Gordon Getty Bringing His ‘Plump Jack’ to L.A.

“Business is just my avocation,” Gordon Getty says. “Music is my vocation.”

That may surprise those who recognize Getty only as the multimillionaire son of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, and it may surprise those critics who have suggested--some none too subtly--that Getty’s compositions are performed only in expectation of substantial patronage.

Getty, however, takes his calling as a composer quite earnestly. Wednesday, local listeners will get the chance to evaluate his major effort so far, the four-scene concert opera “Plump Jack,” interpreting Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

The road to “Plump Jack” has been a long, if hardly rocky, one. The 54-year-old composer studied briefly at the San Francisco Conservatory in the early ‘60s and subsequently published some short piano pieces. Musically, however, little more was heard from him for almost two decades.

“It certainly wasn’t discouragement, and it certainly wasn’t conflicts or demands on my time,” Getty says of the long silence. “I think I was trying to become a composer that I wasn’t.”

Then in 1982, Martha Ellison sang the premiere of Getty’s “The White Election,” a song cycle using 32 Emily Dickinson poems. Judith Blegen brought the work to the Vienna Festival in 1986, and it has been championed by many other singers, among them Kaaren Erickson.

“Only when Kaaren is singing my songs does everything go right,” Getty says. This spring, Delos will release a recording of “The White Election” by Erickson and pianist Armen Guzelimian.

Following “The White Election” in 1982, Sam Wanamaker of the International Shakespeare Globe Centre in London suggested that Getty do a similar cycle on the Shakespeare sonnets. Getty, however, does not care for the sonnets and found inspiration instead in scenes involving Falstaff from “Henry IV” and “Henry V.”

By October, 1984, the first scene of “Plump Jack” was completed, and it was premiered by Edo de Waart and the San Francisco Symphony on March 13, 1985. The second scene was first performed at the Aspen Festival on July 4, 1986, and the third scene at the University of New Mexico on March 30, 1987. The completed work returned to San Francisco for its premiere, June 26, 1987, with Andrew Massey conducting.

The performance of “Plump Jack” on Wednesday will bring Massey to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where he will conduct the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in a Music Center Opera production. The leading roles of Falstaff and Prince Hal will reunite John Del Carlo and Paul Sperry from the San Francisco concerts.

“This is my first orchestral piece,” Getty says, explaining why it took two years to complete the first scene. “I wanted a big, fat orchestra for a big, fat man.”

The learning process, as applied to “Plump Jack,” is not complete. Every performance and rehearsal has taught Getty something new about orchestration, lessons that he did not hesitate to apply immediately, sometimes changing parts in rehearsal.

“ ‘Plump Jack’ changed every time,” he says.

“When you hear ‘The White Election,’ you’re hearing the best I can do. I don’t say that of ‘Plump Jack.’ I can do better.”

Getty also put in a lot of time studying the background of the plays and the music of the period, using some of the “actual music and words sung on that day when Henry V was crowned” in the third scene.

“The harmony doesn’t try to be authentic,” he says, “but on the other hand it does try to evoke the era. Renaissance music just doesn’t have the girth!”

The question of just how much Getty’s music does recall other composers has become an issue with some critics, one that Getty confronts confidently.

“All the training that I had was indispensable, but I found my own way to derivativeness,” Getty says. Though he cites various influences on his work, he also asserts that “there is this quality of integrity that I do have. I think my music sounds like me.

“Things just get born and go their own way,” Getty says of his inspirations. “I just kind of run after them and put their shoes back on.”

Getty also acknowledges his extensive arts patronage has raised the suggestion that performing organizations program his music in anticipation of a financial reward.

“The disproof of that claim is basically the kind of reviews I get,” he says. He likens criticism of his work to a report card, conceding that he has gotten some Fs as well as A’s, while maintaining a high average. That, he says, shows that his music is accepted on its own merits.

“I decided to insulate myself from who gets what,” Getty says of his contributions. He has panels of musicians and critics that advise him how to make his donations. “We like to have a drop in every bucket,” rather than providing the main support of just a few organizations, he says. Getty has been a major supporter of the San Francisco Symphony and says that he has probably given to the Los Angeles organizations that are performing his music.

The blessings of a highly visible name and a very full wallet have been mixed, Getty says.

“I guess its slightly more help than hindrance getting in the door, and more hindrance than help staying in.”

His relatively short list of compositions is showing remarkable staying power, however.

“Plump Jack” goes to Dartmouth College and Aspen this summer, and to Marin Opera in October. Also in October, the Los Angeles Philharmonic will play orchestrations of some of Getty’s piano waltzes.

Although the composer was not involved in arranging the Music Center performance, with its interspersed spoken scenes, he has patched together an hour of spoken sections from the Shakespeare plays to extend “Plump Jack,” and is anticipating staged productions.

He is not, however, at work on a “King Lear” project, as some reports have indicated. Instead, he is contemplating a play with music based on Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” as his next project.

“Every piece I have written is tragic, certainly not excluding ‘Plump Jack,’ ” he says. “My idea of tragedy is not at all a 20th-Century idea.”

Getty also says, “I think sadness and tragedy don’t mix.” Certainly the late-blooming career Getty has forged from his tragedies gives him no cause for sorrow.