The Well-Tempered Ear
New Life for “The Great Gatsby”: John Harbison’s “Roaring ‘20s” opera has its European premiere this month in Dresden, Germany
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear’s good friend, Sarah Schaffer, who works with composer John Harbison, writes:
Many Madisonians were among those who travelled to New York City in 1999 for the world premiere of John Harbison’s opera, “The Great Gatsby,” which is based on the iconic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald and which was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in celebration of renowned conductor James Levine’s 25th anniversary there. (Below, from the original production, are the late tenor Jerry Hadley as Jay Gatsby and soprano Dawn Upshaw as Daisy Buchanan.)
The work has since been presented by Lyric Opera of Chicago, in Boston and at Tanglewood by Emmanuel Music, and, in a reduced orchestra chamber version, by Opera Parallele in San Francisco and at the Aspen Music Festival.
A suite from the opera, commissioned by conductor David Zinman, was performed by the Madison Symphony Orchestra under Maestro John DeMain here in 2010.
And of course, John Harbison and his wife, violinist Rose Mary Harbison, are best known in Madison as the artistic directors of the fiercely imaginative annual Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, held in their refurbished barn near Sun Prairie just before Labor Day each summer.
Now, the first European performance of “The Great Gatsby” will take place at Semperoper (below) in Dresden, Germany from this Sunday, Dec. 6, through Dec. 21. It will be presented in English, with German surtitles.
Preceding the first performance, Semperoper is offering a preview event where two film versions of “The Great Gatsby” will be shown: the 1974 version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow; and the 2013 Baz Luhrman version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan.
According to Semperoper, “The opera blends modern classical music with jazz and swing to paint a thrilling portrait of a debauched and decadent society, where double standards clash with idealism. European audiences can now enjoy this work for the first time.”
Wayne Marshall is music director, Keith Warner stage director, with dramaturgy by Stefan Ulrich, and set design by the late John Engels, whose stunning and evocative work was seen last spring in the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s production of The Passenger, Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s powerful opera about how the horrors of Auschwitz impact people’s lives in the present.
Wayne Marshall, renowned interpreter of the works of George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington and other 20th-century American composers, serves as music director.
In making a new production of The Great Gatsby, Director Keith Warner does not adopt an “update” strategy, often seen in recent European productions. Instead he goes directly to the period, the American mid-1920s, making its excesses, its excitements, and its cloak of impending doom the essential color of the opera. (below is the party scene.)
In the upcoming Dresden production, tenor Peter Lodahl makes his Semperoper debut in the role of Jay Gatsby. For more information, visit: www.peterlodahl.co
Daisy Buchanan will be performed by soprano Maria Bengtsson. For more information, visit: www.mariabengtsson.com
A complete cast list and production personnel can be found at https://www.semperoper.de/en/whats-on/schedule/stid/Gatsby/60545.html
A brief video regarding the launching of Gatsby at Semperopera can be found at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7x_dVimgYg
While not without its detractors, over the years and through its many productions Gatsby has garnered significant praise from some of the most respected critics and publications.
With such an iconic and thoroughly American novel, story and music as its origin and soundscape, it will be fascinating to see what kind of reception Gatsby’s eagerly anticipated European premiere will garner across the pond.
Europeans, very conversant with the Fitzgerald novel, tend to emphasize the role of class more than American readers. Warner uses a number of theatrical devices to starkly outline the attitudes and surroundings of the Wilsons, the working-class couple so crucial to conflicts within the story.
The racist and elitist rants of Tom Buchanan, perhaps more comfortably folded into his familiar character by American fans of the book, emerge in stark outline in Warner’s conception.
Tags: America, Arts, Aspen Music Festival, Auschwitz, Baz Luhrmann, Baz Lurhmann, Boston, Carey Mulligan, Chamber music, chamber orchestra, choral music, Classical music, David Zinman, Dawn Upshaw, debut, Dresden, Duke Ellington, Emmanuel Music, Europe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, film, George Gershwin, German, Germany, Jacob Stockinger, James Levine, Jazz, Jazz Age, Jerry Hadley, John DeMain, John Harbison, Labor Day, Leonard Bernstein, Leonardo DiCaprio, Lyric Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Madison, Madison Symphony Orchestra, Metropolitan Opera, Mia Farrow, Mieczyslaw Weinberg, movie, Music, Music director, New York City, opera, Opera Parallele, premiere, Roaring 20s, Robert Redford, San Francisco, Semperopera, set, soprano, stage director, Tanglewood, tenor, The Great Gatsby, The Passenger, Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, Token Creek Festival, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, vocal music, Wisconsin, YouTube
Classical music: Does The Great American Symphony” exist – or even its equivalent in a different form or genre? American conductor JoAnn Falletta takes up the challenging question on NPR with “All Things Considered” host Robert Siegel. Also, the 14th annual Madison Early Music Festival opens tonight with a concert by Piffaro and a lecture on “The Germanies of 1616.”
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A REMINDER: The 14th Madison Early Music Festival, with the theme “Renaissance Germany,” opens tonight with a performance by the Renaissance band Piffaro (below) at 7:30 p.m. in Mills Hall. It will be preceded at 6:30 p.m. by a FREE lecture by frequent guest blog contributor John W. Barker on “The Germanies of 1616 and How They Got to Be That Way” in Room L-160 of the Elvehjem Building of the nearby Chazen Museum of Art. For more information, visit: http://continuingstudies.wisc.edu/lsa/memf/index.html
By Jacob Stockinger
Back when The Ear was an undergraduate, he had a philosophy professor who claimed in an aesthetics course that no one in the class that was full of ambitious artists and especially would-be writers should worry about writing The Great American Novel.
It had already been written.
The Great American Novel, he said, was “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (below):
It’s a great choice, though others might disagree and name Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” or Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”
Still, overall, I think the decades have proven him right – which is why Gatsby has been made into several movie versions, including an older one with the actor Robert Redford and a recent one by director Baz Luhrman, and John Harbison’s full-length opera (below, with Dawn Upshaw as Daisy and Jerry Hadley as Jay Gatsby). And maybe a TV drama based on the novel is yet to come.
But even though that quite of question somehow seems impertinent or irrelevant, it can lead to some memorable discussions and exposure to new music.
So last week, when everyone was looking up American music to play on Independence Day or the fourth of July, the question of The Great American Symphony arose.
And it was discussed on NPR’s “Deceptive Cadence” blog by Tom Huizenga and also on “All Things Considered” by veteran host, the cultured, cultivated and witty Robert Siegel (below top) and American conductor JoAnn Falletta (below bottom), in a photo by Cheryl Gorski), who now leads three different orchestras as music director. (The three are the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra in Northern Ireland.) Falletta comes up with some interesting choices of American composers and works — some you have heard of and some you haven’t. (At bottom is a YouTube video of the beautiful slow movement from Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1, which I had never heard either live or in a recorded performance.)
It would be interesting to hear what some other American-born and American-trained maestros and champions of old and new American music – from Leonard Bernstein and Alan Gilbert of the New York Philharmonic to Marin Alsop of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Michael Tilson Thomas (below) of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra said or have to say when they took on the same question.
Anyway, here are links to the NPR discussions. I recommend listening to the program and not just reading the transcript.
What do you think?
Do you have an orchestral work to nominate as The Great American Symphony or its equivalent?
The Ear wants to hear.
Tags: Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Baz Luhrman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Germany, Great American Novel, Herman Melville, Huckleberry Finn, JoAnn Falletta, Madison Early Music Festival, Marin Alsop, Mark Twain, Michael Tilson Thomas, New York Philharmonic, Piffaro, Robert Redford, Samuel Barber, The Great Gatsby, United States, Virginia Symphony Orchestra, YouTube
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The Well-Tempered Ear 
Here is a collaborative obituary for music critic, radio host, performer and gay pioneer Jess Anderson, who died in January at 85
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By Jacob Stockinger
In late January of this year, Jess Anderson (below) — a longtime friend, devoted musician and respected music critic – died at 85.
The Ear promised then that when more was known or written, it would be posted on this blog.
That time has come.
Jess was a polymath, a Renaissance Man, as the comments below attest to time and again.
For the past several years, he suffered from advancing dementia and moved from his home of 56 years to an assisted living facility. He had contracted COVID-19, but died from a severe fall from which he never regained consciousness.
Jess did not write his own obituary and he had no family member to do it. So a close friend – Ed Wegert (below) – invited several of the people who knew Jess and worked with him, to co-author a collaborative obituary. We are all grateful to Ed for the effort the obituary took and for his caring for Jess in his final years.
In addition, the obituary has some wonderful, not-to-be-overlooked photos of Jess young and old, at home, with friends, sitting at the piano and at his custom-built harpsichord.
It appears in the March issue of Our Lives, a free statewide LGBTQ magazine that is distributed through grocery stores and other retail outlets as well as free subscriptions. Here is a link to the magazine’s home webpage for details about it: https://ourliveswisconsin.com.
That Jess was an exceptional and multi-talented person is obvious even from the distinguished names of the accomplished people who contributed to the obituary:
They include:
Chester Biscardi (below), who is an acclaimed prize-winning composer, UW-Madison graduate, composer and teacher of composition at Sarah Lawrence College.
John Harbison (below), the MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who teaches at MIT and co-directs the nearby Token Creek Chamber Music Festival in the summer.
Rose Mary Harbison (below), who attended the UW-Madison with Jess and became a professional performing and teaching violinist who co-directs the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival.
Steve Miller (below), a close friend who became a bookmaker and is now a professor at the University of Alabama.
The Ear, who knew Jess over many decades, was also invited to contribute.
Here is a link to the joint obituary in Our Lives magazine, a free LGBTQ periodical that you can find in local grocery store and other retail outlets: https://ourliveswisconsin.com/article/remembering-jess-anderson/?fbclid=IwAR027dzv2YqRUNlYF1cF6JyXnEcQxAwcprPYbtBQCs3rYt0Nu847W_xbjpk
Feel free to leave your own thoughts about and memories of Jess in the comment section.
It also seems a fitting tribute to play the final chorus from The St. John Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach. You can hear it in the YouTube video below. It is, if memory serves me well, the same piece of sublime music that Jess played when he signed off from hosting his Sunday morning early music show for many years on WORT-FM 89.9.
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