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KARREN LaLONDE ALENIER
Poets are troublemakers. If they aren't, they are not doing their job.
I am Karren LaLonde Alenier, the poet who wrote the words to the jazz opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On. The libretto is based on my poetry about modernist writer Gertrude Stein. Now, there is a poet who caused all sorts of trouble, especially with her anti-biography The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas!
William Banfield wrote the music to 'The Stein Opera', my short moniker for our creation. He calls it 'The Jump Opera'. Director Nancy Rhodes of Encompass New Opera Theatre helped develop the work through initial meetings with the poet and composer and through workshops with singers and piano accompaniment. The Word Works, a nonprofit publisher of contemporary poetry and a presenter of public programs, raised the funds to pay the composer a commission and to help finance the workshops. The co-commission from The Word Works and Encompass New Opera Theatre was granted and signed in June 2000. The opera premiered with five performances June 2005 in New York City. A senior music critic from The New York Times gave the work a favorable review.
In 2003, as the originating creator of the project, I began writing for Scene4 Magazine on the Internet about the process of creating an opera. Things had slowed down in the development of the work. The ball was in the composer's court to write the orchestration, which is a considerable job. Instead of twiddling my you-know-whats, I got a gig writing a monthly column on opera. Certainly it was accidental and born out of rejection relative to an essay I wrote about my opera for a print lit magazine, but nonetheless I became a card-carrying journalist. And it was the opportunity I needed to learn more about the field of opera.
Because I was entirely naïve when I started down the road to operadom (yes, that's me using a silly word about a serious subject), I had no idea what trouble I was getting into. One of my early columns concerned what is American opera. Since I was no authority on the subject, I interviewed five working American composers, including Mark Adamo whose opera Little Women has been produced over sixty times throughout the world.
This kind of success is unheard of. Most new operas are lucky to get one or two performances in a one-time only production.
To these five composers I asked what is opera anyway? How do you tell opera apart from Broadway musicals and other productions that seem to be somewhere between opera and musical? I was pleased to learn that the definitions varied and no one completely agreed on how opera is defined. The essential things to know are that singers of opera are trained differently than other singers because the music is usually more difficult to sing and requires greater breath control. Not all operas are completely sung. Some have spoken text. Mozart mixed singing with spoken text in The Magic Flute. 'The Stein Opera' mixes sung text with spoken text and the premiere production mixed opera singers with singers trained for Broadway musicals.
As for American opera, some say it began with George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and others say it began with Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts. The interesting thing to note is that early American opera distinguished itself from European opera through folk and jazz inflection particular to American culture. So how does one write an American opera today? According to most American composers and backed up by the definitive writings of Virgil Thomson, who was also a music critic for most of his adult life, all one has to do is be an American and write an opera. Since I am a poet first and I write columns for Scene4 Magazine in the voice of the Steiny Road Poet, who is a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Voltaire's Candide, I didn't let this answer be a show stopper. And yes, I've been told by at least one composer that librettists know nothing about opera. All I can say is I am earnest about learning as much as I can. Considering librettists are treated as second-class citizens in the world of opera, I prefer to call myself a poet and have everyone do the same.
Cut to October 1, 2007 when what I have been writing about opera has been culled, put into a book, and published so far in a limited advance release edition. The book is called The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas. My blurb writers for this book, all three working in the world of academia and theater, say it is fun to read and a must for those writing or curious about the process of writing opera. My first critic of the book said his favorite chapter is "Hubris, Vanity, Rejection." Yes, indeed, that's a subject we poets know a lot about and why we tend to get into trouble.
-copyright KARREN LaLONDE ALENIER---
She writes for scene4.com at The Dressing; order your insider copy of The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Opera.
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