“If I can’t sing ’em, I don’t write ’em,” says Hugo Weisgall, composer and former singer, in answer to the charge that most modern operas are unsingable. “That doesn’t mean my operas are easy–they’re not. The problem with my operas is the intensity, but that’s a problem you have with Aida, and Tosca, and with Tristan und Isolde, too.”
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Weisgall has been in town to advise the conductor, director, and cast for the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists production of Six Characters in Search of an Author. The 77-year-old Weisgall, who came to this country at the age of seven and says that he alone of his generation of composers was entirely educated here, is short and pear-shaped, with thinning gray hair, thick glasses, and a gallant, youthful manner. This is only the third production–and only the second professional production–his 1959 opus has received. The premiere, given by New York City Opera, was marred by the chorus’s inability to learn their difficult parts; cuts were made, and the singers were allowed to carry their scores onstage. Weisgall doesn’t anticipate any problems this time.
Weisgall, who was the first musician to be elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in half a century, and his librettist, Denis Johnston, moved the action from a regional theater in the 1920s to a provincial opera house in the 1950s, and changed the characters accordingly. Instead of doing a detested play by Pirandello, the fictional company is rehearsing The Temptation of Saint Anthony, a “novelty” by one Weisgall that the singers loathe. The Leading Lady becomes the empty-headed, self- centered Coloratura (a role originated by Beverly Sills), complete with a little dog; the Leading Man becomes the dull-witted Tenore Buffo. The Director sings a hymn to “the union.” Opera house denizens have been added, for a total of 34 recognizable characters, including a bitchy, sardonic Accompanist, a snide Prompter, and a chorus of Eight Deadly Sins–the usual seven rounded out by a sin so deadly his name cannot be printed (a tenor, of course). Weisgall and Johnston also added an array of operatic references, which are filled out in this production by visual jokes at the expense of assorted opera directors and singers of the past and present. So Pirandello’s script has definitely been modified, but the six characters looking for an author to write down their stories remain, and the question remains: What is reality?
“I always work with a librettist, but I’m not at all loath to change his words–although I usually ask first. I wish I could be my own librettist, but the advantage of not being that is that I have somebody to fight with. I like the additional personality, and the additional ideas.”
