Daron Hagen

Hi. Hello, my friend.

We had a lovely lunch, the last time.

Yeah.

Well, I got a great bit of advice from a writer named Lynn Freed many years ago, who—who—I knew I was writing a memoir. And she said, "Well, if—darling, if you're going to do it, be brave, or don't." So I found my courage, and I wrote a book that took courage, I—for me, at least, to write. Um, I've always felt that why would we take up people's time? If you write a three-minute piece of music, that means you've taken three minutes of somebody's life they've given you. I still find that to be extraordinary generosity on the part of music lovers. And readers, the same thing. At least with a reader, they can put your book down, and you never found out that they put the book down, and, you know, they've been using it as a coaster ever since. They only got through five pages. But with a piece of music, they're trapped in a concert hall.

Uh, the other thing was is that I—I—I read somewhere, and I forget where it was because I'm, I don't know, lack of sleep, but, uh, uh, a—a fellow who wrote a—a memoir that was, uh, "to console, uh, the troubled, and to trouble the comfortable. To comfort the troubled, and trouble the comfortable."

And I thought that that was a—an—uh, a really neat challenge, and an important challenge for somebody who—who is trying to be a better person.

Absolutely. If we're artists, uh, you know, there's so much of us that, uh, has to deal with the marketplace, and what constitutes commercialism, and, uh, you know, we take for granted, or maybe we don't, uh, that we're artists. We aspire to be artists, but what does being an artist mean? Does being a fine artist means financially not viable, or non-commercially viable, or nobody likes it so it must be art? Uh, these are all things that we're thinking about all the time. Um...

No. I—I wish it had. Um, I— I always, uh, since being a teenager, uh, realized that, uh, one had to solve the money problem somehow. And how one solves the money problem, uh, dictates is dictated on one's own value system, what you can tolerate. Uh, we are how we spend our time. Uh, and, uh, for me, I was always able to tolerate a large amount of financial instability. Uh, beyond instability, complete madness. Uh, and, of course, you just—you just framed it. You know, you have kids, you have a mortgage, and things like that, and you suddenly have to—to grow up and become a stable provider. I—I was very lucky, uh, to, uh, have children late, after I had already figured it out, uh, figured the money thing out for myself. But yeah, we—we live in a capitalist society, and if you want to make art, you have to buy the time to do it, or you have to have other people buy the time for you.

Yeah. In—exactly. Well, there are two corollaries to that. There—it's the—it's the "when you get a cab" story.

Uh, when I was in my 20s, I would grab a cab in Philadelphia, and you'd, you know, you talk to the cab driver the way that you do. And, uh, I—this fellow would ultimately say, "What do you do?" And I say, "I'm a composer." He says, "Oh, that's nice. What do you do for a living?"

Indeed. For God's sake, why not? It's like, "oh, he's a living composer." Does he eat? Does he—he or she breathe?

Well, it's kind of you to say. I mean, I—I think that I'm, um, uh, the more I, uh, get out of my own sandbox, and what I and think that I have a sandbox, the more fulfilled I am as a person, uh, who—who wanted to live an examined life. Uh, you—you remember how Schonberg used to just jump on Bernstein for, you know, "if only he wouldn't play the piano, he'd be a better conductor; if he wouldn't con- conduct, he'd be better composer." And he just—nobody would give him a break.

No, no, I'm talking—I'm talking—oh, Harold Schonberg!

Harold Schonberg, yeah. Remember? And I remember as a kid reading those reviews, just thinking, "Yeah, just leave him alone, let him be." And—but I think that our society still—less so, I think— um, but still wants to pigeonhole people. If you're—and I remember with—with Ned Rorem when I was studying with him, it was always his writer friends would say, you know, they knew nothing about his music; his musician friends would know nothing about his writing. And—and I'm afraid that I still have a lot of people who—who—who are the same way with me, but now I've got filmmaker friends who, uh, who don't know anything about music, and so forth. I think that I'm happiest just going my own way, doing my own thing, and, uh, eschewing all gatekeepers and all received ideas of what constitutes success, artistic or professionally.

It is.

Well, it's about Orson Welles. And, uh, Orson Welles grew up in Kenosha—well, he was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and grew up all over the world. But, uh, he's a Wisconsin boy, uh, as am I. And, uh, uh, has been someone who's fascinated me all my life as a—as a—as— who was a polymath, um, actor, writer, beautiful visual artist, filmmaker, director, I mean, we all know that Orson Welles did a lot of things. And—and a—and a very, very intensely, uh, socially conscious and socially, uh, social- uh, politically active person. You know, he used to write, uh, speeches for FDR, and he would coach FDR on how to de- deliver speeches. He took a year off of his own career to campaign for Roosevelt, and so forth.Anyway, I—I, uh, I have long had a fascination for the Bardo, or the—the area between life and death where, uh, you know, some people call it Limbo, or what is the transition, the liminal zone between these states, where, uh, Charon, uh, the River Styx, uh, people crossing from one state to the other, Orpheus and Eurydice. And so I took—got it in my mind that I would examine how Orson Welles might be feeling during the last few heartbeats of his life, a man famously started at the top and worked his way down in many ways, but was always on the outside, always a free spirit, always someone seeking a—a fulfilling personal and artistic existence.So, uh, for me, it was just natural that if you're going to create a—a lyric theater work, a- uh, about a man who was a filmmaker, you should get in—you should use film. And so I started shooting film just to get limber in my own head with with with how that person might think. And I've always been a a pretty serious critical film watcher since—since my teens. So I was already, uh, aware of the language and the rhetoric. Um, and so I started shooting film. And I had about 60 hours of of of high-def video. And then I realized, well, this is—this is—this has got to be integration of film, the way that Welles very early on integrated film into his his legit stage plays.Then I realized, well, with the technology is now so inexpensive and so fluid and so fluid and fluent, that with with some application, uh, I could—I could learn these apps, and I could become—and I'd been doing some film work and so forth. Anyway, I acquired the skills. And so I started cutting together film, and then I realized I needed to create a process. So I wrote an, uh, an opera about moments in Welles' life that then would be accompanied by films, singers singing to films, three singers portraying Welles that would be singing his internal thoughts as avatars: a young Welles, a dying Welles, and a middle-aged Welles. And the films would be showing us what they were thinking. Um, and the orchestra would be an orchestra, but there would also be a huge electroacoustic track that would sometimes be louder or without the live players, so that you'd always have two opposing forces, or three, or many. There would be live music, but there'd also be dead music. There'd be live action, but also dead, canned action on the screens to that.But, uh, once I got to that place, then I started thinking the way that a Joyce thought about writing, or—or Paul Muldoon or or Seamus Heaney thinks about poetry, which is, how many layers can you add in and still be comprehensible? So I realized it would have to be a film, ultimately. So the—the—the films were made, the onstage films were made, the show was written to match those films with live singers. The live singers were done in concert with a live orchestra of 11 players, Fifth House Ensemble in Chicago, and I staged it, uh, with the films going and the opera singers singing. And those were shot by three cameras and mobile camera, and everything would then be—then I cut everything together. But then there would be a third level of rhetoric, which would be, um, semi-opaque images that would be drawn from both worlds that would then have their own sort of ghosts of Verveisa story that floated on between the two. Anyway, it's—it sounds— it is. It's—it's a little bit crazy, um, but...

We know Bob. Both—both of us know Bob, yeah. Bob—Bob Orth, it's— it was a great privilege to work with Bob, because Bob was going through chemotherapy during production.

He—he— it is. He was playing a dying Orson Welles, and he himself was—was in the process of coming to grips with the very issues that—w- that the—his character in the opera. And...

We dis- And during discovery, while we were—while I was staging it with—with the men, um, these were candid conversations. And to me, there's—there's nothing better. There's—there's no more honorable transaction than—than what we were doing together, talking about real things and trying to make a work of art about real things.

And your son's. Her—

Yeah, I've written a lot of them, uh, and, uh, every one of them I've—I've attempted a different strategy for getting to solving the dramaturgical riddle. And so some of them are—are—are pretty straightforward, pretty some of them have very literary, hard-to-understand libretti. Some of them have very speechy libretti. Some—some are, like Orson, 90% uh, found objects.

Well, I mean, some people would argue that this is where opera's always been. Uh, you know, you— I—there are so many versions of the Verdi operas. Uh, the— someone, uh, anytime Company is revived of Sondheim, it's a different show. Anytime you do legitimate musical theater, the show's been altered for that market or that reinterpretation of the show. Uh, it—it doesn't take a Peter Sellars to make Mozart completely different. All you have to do is wear a different pair of of intellectual glasses toward the staging of it. Um, changing the physical—changing the actual musical document is not that big of a deal. You don't make the perfect production of Don Giovanni, any more than you make the perfect production of Long Day's Journey into Night. You do the—the show that the people in the room can do.

Yeah, and I understand that. I mean, of course, COVID has forced us all to come to grips with with with with rethinking what constitutes, uh, the sandbox. Um, I— to—to be honest, I mean, I let go of the sandbox a long time ago. Um, I— I think that theater have always felt, uh, guerrilla theater on the sidewalk is just as viable as—as theater at the Met, and that all spaces, all media, there's nothing particularly novel or or um, innovative or visionary about simply using the tools that we have to to go into new places and and express things like that. I mean, I—I— I did Orson the way that I did because the subject and the execution, form must follow function, the subject must be a manifestation of— But I agree with you, yeah, I mean, everybody is—

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

I don't know. I have no idea. Uh, I'm— I—I know I'm shooting, uh, an opera called 9/10 for six singers in an Italian restaurant in Chicago next year. Um, it's sort of my My Dinner with Andre meets um, uh, uh, oh, what is the Verdi opera with the two men? Oh, I—I don't know, it could be Rigoletto. Um, but it—it, um—

Don Carlo, that's it, Don Carlo. No, Don Carlo. Don— [singing] Oh God, it's that good.

Um, it's—it's six people having a dinner in an Italian restaurant the night before 9/11, and they're in Little Italy. And they're all going to die the next day. And, um, it's—it's going to be shot with a rail camera so that I can get all the shots. And the music will come from a—a— it'll all be pre-recorded with soundscapes and so, and and come from a—a jukebox in the Italian restaurant.

And the—the audiences will—will pay to have dinner and see the show and basically see the filming at the same time, and the—the opera itself is—is cued to the courses of the meal and the arias come come and go as the as the removes happen. And and that's the next one.

9/10.

9/10, yeah.

The Loop will feed us forever.

Be well, my friend. Thanks for having me over.

Take care, Michael. Bye-bye.