The studio upstate, mid-afternoon: W. noodling at the piano; B., curled up on the window seat, with laptop.
B. So: Anna Nicole, the opera.
W. Make it a one-act, you’ve got a double-bill.
B. Seriously: thoughts?
W. Why not? Everything depends on execution. And newsy opera is at least a century old. Verismo—see Cavalleria rusticana–-was the CNN opera of its day.
B. OK: Harvey Milk. Tania. Nixon. Marilyn! Anna Nicole?
W. Answer three questions, and you have an opera. 1: Why? (Artistically, not commercially.) 2: How much history, versus invention? (1. will help answer 2.) 3: How, or why, does this woman’s story fit these forces? Or vice versa?
B. That’s four questions.
W. Three point five.
B. Someone holds a revolver to your temple and says, write this piece. What do you ask?
W. What’s she’s about? Blonde ambition? You can start a character with that: Poppea didn’t gain Nero’s bed so as to reform Roman health care. Smith’s sharp limits suggest a very “now” conflict: what if your lone skill (i. e., to be “Anna Nicole Smith”) is at once almost nothing and yet can earn you the world? If the writers embrace (but not mock) the fact that she’s quite ignorant and undisciplined upfront (contrast with Madonna), you could build the story on watching Smith flail about, learning—but too little, too late—how to ride this tiger of celebrity.
B. What if your research shows that she didn’t flail, she didn’t try: that she’s just as dull a golddigger as her detractors make her out to be? What if there’s no there there?
W. The short answer is that you write her as more interesting than she was if you have to. But you’re correct to squint at this problem of historical fiction. I’d opt to change all the names in a story like this, so I could write what I need, fearless of hurt feelings and an overdertermined audience response. But I’m sure Covent Garden thinks that the name is the hook.
B Come on: how can the timbre of an acoustic singer portray this woman without sounding camp or antique?
W. As if there’s only one concert timbre! Hila Plitmann isn’t Renée Fleming, who isn’t Dolora Zajick. Can Turnage write Smith a Vicky Lynn voice, a Vicky Lynn music, so as to make audible a conflict between that music and, say, this fragile and artificial but glamourous Anna Nicole music? Maybe he can use Smith’s Texas-ness the way Previn used Blanche’s New Orleans grandiosity to tell us something about the character—
B. Because U. K. audiences easily parse American dialects—
W. Making those distinctions internationally unmissable, at least to Anglophones, is a fair challenge to the creators—
B. I must say I’m amazed at how sympathetic you are to this project, given that you’ve never set anything even in the 20th century, let alone the 21rst.
W. Not quite true. I wrote both my shows in contemporary idioms first. Then, in Little Women, I brought back just a fragrance of the 19th century in both text and score—even “Kennst du das Land,” like Beth’s’ chorale, is, in context, an objet trouvé–-and I wrote Lysistrata similarly. Any new opera should acknowledge both past and present: but there’s no one way to do that. My shows took two old stories and wrote them as new pieces: others take new stories and, in telling them, refer to and refresh the forms of the past. Harvey Milk ends its first act with this stunning Michael Korie text for the lead: “My star is two triangles: one pink, one yellow: they overlap as I do…” &c. The slogan of a 70’s activist? Or an announcement of character structurally identical (if opposed in tone) to, say, “Non so più cosa son“? Yes.
B. But why opera? Why not musical theatre: mikes, actors, less historical baggage?
W. Put Anna Nicole in a West End musical, and a mass-culture subject meets an increasingly mass-culture medium. So what? But new opera is, or can be, an arena in which past and present ideas of art challenge each other. A composer I know is working on a piece: its subject would have been unwritable even twenty years ago, because in it the Internet figures prominently. I assumed he’d be scoring it electronically. But he’s mulling quite the opposite, in fact—all acoustic, all the time— which is much more interesting. Why? Because the real subject of the piece isn’t chatrooms, which are historical ephemera, but masquerade, which, if not eternal, is certainly as old as drama—and, thus, more operatic.
B. Imagine vibrato applied to a word like “Trimspa.”
W. I hear you. But it’s too easy to divide language into poetic-and/or-antique = singable vs. prosy-and/or-modern = not. Yes, performance matters here: to sing contemporary English the way you sing Baroque Italian would be an error in taste. (It’d be equally tone-deaf to sing Baroque Italian the way you sing Romantic German.) But writing matters more. Writers have to solve two problems. The smaller, more (but not entirely) technical issue is: which words sing? This is partly a matter of scansion, and of which vowels extend naturally (i. e. in speech) and which don’t; but it’s also aural taste: an ear for language. (I don’t know if this can be taught, though it can be learned.) The other question, though, is: what’s essential (i. e., transhistorical, transcultural) about this story, and what’s merely local? Find the core, write the core, and a lot of the diction problems will solve themselves. Think of it this way: Poppea the opera ends in love duet, but the Poppea the historical character ended kicked to death by the man whose bed she schemed to gain. Could the Italian team had written that sequel? Probably. Isn’t there a rough overlap between that character’s story and Smith’s: hungry courtesan gains power through sex, but can manage neither and dies in expensive squalor? If Busenello can write that show, why can’t Thomas?
B. The Coronation of Anna Nicole?
W. There are worse titles.
B. The masquerade theme actually applies to Smith as well. Her mask is her fortune.
W. Indeed. In a strange way, the history-vs.-fiction thing is less problematic here, because her whole goal was to be a fictional character.
B. Which also links with the ‘Net. Everyone on the ‘Net is a fictional character.
W. You think so. Really? Speak for yourself.
B. stares. W. noodles. Beat. B. rolls eyes, resumes surfing.
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