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Program Notes

John Harbison (b. 1938)
Winter's Tale

Winter's Tale is an opera in two-acts based on the play by Shakespeare. The text is by the composer after Shakespeare. Winter's Tale received its first performance on August 20, 1979 in San Francisco, CA by the American Opera Project, Christine Bullin, Manager, under the auspices of the San Francisco Opera, Kurt Herbert Adler, General Director. The premiere featured David Arnold, bass-baritone, Susan Quittmeyer, soprano, Ellen Kerrigan, soprano, John Miller, baritone, and David Agler, conductor. This revised version is scored for a cast of 13 (Baritone, Soprano, two Mezzo-sopranos, Tenor, Bass, 6 male, 1 female), chorus, and orchestra (2(pic).2(ca).2.2(cbn)/2200/perc/strings). Its duration is 90 minutes.

Comment
By John Harbison

The opera Winter's Tale was composed in 1972-74 with no prospect of performance. A composer-lyricist grant from the NEA made possible three months away from a heavy Assistant Professor teaching schedule to write out the orchestral score. I made a home recording of a few excerpts, sung by my friends at Emmanuel Music, which drew the interest of Christine Bullin, Manager of the San Francisco American Opera Project, which gave two performances of Winter's Tale in 1979. Directed by Mark Lamos, conducted by David Agler, with strong singers throughout the cast, the piece received a fair hearing.

Gil Rose's plan to revive Winter's Tale is a welcome chance to connect again with my favorite medium. Many improvements are possible, but the main problems are conceptual, correctable only by writing a completely different piece. I thought of the dense texture of Act I as expressing the disordered mind of Leontes, and the dislocated state of his whole cosmos. I believed that a small orchestra and big operatic voices would render some of the complicated text intelligible. I was warned, prior to the production, that my vocal lines were too difficult, would need doubling. Some unnecessary doubling is thus woven in inextricably.

While regretting the pieces problems, it is a pleasure to re-encounter some of the effective moments. The Dumbshows (separately extracted for chamber ensemble performance and sometimes advertised as Six Dumb Shows) were very strong in the theater, and benefit from being rescored for orchestra (they were originally on pre-recorded tape). The falsetto exclamations of Leontes characterize his slips into madness. And the Monteverdian speech-melody arioso adapts to Shakespeare's densities and asymmetries.

Most important for me at this distance is my memory of how one line, at the heart of one remarkable Shakespearean scene, set off the whole project: "Music, awake her; strike! 'Tis time; descend; be stone no more.

Notes

By Robert Kirzinger

Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Winter's Tale is great late Shakespeare, neither comedy nor truly tragedy, sharing with The Tempest the designation of "romance." Such plays, not limited to Shakespeare, included set-pieces like shipwrecks, hidden identities, a setting in an exotic time or place, a fairy-tale sense of sidestepping certain aspects of reality. Although more rarely encountered than The Tempest, The Winter's Tale vies with that play in aiming toward redemption through struggle; here the struggle is darker, the redemption harder won. Unlike forgiving Prospero, the central character Leontes is guilty of a dark narcissistic jealousy that, among other things, costs him his son, and the consequences of which only time, circumstance, and emotional catharsis can transcend.

John Harbison's Winter's Tale is a Shakespearean opera in English, employing a libretto constructed by the composer essentially from the text of the play. This, perhaps surprisingly, is a relatively rare phenomenon. Shakespeare reigns as such a literary icon that one would expect his plays, particularly in English-speaking countries, to be the continual temptation of opera composers of the last four hundred years, despite the daunting prospect of setting such revered texts. But opera itself was still in its infancy while Shakespeare was alive (he died in 1616), and only gained a tenuous foothold in England decades later. Eventually it was non-English composers, with the distancing effects of translation and less reason to treat Shakespeare as sacred, who had little compunction about simplifying the plays to operatic ends, once translations were readily available to librettists. (Opera was, in any case, a stronger genre in continental Europe than in England - Handel, a German writing mostly Italian opera in London, excepted.)

Shakespearean opera came into its own in the 1800s, from Salieri's Falstaff to Verdi's ninety years later, with Berlioz's Béatrice et Bénédict, Gounod's Romeo et Juliet, and Verdi's Macbeth and Otello the best known works in between. It took until the twentieth century for English-language composers to catch up. Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream became the prototype of Shakespearean opera in English, keeping the language of the play while making judicious but necessary cuts for musical reasons, and, most important, retaining the magical quality of the original. With some major differences, John Harbison's Winter's Tale follows Britten's lead in keeping Shakespeare's words, but with a radical reshaping of the play's form to accommodate its new context.

Harbison, who calls opera his "favorite medium," is fundamentally a dramatic, even a theatrical composer, in that tradition that counts the Bach cantatas as theatrical. His involvement with Boston's Emmanuel Music has resulted in deep practical experience with those unstaged dramas of Bach. (He will lead performances of Bach's St. Matthew Passion with Emmanuel next month.) His own works for voice range from solo song and large song-cycles to works with voice and orchestra, including his most recent Boston Symphony Orchestra commission, his Symphony No. 5 for baritone, mezzo-soprano, and orchestra, premiered last year, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning motet The Flight into Egypt, written for the Cantata Singers, of which he was director for many years. Another kind of dramatic music, his evening-length ballet Ulysses, was recorded and recently released on CD by BMOP/sound.

Harbison has, though, written only three "true" operas, of which by far the best known is The Great Gatsby, based on Fitzgerald's novel. Gatsby, written after a twenty-year hiatus from the medium, was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to celebrate the 25th anniversary of James Levine's house debut. It was premiered in December 1999 with a cast that included Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Dawn Upshaw. The opera traveled to Chicago, and was later revived at the Met. Harbison, well known as one of the most abidingly literary of composers, wrote his own libretto.

Harbison's earlier operas were the chamber opera Full Moon in March, based on W.B. Yeats (1977), and the present piece. He wrote Winter's Tale in 1974 without a production lined up - an unusual move for a composer, since an opera takes a very long time to complete, and meanwhile, typically, there are far more pragmatic commissions to fulfill. It's a measure of how engaged Harbison was with the idea of opera that he pushed the project forward. It's probably also a sign of his own confidence as a dramatist to complete such a work without the collaboration of a librettist or the invaluable (albeit sometimes irksome) involvement of directors and designers, whose ideas are (ideally) the catalysts of refining change, of practical wisdom.

Harbison's libretto rearranges Shakespeare's five-act drama into two acts. The first act of the opera covers Shakespeare's acts I-III; the second, acts IV and V. Between the two parts, sixteen years elapse, as in the original. Harbison introduces the play's action via the device of Time personified; in Shakespeare's play Time only appears at the start of Act IV to explain the sixteen-year gap. The opera also eliminates the complex comedic vehicle of the thief Autolycus, who dupes the Shepherd's (likewise eliminated) son.

Opera's traditions have, of course, ranged greatly over the centuries. Winter's Tale contains both points of reference to and points of departure from these traditions. As the composer points out, the most radical change to Shakespeare's drama is the inclusion of six "Dumbshows," musically accompanied, mimed scenes that serve to streamline the narrative. These scenes evoke theatrical traditions going back to the stylized medieval morality plays, or even the Japanese Noh. (Shakespeare himself incorporated similar scenes into his works, such as in the play-within-a-play in Hamlet.) In the operatic canon, we find a precedent in the Royal Hunt and Storm scene of Berlioz's Les Troyens; as in that work, the orchestra itself becomes a character in the drama. There are six such scenes, and their placement affects the pacing of the whole that parcels out the action into ritualized pattern removed from a realistic progression of time.

In passages confined to Act II, during the sheep-shearing festival, Harbison refers to an old French tradition of extended choreographic scenes with dances for the Twelve Satyrs, taken directly from Shakespeare's play, and for the Shepherds and Shepherdesses. In the score, the composer even suggests, Dances may be included in the staging more frequently than indicated." The festival or ball scene is found not only in the source play but also as a "type" in, for example, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Verdi's La traviata, and Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. As is typical in opera from Mozart to Britten, the largest ensemble scenes are placed at the end of acts.

On a subtler level, Harbison also adopts in part the traditional approach of assembling scenes as self-contained, multi-movement forms. As part of this process, the composer integrates musical contrast with characterization. For example, in Leontes' long soliloquy and exchange with Camillo, Leontes' tempos are generally fast but wildly mutable (animando, allegro), while Camillo's are far more stable andantes. Compare this, also, with Leontes' exchange with Hermione in the courtroom scene (incidentally another scenic "type"). From a perspective of "flow," we find ourselves in the realm of Verdi's more through-composed later works, as opposed to the more discretely segmented "number" operas of Mozart (or even early Verdi).

Harbison's orchestra is about the size of Mozart's Idomeneo ensemble (pairs of woodwinds, horns, and trumpets; timpani, strings) with doublings of piccolo, English horn, contrabassoon, and two extra percussionists adding a modern edge, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The instruments are deployed colorfully but with remarkable transparency, never threatening to overwhelm the singers. The distinctive shifts of character from one role to another in a single scene and in such passages as the busy multi-layered sheep-shearing episode reveal Harbison, in his mid-thirties when he wrote the piece, already as a master of drama. We know the flavor of the composer's music from later works; here it's present in the driving, asymmetrical rhythmic language and pungent harmonies accompanying Leontes' entrance in Act I and in the storm/bear scene to end the act, in the shifting quasi-ostinato patterns underlying the Dumbshows, and the deceptively simple prosody of the vocal setting throughout. Combining with the foundational elements of long tradition, that musical personality and theatrical instinct result in a work of substantial, and Shakespearean, dramatic power.

Synopsis

Act I, scene 1. Sicilia, in ancient times. The opera opens with a Dumbshow, in which Time introduces the main characters, spotlighted one by one on a darkened stage: Leontes, King of Sicilia; Hermione, his Queen (with their son Mamillius); and Polixenes, King of Bohemia. We are before the palace of Leontes. Polixenes, preparing to leave, is detained by Leontes. As he turns to leave again, Leontes directs Hermione to follow him. Hermione and Polixenes enter the garden while Leontes, with Mamillius, looks on suspiciously. Time departs.

Leontes' aria, "Too hot, too hot!" expresses his growing jealousy. Hermione and Polixenes return; she tells Leontes his friend will stay longer. The two's friendliness as they move toward the palace invites the continuation ("Thy mother plays, and I play too") of Leontes's dark thoughts. A final wild "Go play, boy, play" sends his terrified son running back to the palace. Camillo, Leontes's courtier, enters. Leontes tells of his certainty that he is being betrayed, and entreats Camillo to take a cup and vial, apparently poison, to give to Polixenes. Camillo protests but takes them.

Dumbshow 2. Camillo on a darkened stage. He approaches Polixenes with the cup, but pours it on the ground unseen by the king. He evidently reveals Leontes's plan; Polixenes grasps his hand, and they depart.

Act I, scene 2. A room in the palace. Paulina, a lady of the court, asks Hermione to tell a tale. Paulina's husband Antigonus and Prince Mamillius are by. Leontes enters to demand Hermione give him Mamillius and refers to her pregnancy, saying the child she carries is not his. Hermione is led off to prison, Mamillius taken away. Antigonus protests the queen's goodness. The king, to quell the unrest of his court, has sent to the Oracle at Delphi to prove his claim. Left alone, he laments his inability to exact revenge on Polixenes ("Nor night, nor day, no rest"). Paulina arrives, telling Leontes that Hermione has given birth to his daughter. He denies she is his and commands that she be burned. In a trio with the king, Paulina and Antigonus convince him to compromise: Antigonus is to abandon the child in a wild place.

Act I, scene 3. A courtroom in the palace. Time, as court Herald, reads the charges against Hermione. She enumerates her recent ignominies - "Tell me what blessings I have here alive that I should fear to die" - and calls upon the oracle to exonerate her. The oracle's terse message is read: "Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten. He shall live without heir if the lost [his abandoned daughter] be not found." Leontes rejects the oracle, but Time's announcement that Mamillius has died shocks the king into realizing his injustice. Hermione, at the news of her son's death, collapses and is carried out. Paulina, reentering, tells Leontes she is dead. The Chorus warns him that his guilt and grief are irredeemable.

Dumbshow 3. A remote island ("Bohemia"). Antigonus enters with the baby and lays her on the ground. A storm breaks; a bear chases and kills Antogonus. The Shepherd finds the child with her rich mantle and Hermione's necklace, sent with her by Paulina.

Act II, scene 1. Dumbshow 4 (echoing Dumbshow 1). Time tells us that sixteen years have passed. We are in Bohemia, where the abandoned baby, Leontes's daughter Perdita (meaning "the found one"), has grown to young womanhood. The Shepherd crowns his adopted daughter with flowers.

A sheep-shearing festival. The chorus sings in celebration: "When daffodils begin to peer." Perdita voices to Florizel, Polixenes's son, her concerns that his father will disapprove of their plans to marry, given her (supposed) lowborn status. He vows to stand by her.

Perdita greets Polixenes and Camillo, who are disguised. The Dance of the Twelve Satyrs. Perdita and Florizel sing to one another of their love. Dance of the Shepherds and Shepherdesses. The disguised Polixenes draws Florizel out, and his son declares his intention to marry Perdita. Polixenes reveals his identity, declares his son disowned, and threatens the punishment of death should he and Perdita be discovered together. Florizel decides to put to sea with Perdita; Camillo suggests he sail for Sicilia, where a contrite Leontes will surely welcome them. Quartet and chorus sing of hope.

Act II, scene 2. Sicilia, a room in Leontes's palace. Leontes, with Paulina, after sixteen years still bitterly regrets the error that resulted in his wife's death. Time announces the arrival of Florizel and Perdita. Leontes welcomes them warmly and wonders at the Princess's beauty, which recalls his queen's. Time announces Polixenes' imminent arrival and relates the Bohemian king's anger at his son for lowering himself to be with a shepherd's daughter. Florizel hopes Leontes will intervene with his father.

Dumbshow 5. Polixenes, approaching Florizel, is detained by the Shepherd, who then places Hermione's necklace around Perdita's neck. Leontes realizes the truth and kneels before Perdita, his daughter. The Shepherd shows Paulina a portion of her husband's torn cloak. Polixenes kneels before his son; they embrace. Finally Leontes embraces Polixenes.

Act II, scene 3. A chapel with statuary, a curtain obscuring the nave. Leontes, Paulina, Florizel, Perdita, Polixenes, and Camillo enter, having come to view a sculpture Paulina commissioned in the likeness of Hermione. Paulina draws back the curtain to reveal the remarkably lifelike statue. Everyone is deeply moved. Paulina gently mocks Leontes: "My lord's so far transported he'll think anon it lives!" Leontes wishes for the madness that would make him think so. Paulina tells him she'll carry the magic further and cause the statue to descend and take him by the hand. "Music, awake her; strike! 'Tis time; descend; be stone no more…." All (save Paulina) marvel at the restored Hermione, kept from sight by Paulina for sixteen years. Hermione and Leontes embrace, and the queen blesses Perdita. A final chorale is suffused with joy and redemption.

Copyright 2009 Robert Kirzinger. Robert Kirzinger is an active composer who writes frequently for the Boston Symphony Orchestra program book and is editor of the program book for the annual Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.