, living through the Vietnam war. The musical themes—-which are also the poetic and emotional themes of the opera-—begin with composer and librettist, with how they think.

Daron Hagen, in particular, describes himself as having an ‘associative’ brain: one thing makes him think of another, which leads to another, and another in quick succession. Musical themes and motives, with their semiotic game of signifier-and-signified, are bread and butter to a mind like Hagen’s. For most opera-goers, motives register subliminally; but in the composer’s brain, everything operates at the level of conscious awareness.

For instance, one of the principal musical themes of Amelia is what we call the “SOS motive,” associated in the opera with characters in danger or distress. Rhythmically, it’s based on the Morse Code signal for S-O-S:


If (like Daron Hagen, whose father was a radio man for the Navy, or Gardner McFall, whose father was a Navy pilot) you have real-life experience with that rhythm, you’ll automatically tense up when you hear it in the opera. The libretto even comments on the use of Morse Code: The Flier (Amelia’s dream of Amelia Earhart), when crashing into the Pacific, admits that she never learned Morse code--not that knowing it would help her in her predicament!

And just as the SOS motive underscores moments of panic and distress, Hagen and McFall use the Navy Hymn to reassure their characters and promote emotional stability. Aunt Helen sings (Hagen and McFall’s arrangement of) the Navy Hymn in a particularly tense scene in Act Two:


But by the time Aunt Helen sings that melody, we’ve already heard the Navy hymn dozens of times, motivically. Sometimes Hagen simply uses steady progressions of reassuring tonic chords, a hymn-texture, as for example when he introduces the men in Amelia’s life (her tenor father, Dodge, and her baritone husband, Paul); at other times, he uses the tune of the Navy hymn’s cadence, or musical completion (the part that goes “For those in peril in the air”), often to comment on the frustrating lack of completion in Dodge’s missing-in-action status.

But it isn’t necessary to analyze the motives in Amelia (or in any opera, for that matter) to enjoy its music. Starting tomorrow, I'll be looking through the six scenes of the opera with an ear to the voices who star in the show and the arias and ensembles they sing.