Knowing When to Stop by Ned Rorem

Author:Ned Rorem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

I have just listened, without intermission, to the new CD of Regina, all 153 minutes of it. Here are some notes taken during that experience:

I am not a reviewer, I am a composer and a sometime critic; but I do read reviews and see how they shouldn’t be done. (Is the reviewer’s description of a new work, for example, succinct enough to show whether he likes it without his saying “I like it”? Does he describe the work, or the performance of the work?)

Much has been made about Lillian Hellman’s continual interference—how she forbade Blitzstein’s numerous embellishments on her play. Playwrights, if still alive, can be a thorn in their composer’s side (so goes the received opinion); why don’t they just shut up, the play will survive on its own, and a composer’s domain is a separate dimension. During the lifetimes of Blitzstein and Hellman the opera was never produced as the composer envisioned it. Am I a minority of one in believing Hellman was right about the musicalizing of her play? This first complete version proves that more is less.

When Poulenc expands Bernanos’s Dialogues des Carmélites, from a filmscript made on Gertrud von Le Fort’s German novella the text stays intact, though with an overlay of five ritual numbers from Latin liturgy. Four of these serve as prayers-without-action to close scenes; the fifth, the final Salve Regina, impels the action when, with each crunch of the guillotine, the music modulates upward, thinning out bit by bit, until all sixteen nuns are dead. These interpolations do not “open up” the story; they intensify a basically motionless drama by entering, as only music can, the mute interior of monastic life. The play is tightened into a necessary opera, there is something to sing about.

When Blitzstein expands a densely plotted story about “the little foxes that spoil the vines,” the text is widely revised, and with the addition of jazz bands, Negro spirituals, party music, “set” numbers on his own doggerel. The play is loosened into an unnecessary extravagance, because otherwise there would be nothing to sing about. True, certain non-Hellman parts of the piece—such as the “Rain Quartet” and the terrific Dance Suite in Act II—make arguably the best music in Regina, just as the Latin choral numbers are the most beautiful parts of Dialogues; but where these are extraneous those are integral. Whatever else Hellman’s play might be, it’s economical: the power of her craft lies in the claustrophobia of greed, her principal characters are hopelessly naughty and unpoetic. Even without the composer’s accessories, it’s questionable whether any opera can depict unalleviated evil. Music, the most ambiguous of the seven arts, lends sympathy to aberration. Are not Scarpia, Iago, and Claggart, as repainted by Puccini, Verdi, and Britten, raised from mere loathsomeness to a sort of tragic pathos? To hear Regina Giddens and her relatives at song is to defang them, our vines still have tender grapes, and gone is the hard compulsory shell of Hellman.

Add to this that Regina

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