Getting from here to there

At the end of Act Two, scene two of the opera I am working on with my librettist Gardner McFall right now called Amelia, pregnant Amelia, surrounded by hospital staff and her husband, awakens from a coma, in the early stages of labor. Everyone’s been discussing her as if she weren’t there; she cries, ‘Who said anything about dying?’ and, after a brief exchange with her husband and doctor where she insists on natural childbirth, she is wheeled to a birthing room. The next scene begins a few hours later, with Amelia laboring to one side, and a conversation between her Aunt and her doctor on the other.

I have executed this tricky sequence of events several ways, now. The first time, before in real life my wife had our baby and together we went through the process of natural labor, and before the opera was workshopped, I determined to track Amelia’s joy and apprehension from the moment she regained conscious. She did so suddenly, with no preparation but an upward roulade in the orchestra and entry on a high G on the word ‘Who’ — big stuff for a mezzo. It was terrible. What I perceived as a dramatic shift from one psychological state to another came off as unprepared, the roulade was melodramatic because it telegraphed for three precious awful seconds that something ‘big’ was about to happen, and the high G sounded ridiculous blurting, as it did, suddenly from the mouth of someone prone on a hospital bed. Worst of all, the music I thought was joyous, a little giddy, and apprehensive all at once sounded like the quirky underscoring in a cartoon. It rankled.

Although Gardner’s words were perfect, the musical tone was wildly off; it seemed ham-fisted, like a man’s complete misapprehension of the dynamics of the situation. It ended with quiet burbling in the orchestra as she was wheeled out on a gurney. Here the tone seemed right. The production design was at that point such that the curtain would not close but rather the set would reassemble itself; Amelia would never leave the stage, but she would move behind a scrim and the next scene, between her Aunt and the doctor, would begin, about twenty seconds later. There would be a brief exchange, and the balance of the scene would be performed in pantomime, with the drama moving forward in the orchestra, utilizing themes from the opera associated with the characters in the scene as they came and went — very filmic and, I think effective. In this scenario, the scenelet where Amelia awoke became the transition in the course of the larger drama. This was another error in judgment on my part: demoting it to transitional status served to undercut the drama of the moment, to trivialize it, even.

Six months later, the second draft, after the workshop, an intense work session with Gardner and with Stephen Wadsworth, our stage director and story man, and after having helped my wife through her Birth Story, was more realistic, and more responsible, I think. Since the scene falls at the critical 11:30 spot in the book, it was important to begin tying up, once and for all, the various motives that had been unspooling for the previous ninety minutes. A neat solution presented itself: I backed up from the moment of Amelia’s recovery of consciousness and imbedded a motive in the timpani (an S-O-S rhythmic tattoo also associated with her disappeared pilot father and the famous aviatrix in her dreams) that became a musical manifestation of her contractions. This grew until it served to wake her up, and remained, rising and falling in volume, throughout the scenelet between Amelia, the doctor, and her husband. All the joy was muted, the apprehension ratcheted up by stripping out most of the orchestral flourishes. Appropriately enough, since it was already parlando in the extreme, I needed to change very few notes of the text setting.

My collaborators and I decided to throw in fragmentary comments for the men, snatches of phrases that Amelia would ‘step on’ musically; this highlighted her centrality and position of power, diminished theirs, and kept the focus on her and her contractions. I was able to grab little swatches of music from her dream aviatrix’s final plunge into the ocean and place them in the orchestra to complete the identification in her mind. The transition remained the same, and the next scene unfolded unchanged.

After a year, word came from Seattle that the production team needed three minutes to change the set and that my worst fear would be realized: a closed curtain — which could bring the whole story to a screeching halt at the very moment forward momentum was most needed — would be required. Although it felt like a lifetime was being asked for, what it meant practically was that ten seconds were needed for the curtain to come down, another two and a half minutes for the set change, and another ten seconds for the curtain to rise on the next scene before the exchange between Amelia’s Aunt and the doctor could begin. This required yet another rethinking of the reawakening scenelet and the ensuing scene. My concern from the start had been that, once Amelia awakens, there is drama only in the rapid, successive tying up of the various stories in the opera, the emergence of the healthy baby being the most important.

The final scene drove forward entirely to the instant when the baby is held aloft by the doctor, and placed on Amelia’s chest, at which point the orchestra, which had been telling the story through underscore, would drop out, and the voices carry the opera alone to its coda, dropping out sensibly as characters left the birthing room, until we heard only Amelia, her husband, and, haloing her in her mind, the voices of her aviatrix and her dead mother. An orchestral interlude of at least 150 seconds’ length would need to be wedged between the moment Amelia was wheeled out and the nearly five minutes of filmic underscoring that would serve as an apotheosis of the opera’s various musical ideas.

The third solution that resulted, executed nearly two years after composing the initial musical sketches of the scene, required backing up again, only this time from the moment Amelia was wheeled out of the room, and introducing into the scenelet solo strings here and there playing held clusters, up-bow, from quiet to very loud, that sound to me like what spasms of pain might feel like. These would then carry into the transition, where I would solidify Amelia’s relationship to another character in her dreams with whom she identifies, Icarus, by recapitulating an ensemble set piece from a few minutes earlier in the course of which the boy in the next room ‘who had fallen from a great height’ had just awoken to seizures and received sedation.

The trickiest measures were the introduction of a rising figure in the strings under Amelia’s cry, ‘I can do this!’ over the S-O-S tattoo in the timpani and the spasms in the solo strings. Then it was smooth flying (or not) as the orchestra revisits for forty seconds the boy’s seizure, his sedation, and a reminder of two motives associated with ‘near-death’ in the opera, the ‘sound’ of a heart monitor in the orchestra and a swooping motive in the low strings that was a musical manifestation of what the blips on a heart monitor ‘look’ like, first introduced as we met Icarus an hour earlier in the opera. The effect was that we were now tracking Amelia as she labored offstage.

A very important dramatic cadence took shape just after the heart monitor’s return and the begininng of the upward phrases: to me, this is Amelia’s crucial ‘I can’t do this’ moment. This moment, where the music grinds to a halt, counterbalances her earlier optimistic ‘I can do this’ moment, reveals her to have achieved (offstage, during events transpiring between scenes) the emotional state required for the final stage of labor. What follows are ‘rising lines’ from the original beginning of the last scene — themselves based on the S-O-S rhythm, and associated earlier in the opera with the aviatrix’s plane taking off — atop the heart monitor figure. Amelia is heard to have found musical closure: she has moved past her intense identification with the boy, with Icarus, and with the aviatrix, rejected their fates and embraced the ‘rising line’ of her own Birth Story.

This last solution served to make Amelia’s awakening scarier, more psychologically sound. The transition between scenes now served a purpose: to track Amelia’s progress as she labors during the hours between the last two scenes of the opera, increasing the drama of the colloquy and events that follow and, I think, enhancing the dramatic effect of the vocal nonette that unfolds like a montage of kisses when the baby emerges and our story ends.