Houston brings Tod Machover's 'Resurrection' to life

By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 04/18/99

here are two big new American operas this year - Tod Machover's ''Resurrection,'' which opens next week at the Houston Grand Opera, and John Harbison's ''The Great Gatsby,'' which will have its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in the fall. It says something for the density and quality of our musical life that both composers live here - and both teach at MIT.

Machover's opera has been in the works since 1988, when Houston's general manager, David Gockley, saw the premiere of Machover's first opera, ''Valis,'' in the Pompidou Center in Paris. ''Valis,'' based on a science-fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, boasts a high-tech, musically advanced but rock-related score that reached a young and hip audience in a way no American opera had in years. Gockley wanted Machover's next opera. It took him more than 10 years to get it.

Machover is 45, but he talks with the unbounded yet focused energy that must have made him the extraordinary teenager he still physically resembles. The route toward ''Resurrection'' turned out to have many swerves and detours. Over lunch in Harvard Square recently, the composer explained some of how it went.

''Originally this was going to be a joint project with the stage director Peter Sellars,'' he explained. ''`Valis' was very much a story that saw the world through one person's mind, an internal drama. I wanted my next narrative project to go in a different direction, to show how the mind can get out of itself, and make a difference in the world around it.''

Machover and Sellars considered several subjects, including Honore de Balzac's novel ''La Peau de Chagrin.'' An original libretto was commissioned on a 20th-century subject, the experiences of two families in Dallas before and after the Kennedy assassination, ''how an unbounded but unrealistic optimism was shattered and turned the opposite way and the movement toward a realistic sense of what is achievable,''

Machover says. The composer found the completed libretto dark and strong, but the consensus was that the text was ''way too real,'' and that it might be better to look for something else. Thinking back to the Balzac idea, Machover again began to think about the vivid characters and powerful themes of the major 19th-century novels - George Eliot's ''Daniel Deronda'' was a possibility for a while.

A big Tolstoy period

''I've always been a big novel reader,'' Machover says. ''In my late high school and early college years, I went through a big Tolstoy period. Both sets of my grandparents came from Russia, so Tolstoy was my favorite; there was a copy of his last novel, `Resurrection,' on my shelves.'' His attention was directed back to ''Resurrection'' by a book by David Remnick (now the editor of the New Yorker).

By then, Sellars was out of the picture, but Gockley suggested a librettist who had done some earlier work for Houston Opera, Laura Harrington, who conveniently lives in Gloucester - and, even more conveniently, turns out to teach at MIT, although the two had never met there.

As Harrington worked on a scenario, Machover and Gockley were on the lookout for a director. ''For a while we were looking for someone young, and Russian, but then at the suggestion of the conductor Kent Nagano, we met with Braham Murray, the artistic director of the Royal Exchange Theater in Manchester, England. It was clear from our first meeting that Braham would be ideal for this opera, so he joined the team. All of us met on the Big Sur, in California, and firmed up all the details.''

''Resurrection'' tells the story of an aristocrat, Prince Nekhlyudov, who is summoned to serve on the jury for a murder trial. One of the accused is a prostitute, Maslova. Nekhlyudov recognizes her as a young girl he once seduced and abandoned. Maslova is carelessly convicted by the jury and sent to Siberia; Nekhlyudov follows her there, and both find their own way to salvation.

''`Resurrection' is a vast novel,'' says Machover, ''and nature is one of the major characters. Braham emphasized how important it was to concentrate on Maslova and Nekhlyudov, on their meetings, and on what happens to them.''

Machover wrote the music between January 1998 and February 1999, most of it on the Big Sur while he was on a leave of absence from MIT. ''We arrived three weeks before El Nino knocked out all the roads around the house,'' he says, ''so our time there turned out to be more of a retreat than we expected.''

A demo CD

After the California meetings with Harrington and Murray, ''it was up to me,'' Machover says. Murray had emphasized how important the sound of the music would be to the designers, so Machover departed from his usual routine, took five key episodes, and wrote the music for them first, putting it onto a little 15-minute demo CD. ''This is what got me started,'' Machover says.

By then, a cast was in place.

Machover had decided he wanted a young, attractive, and talented cast, not necessarily a lineup of famous singers. The choice for Maslova fell on mezzo-soprano Joyce Didonato, a graduate of the Houston Opera Studio - ''she is fantastic and very smart'' - and the sound of her voice was in Machover's ear as he composed. The baritone selected for Nekhlyudov proved to be the wrong choice once rehearsals began. ''But we were incredibly lucky,'' Machover says, ''because the understudy, Scott Hendricks, was everything we were looking for in the first place.''

''Resurrection'' is a big opera, 21/2 hours of music. Because Machover is associated with the avant-garde, Houston's initial publicity concentrated on how traditional the opera is. Machover's many admirers know better than to assume he would write anything merely conventional - after all, there's already a conventional opera based on ''Resurrection'' by the Italian composer Franco Alfano, who is best known for completing ''Turandot'' after Puccini's death.

Machover does admit that ''Resurrection'' is a ''number opera'' with arias, duets, choruses, etc., ''but the structures are larger than the individual numbers, as they are in the operas of Mozart and Tchaikovsky; the music really does move from one end to the other. The second act does bring big transformations in the story and in the music. At this point, the characters have lost `everything,' but it is at that very moment that they express their human warmth and begin to make connections; as they are dehumanized by everything around them, they become human again. For me, one of the big challenges was to find something in the music that would sweep you through all the dialogue, but also make each turn of events and feelings sink in, and become consequential. There are many mini-numbers in the opera, but the little sections build into bigger ones. The music mutates and evolves.''

Checking other operas

Machover says he has known and loved the major Mozart operas all his life. ''But I looked at `The Marriage of Figaro' and `Cosi fan tutte'' again before setting to work, to see how Mozart made psychological and dramatic points as elegantly as he did, and how he built his finales into overall shapes. And I listened to a lot of Russian operas, `Boris Godunov,' `Eugen Onegin,' `The Queen of Spades,' and `War and Peace,' as well as to Janacek's `From the House of the Dead.' I also found myself listening to a lot of Scriabin's piano music, to some of Tchaikovsky's music, and to some early Shostakovich - not to imitate it, but to see how it works. I think the melodies in the opera, the emotional directness, the strong bass line, the energy, the adventure, all owe something to these examples. Russian music had its own progression from Tchaikovsky to Scriabin to Stravinsky that was very different from the progression in French and German music we are are familiar with. My bedside reading during this period was Richard Taruskin's huge volumes on the Russian Stravinsky.''

Machover's own view is that ''Resurrection'' sounds like his own music, ''the same, only different.'' There is an electronic element running through the whole piece, generated by three keyboards; one reason for this is to define, clarify, and emphasize the bass line, but it is also there to shadow melody, and color and refine textures. ''I like acoustic sound better than the sound that comes out of loudspeakers, which is not three-dimensional and lacks roundness and presence. This score is a blend, and attempts to take the best of both worlds. The electronics have to be performed like everything else in the score; I hate anything that's merely mechanical. The orchestra, singers, and chorus will not be amplified.''

Machover is fascinated by the way a major opera house works. It is also a new experience to turn so much of the work over to other people. ''David has been a real producer. `Valis' was essentially built on the model of a rock group, which can rehearse all day in a garage. This is something else - an ocean liner, not a sports car.''

Machover has enjoyed the process so much he's already planning another opera, with a libretto by novelist Leslie Epstein about the life of composer Arnold Schoenberg in Hollywood; the subject is the clash and coexistence of serious and popular culture. Meanwhile, he's at work on a special project for children he is calling the ''Toy Symphony.''

''For this I will invent some new musical instruments, so that kids can play with sounds the way they can play with colors and other things. I'm working with the toy companies on this because they have proved far more receptive to the idea than the music companies. The plan is to involve the orchestras of 10 cities, and 100 kids will end up playing their instruments alongside the 100 members of each orchestra. We haven't approached the Boston Symphony yet, but we certainly hope they'd be interested.''

This story ran on page N02 of the Boston Globe on 04/18/99.
©Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.