for andante.com, May 2005
I accompany New York City Opera as it presents the Asian première of my opera Little Women alongside Madama Butterfly on the company’s first international tour in almost twenty years.
MAY 13: “YOU HAVE AN OPERA ON TENDER GREEN LEAVES?”
How swiftly we’ve traveled: from a sumptuous 1999 dinner with the consul of Japan, to an ovoid beechwood module of a seat on a Boeing 777 whose maiden flight was only yesterday. General and Artistic Director Paul Kellogg and I are en route to Tokyo for the Asian premiere, in Rhoda Levine’s haunting New York City Opera production, of my opera Little Women, of which NYCO gave the Manhattan première in 2003: Mark Lamos’s luminous framing of Madama Butterfly is the second offering on the company’s first international tour in almost twenty years. It is to be my first trip to Asia: prepped by Matthew Price, my executive of the VOX program and the architect of this tour, I have packed, alongside my Little Women score, a veritable pinochle deck of business cards. The stewardess, bestowing an amuse-bouche of steamed tilefish, sweet peppers, and fava beans, prompts a retelling of our Martinis at Mark’s Bar on the East Side; at which Paul, due in an hour for dinner at the Nippon Club, wondered whether NYCO had in its repertory a contemporary piece that might speak to a Japanese audience. Synchronicity: my agent at G. Schirmer, apropos of nothing, had told me only that afternoon of how Little Women had never left Japanese consciousness—it had most recently resurfaced as an animé TV series—so I suggested it to Paul and Paul (as he told me later) suggested it to the producer’s guests. Blank stares round the dinner table. The ice sculptures cradling the toro puddled into the onyx lacquer as Paul rephrased, gamely: Jo? A writer? Four sisters? Concord, London, New York? At last—found in translation!—one of the guests caught on: “You have an opera on Tender Green Leaves?” (Such is the Englishing of Wakukusa Monogotari, the title by which Japan knows the novel.) And, lo, five years later, almost 200 of us winging so far west it’s east: two performances of each opera, one in Tokyo, one in Nagoya, borne aloft by the goodwill of ANA, Dentzu Corporation, Toyota, Tokai Television, How Fulls Productions, and the U.S. Pavilion at the Aichi World Expo, at which we are the featured cultural guest.
First things first: we adjust to the new time. After dinner, I swallow two Ambien—the post-prandial mint of the international traveler—and stretch the seat flat with a press of a button. When I awake, we’ll have flown over the top of the globe.
MAY 14-15: A PARASOL OF PLATINUM
In Kyoto. PK and I have realized that our schedules allow us the same free days—these first two—so we have taken the bullet train to this fabled city of temples. Somehow I’m expecting the Napa Valley, but Kyoto’s hectic, urban, huge: much of its traditional paper architecture has been replaced by tasteful, if concrete, variations on the ancient motifs. The shrines amaze: their buildings, all sharp rectangles and swooping roofs, seem both weighty and winged, and the gardens model what happens when topiary aspires to the condition of sculpture. (And yet: isn’t there something Procrustean—something of the footbinder—in these thousand wooden struts stretching the pine limbs into their desired shapes?) The greatest surprise isn’t so much the clean minimalism of Zen taste, which, I would argue, has been so eagerly consumed by the Western eye that it’s old news to any New Yorker with a MOMA membership. It’s the antiquity of it. At exactly the same moment when the West was erecting Chartres—gargoyles, buttresses, sunbursts of glass—Kyoto preferred, please, only this rock; this screen; this pool of iris.
We blunder into the Aoi Matsuri Festival, in which Easter meets the Fourth of July. On one street, schoolgirls swathed in embroidered satin bow gravely from a red-wheeled carriage. But mobbing the park, it’s picnic, barbecue: braying kids in T-shirts blow on brilliant green water whistles, and Polo-shirted grownups yoked by Minoltas bite into cabbage fritters grilled amid clouds of steam. We flee the heat and chaos to a cool grotto of a spice shop, where a poised matron in ivory silk serves a tasting of savories—droplets, no more, of salt plum, sardine, seaweed, sesame. You couldn’t be farther from New York, from the West—that is, until you recognize Nat King Cole crooning “Unforgettable” deep in the FM background.
Back to our respective rooms in the Hotel Fujita. I doze fitfully until dawn, and wake to see, from my window, a woman’s parasol glinting platinum as she walks the Kamo River.
MAY 16: LIVING BY EAR
Now, to Tokyo: the Keio Plaza Hotel, across from Tokyo’s Metropolitan Buildings, sandstone, immaculate, triumphalist. Shinjuku, this borough of Tokyo, flings up a clutch of skyscrapers that dwarf its surrounding cityscape much as Houston’s do. I’m falling half in love with the graciousness of the city: the white–gloved chauffeurs, the cab-seats upholstered in lace, the smiling female concierge who escorts you to your elevator and bows deeply until after its doors close. The repeated murmur of sumimasen, sumimasen (excuse me) whispers like autumn leaves. The city’s architectural tropes are familiar from New York, but somehow Tokyo seems more polished: its glass glassier, its steel steelier, its stone obdurate as Egypt. Newer, too, of course, and one winces, recalling why: these phoenix towers rose from the ashes of firebombs.
My schedule is still light. I know enough to shun the Little Women tech rehearsal—if it’s going well, I’ll be unnecessary, and if not, I’ll be nervous (and unnecessary)—so some of our singers and I crowd onto the subway and aim for the vermilion arch of the Senshoji Shrine. Dan Belcher, Little Women’s first and indelible John Brooke, and I marvel how we’ve already fallen into the habit of parsing Japan only by ear. I’d not been able to learn even a smattering of the language, having just opened Lysistrata two months before the tour: so communication has condensed to gesture, timbre, inflection. We’re living an opera without supertitles.
MAY 18: THE CRICKETS OF MEDIA
Today the work begins in earnest, so first to breakfast: a sweetened juice of aloe and an omelette of these preternaturally brilliant Japanese eggs, their yolks lurid as tangerines. At 2:30, NYCO holds a press conference: Paul, our music director George Manahan, Atsushi Yamada (who’ll conduct Butterfly), and peerless, harried Matthew and me. I remember the comparable event heralding the Mexico City première of Little Women two Novembers ago: the hushed hotel ballroom, the murmuring interpreter, we speakers careful and cool above our waterglasses and microphones. We say extravagant things, which we happen to mean, about each other, the company, the event. I improvise a poor haiku:
A hotel ballroom:
Cameras, microphones click—
Media crickets.
Off to the Little Women dress rehearsal. Jennifer Dudley’s Jo—her fourth traversal of the role— is whimsical, childlike, more heartbreaking than ever; Jennifer Rivera, returning to Meg after her first two Jo’s last year, brings new pliancy to her recitative, a newly wine-dark lower register to “Things change, Jo.” But the balance is off—I hear it, it matters, and yet I revel guiltily in the lushness of the orchestra. Only NYCO performs this score with a symphonic string section, and between George’s rhythmic brio and the celli in full cry, I feel like I’m hearing the score for the first time. Paul, though, throws up his hands: he’s not understanding a single word, so he dashes backstage to sway the tech elves into doing something. After seven years and over a hundred performances of this piece I’m doubtless its worst possible critic, but still I wonder if Paul isn’t overreacting: for a non-Anglophone audience, won’t the timbral color carry more meaning than the consonants? Isn’t hearing Little Women in Tokyo like hearing Katya Kabanova in New York?
Moot point: during the interval the crew sinks the pit by eighteen inches, and lo, forward bloom the voices. John Packard, my Brooke in Costa Mesa but here essaying his first Bhaer, unrolls a faultless, seemingly anaerobic legato in “Kennst du das Land:” Kathleen Magee, new both to her role and the production, showers on Amy’s lyric music a winning soubrette glitter—just what the music needs. Jennifer Roderer’s first Cecilia sounds like Erda and looks like the Queen of Diamonds. But even with the pit lowered, her three sisters still stand too far upstage of Jo for the final quartet to sound: Rhoda loves the silhouette, as do I, but between the placement and the mostly gauzy set (Christina Bouras, our Beth, quips, “It’s like singing into a pillowcase) the quartet isn’t peaking vocally—and this is the climax of the opera. Larry Edelson, Rhoda’s assistant, trots onstage to retape the sisters’ marks: I cross my fingers.
MAY 19: WE OPEN IN TOKYO
Tonight’s the première, but this morning, more media: Atsushi broadcasts a classical-music interview program each week from the crown of the Ropponghi Hills Tower, so here on the 53rd floor it’s soundboards and sound checks in a mothership of glass. I murmur pleasantries about the happy international career of Little Women, the future engagements of Lysistrata, and the upcoming grand opera for San Francisco; which prompts the irrepressible Atsushi to exclaim, “You must be rich!” The co-hostess giggles into her palm—outside, in the booth, Matthew rolls his eyes—but I respond merely that I’m doing well enough to afford dinner in Tokyo, and leave it at that. (It’s weirdly energizing to realize that the Japanese, too, can be vulgar.) Our unflappable dramaturg Cori Ellison and I bolt for the subway back to the hall: we’d thought to proof the supertitle translations one last time, but our producers talk us out of it so elegantly we can only marvel. What else to do? We’ve confirmed a signing of the Ondine CD of Little Women afterwards: my suit is pressed; Larry assures me he’s edged the sisters downstage. I’ve trusted Little Women to this company for three years now, and this is as important a performance for NYCO as it is for me. I set a wake-up call and expect the best.
And I get it: starting at 6:30, the production works its familiar magic. All three Jennifers captivate: Ryan MacPherson’s first Laurie is antic, wistful, silvery; Dan Belcher creates anew his witty, ardent, plangent Brooke; and Christina Bouras’ Beth, fragile yet intense, suggests a young Callas as Mimi. Under George’s baton the orchestra surges, lilts, undulates; onstage, Rhoda’s elegant groupings make visible the emotional nuances she’s coaxed from the cast. It could be the State Theatre but for the vertical black LED screens at either side of the stage, which turn the translation of my libretto into the twin marquees of an Osaka hotel.
But what is the audience hearing? The house is full, the crowd elegant—but the opera is unfolding in cathedral silence. Is it too dense? Tokyo hosts opera companies regularly—La Scala, La Fenice, the MET—but only in the most basic repertory. How challenging is this piece to Japanese ears? I crease my program, unfold it, crease it again. Relief, suddenly: the first act closes on Beth’s collapse, and the applause breaks in waves. Matthew’s avuncular friend Yoshi leaps from his seat to assure me that the audience is with us: they’re not mute, they’re involved. I’ll take his word for it until Act Two.
Act Two develops as beautifully as did Act One, and, to my surprise and gratitude, the ovation is lengthy and intense: whisked to the lobby, I sign CD booklets for forty-five minutes. Who’d have thought? But we can’t linger: Goldman Sachs, one of the underwriters of this tour, is hosting a reception for us back in the Concord Room–an acre of mauve carpet dominated by a sparkling tarantula of a chandelier. A lady in a pale pink suit is introduced to me by her interpreter as the wife of the CEO of a discount store chain. She trembles with emotion. Over and over she tells me how grateful she is for the introspection of the piece, its subtlety and delicacy; her bows are deep and frequent. I’m moved that she’s moved: we bow. Yoshi, aglow, taking my elbow, praises the opera as, among other things, an orchestral tone poem. That’s silly, I think (and say)—the orchestral score is underwritten to the point of severity—but Yoshi, a financier by trade but a lover of music by choice, bids me compare the textures of this piece to those of the late Takemitsu. It’s a lovely thought—far too extravagant—but it’s becoming an evening for extravagant gestures: later, after a nightcap in a bar as upholstered in blood-red velvet as a jewelry box, I am unable to resist sweeping Rhoda Levine up off the sidewalk and bearing her, protesting, across the street.
MAY 20: LUNCH WITH DR. DRE
Only this morning, over “plane yogurt,” do I learn that the affable Viking I’ve spied wielding a Nikon the size of a hotel safe is, in fact, the photojournalist Joe McNally, a mainstay of Time, Life, and National Geographic, who photographed Faces of Ground Zero and will be documenting this tour for New York City Opera. The slide show he cues on his PowerBook shows our Jo, Meg, and Gideon, in full costume, roaring with laughter amid the glare and clamour of a Tokyo pachinko parlor. The images pulse with life. Why didn’t I write that opera?
At noon, I am taken to lunch by the leader of a publishing company. My agents at G. Schirmer had wistfully hoped he might guide us into the contemporary-music scene in Tokyo. Contemporary they are, and genial too, but only Asian teens in jeans like parachutes snarl from their catalogue covers: it would have been as enlightening to have lunched with Dr. Dre. Later, during my first workout in a gleaming corporate gym, I’m struck by the difference I see in the exercise styles of the members. More yoga, of course, (and no shoes on the stretching mats!) but the Asian men use even the Cybex machines differently: their gestures rapid, birdlike, strangely furious. I feel ursine.
MAY 21: PARAKEETS AND VICARS
From Schirmer, an e-mail materializes: will Little Women bow in Australia in March 2007? Stranger things have happened, some of them to me. To toast the Little Women opening, Yoshi is hosting Paul, George, Matthew, Atsushi and me to a tiny family restaurant the name of which, “I-qiu,” means “respite:” ours is to be the only table. We meet in the lobby and stride, expounding, into the neon dusk. En route, I note how metropolitan Tokyo fashion seems to spin a thousand variations on the black suit, with only the young men’s torchlike haircuts mutely protesting the enforced grisaille. My colleagues are dressed in faultless taste: I, however, have been unable to resist spiking my wardrobe with my usual Hockneyesque splashes of color—chlorine blue, canary, celery green. Haiku:
Cocktails in Tokyo:
Amongst the chatting vicars,
One mute parakeet.
Sumimasen. Sumimasen.
Dinner is a fisherman’s fantasy on themes from Aladdin’s cave: amethysts of tuna, opals of mackerel, an elfin cucumber guillotined into translucent half-moons of jade. Such is sushi in Tokyo. Yoshi’s scrutiny of City Opera over the years extends to noting to what degree, and in which choirs, the orchestra has blossomed: he seems to know more about the company than we do. Course after course appears, each more exotic than the last—stonefish, flying fish, an emerald tangle of moss one harvests only from the roughest seas. For dessert, one small tomato, sweeter than a plum; afterwards, shoju, of course, which is what you get when vodka matriculates at Vassar. Atsushi begs to leave: he’s to lead our first Butterfly tomorrow. An American company presenting an Italian take on a Japanese tragedy! Where’s Edward Said when you need him?
MAY 22: BUTTERFLY ASSOLUTA
I had not seen our Butterfly before today’s matinee, and I am dazzled. The set is one staircase, one wall of screens. The lighting uses only reds, whites, and blues: the flags of Japan and America, misremembered by Magritte. Jee-Hoon Kim, our Cio-Cio San, sweeps all before her: her tone slender but pointed, her phrasing arched, her acting exposed. Atsushi’s orchestra makes much of the oceanic score. And—kudos, Mark Lamos— the staging and lighting of the Humming Chorus make this brief and almost tangential moment the most moving scene in the piece.
The applause is tumultuous—but we can’t linger now, either: Goldman Sacks is hosting another reception in the crystalline Park Hyatt, this one even more imperial than the last. We are served a cocktail created for the occasion named The Butterfly—a mad concoction of Campari and Champagne made to glow (to glow!) by some high-tech LED ice-cube submerged in the glass. It’s like drinking from The Wizard of Oz’s ruby slipper. For a moment the mandarin opulence of all this makes me blink: it seems so remote from the studio, the practice room, the plain work of music which has little to learn from luxury. And yet, without Esterhazy, no Haydn: it seems the wrong room and hour to indulge a received and sentimental Marxism. We toast the largesse of our benefactors and dash off to our own, more modest party, at which our singers and I, aloft on a billow of shoju, improvise our own essay in Zen architecture by twisting napkins into a paper bridge across two tables and suspending our ten-yen coins thereon. We’re beginning to feel like rock singers whose tour has been underwritten by the U. N.
MAY 23-25: AMUSING THE LIONS
A calendar crowded with the outings of privilege. Elliott Slade, who serves on our board and has only yesterday flown in from New York, has worked some recondite diplomatic legerdemain, and on Wednesday morning, drunk on gusts of lilac, we tour the gardens of the royal family. The Palace is a stunning essay in horizontals, a three-story rectangle the length of a football field, but the complex itself, disappointingly, suggests a bigger Lincoln Center with better landscaping. That night, cocktails at the house of a deputy of the U. S. Embassy. In the crowd, every other male hand clutches a crystal fistful of Suntory. (Whiskey’s back in Tokyo: did it ever leave?) That small broad woman in the sculpted silk turns out to be Junko Koshino, the costume designer for Broadway’s revival of Pacific Overtures; she’s been nominated for a Tony Award. Imagine: thirteen hours around the world, and still you never leave Manhattan.
The next night, another sponsor, another dinner. I am shot through with sympathy for Paul, as he struggles manfully to nose aloft the balloon of small talk with moguls as courtly as their English is limited. Singers have it easier: there’s a stable score, a set rehearsal period, limits to the number and kinds of performances. But to lead a company—to muster support for a theatre, a commission, an international tour— means on one level to be performing—auditioning, really—all the time, for constantly changing audiences on scripts of your own device. It’s stand-up comedy on a tightrope above a Coliseum thick with lions. I toast PK silently and take my leave: tomorrow, Nagoya.
MAY 25: THE TEA-MISTRESS PREPARES
If Shinjuku is the Houston of Tokyo, Nagoya, home to Toyota, is the Houston of Japan: not nearly as metallically chic, but prosperous enough to boast the occasional Lamborghini idling at a stoplight. The Nagoya Kanko Hotel ushers us bedraggled guests into its tranquil cherrywood vault of a lobby; and the theatre—the theatre!— is a 1992 acoustical miracle: even speaking on its stage is like tap-dancing on the soundboard of a Guarneri. We’re wildly optimistic for the performances. I park my grotesquely overpacked suitcase in a corner of Room 634 and seize my dinner jacket: this afternoon I am set to learn my first tea ceremony, which Joe McNally will photograph in Nagoya’s oldest garden.
We clatter across a sun-baked footbridge over a pond choking with lotus. Fleshy carp foam the shallows as they compete for scraps. But inside the tea chamber, only cool yellow wood; only sunlight, screened by paper squares. I kneel in a corner of a long low room matted with tatami while the tea-mistress tends water over a candle flame. In Zen, learn by doing: I am to rehearse once, then commence. The ritual is suggestive but not symbolic: meaning inheres in the silence, the focus, the beauty of the things, the economy of the gestures.
Kneeling in the dimmest nook, the tea-mistress prepares. She bows. I bow. Joe clicks. As in William Carlos Williams, so much depends upon the placement of the cup: the turning of the bowl; the thumb here, the forefinger there. Circles close: once in university, I played the role of Manjiro in the same musical, Pacific Overtures, for which that Tokyo designer is nominated for this year’s Tony. The script required me to fake the very same tea ceremony I am attempting authentically now. I wonder for the first time if Little Women and Pacific Overtures don’t share, in fact, the same conflict: if my Jo’s forcing back the hands of the clock doesn’t mirror Weidman and Sondheim’s desperate islanders, covering their ears and praying to yesterday while the Western admirals knock and bray. Was it this felt analogy that so moved my tremulous lady in pink?
From the twilight past to the corporate present: I and Adam Sachs, Joe’s assistant and NYCO’s jack-of-all-trades for this tour, race for the monorail which will speed us to the pavilions of the 2005 Aichi World Expo. A Ferris wheel X-rayed in green neon looms through the train window; an enormous DVD screen, jittery with adverts, winks at its hub. It’s a giant Martian Cyclops in a Ray-Ban monocle. We follow arguing mobs to a boardwalk so new the fragrance of fresh lumber still blows through its coats of paint. There’s a Saudi Pavilion—a Colombia pavilion—even a Pavilion of Gas! But—we have a reception to attend. We sneak in too late to have heard an apparently dazzling performance of a Milhaud trio played by members of the orchestra. Afterwards, hungry for a bit of Village informality, we stop for Margaritas at the Mexican Pavilion, but the hoped-for taste of Tijuana doesn’t survive translation: the chef has parboiled the jalapenos, and the tortilla chips are so exquisitely posed in the guacamole they suggest the Sydney Opera House.
MAY 26: PREPOSITIONS AND THE NAMES OF FISH
Tonight at 6:30, Butterfly II in Nagoya, with Shu-Ying Li, our second Cio-Cio San. The strengths of Tokyo survive intact: warm-toned Shu-Ying builds slowly to a deeply felt Act III. Mr. Kimura, an executive from Tokai TV, insists on hosting us for sushi: to reach his restaurant, we must nudge through a quartet of glamourous prostitutes, all slit skirts and false pearls, loitering in the vestibule. (The bone-deep elegance of urban Japan: I’ve seen debutantes dressed less tastefully than these girls.) Matthew remarks that the hardest elements of any language to translate are “prepositions and the names of fish;” I resolve immediately to write a piece of that name. Then it’s off to the Supper Club atop the International Hotel for a nightcap and networking. Condoleezza Rice has recently visited Japan, and Paul asks how she’s been received; Kimura delicately replies that, while such questions are taboo in Japan, he’ll freely admit that Bush is quite popular in Japan for the very simple reason that Clinton was perceived to have favored China. To shrug seems the only gentlemanly response: I feel at once cosmopolitan and depressed. We sip our Scotch in silence as, one table over, a heroin-thin couple in his-and-her black leather chat in quiet French.
MAY 27: “MUCH TAI!”
Today, we unveil our education program for Sugiyama Jogakuen High School, which was launched as a sewing academy (!) in 1903 and today guides the daughters of Nagoya from pre-school to university. Onstage in a cavernous auditorium under emergency-room lighting, we talk the students through opera in general to Little Women in particular: our cover cast sings excerpts from my score to make audible its emotional journey. Cherry Duke, here covering Jo after performances of the role in Virginia and California, is, as ever, noble, rich, precise—her pitch as true as a compass needle pointing north; Jennifer Tiller gives us a pliable, aching Meg, and Jody Sheinbaum’s Beth is diamantine. Afterwards, the cast is gifted with flowers, and—surprise— I am mobbed by giggling schoolgirls in kneesocks asking me to sign their Xeroxed programs in pink and green magic markers. To Minima. To Yazuki. To Kana. I struggle to embrace the incongruity of an opera composer signing autographs to schoolchildren. How much do one-bedroom apartments go for in this town?
Dazed, we stagger past the parked Ferraris to join our hosts for lunch at La Maison Blanche, a restaurant in which Nagoya meets Bel Air by way of Tangier: paper screens reveal a Napa Valley fountain plashing in a courtyard of Moroccan tile. Lunch begins with glazed mussels, a cube of honeydew saddled with prosciutto, and a precious packet of snapper framed with peapods—our host tells us that snapper (tai) is considered so lucky a fish that the Japanese idiom “Much tai!” translates, roughly, into “Good luck!” We continue through a dauntingly marbled entrecote and conclude with tiles of chocolate flecked with gold leaf: it seems an odd moment to learn from Sugiyama’s principal that the word nagoya means “moderate.”
MAY 28: LET ME LOOK AT YOU
It is, literally, all over but the matinée and the last party. We reprise Little Women in the Nagoya theatre, and, between these artists and this resonant room, the piece may never have sounded better: in that quartet finale, the girls resolve their whole tones into a C-sharp octave so pure it sounds like virtue. I’ve gone into this project with no expectations, but now I wonder what the future holds: is this the opening for City Opera—for new American opera—of the gates of Asia? Perhaps: at the party, Matthew is ebullient. One of our underwriters, mightily impressed by our work here, has made specific overtures about bringing us back to Japan, and tomorrow, as most of us will blearily drag our suitcases towards an iodine-lit shuttle, Matthew and Paul will jet south to Hong Kong to discuss the possibilities there. Good word from Tokyo has, clearly, flown ahead: is there rumor of Singapore?
We exult: we clink our glasses. It’s nine o’clock. This time Sunday, we’ll be back in the U. S. Like robot fireflies, out flutter the cameras. I improvise my last haiku:
Flash, smile, hold, click, flash:
Silver chambers remember
What shoju forgets.
Tomorrow, New York.