‘Wild Things’ in Operaland : Maurice Sendak moves from children’s books to stage designer and librettist

Directions to Maurice Sendak’s house here are a little intimidating.

Over the phone, Sendak describes at great length country dirt roads with no identification, hard-to-see turns and easy-to-miss landmarks. On a rainy, foggy May day, the 90-minute drive from Manhattan puts one in mind of those mysterious journeys to a weird land Sendak’s characters regularly take, especially Max’s voyage in Sendak’s popular children’s book, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

What wild thing lies at voyage’s end? Sendak has, well . . . let’s say a reputation. At 61 one of the world’s most celebrated and successful creators of children’s books, he is known as something of a curmudgeon. Sendak lives alone in a big house in the middle of the Connecticut backwoods. He is said to be obsessed with death, with the soul’s darker side, with psychiatry. His health has never been robust. He was a frail child; he had a massive heart attack when he was 39 and now he is only recently home from the hospital and walking with a cane. Some of his friends have nicknamed him Morose Sendak.

Sendak turns out, however, to be friendly, very funny, highly articulate and ornery. He is fretful one minute, incautiously opinionated the next. He lives with a huge, protective German shepherd named Runge (after the 18th-Century German painter) in a house dominated by childhood fantasy and adult Angst . His heroes are Melville, Mickey Mouse and Mozart--and all are in great evidence.

On the shelves of his studio, grand tomes of 19th-Century German literature and art knock against miniature old Disney volumes; Kleist and Robin Hood are neighbors. Statuettes of Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat and Mozart crown his desk. A rocking chair is filled with “Wild Things” dolls. But old Mickey knickknacks predominate.

“This is heresy, I know, but I always think that what Lourdes is to Bernadette, my house is to Mickey,” Sendak says of his extensive collection of Mickey Mouse-iana.

But this house filled with fantastical lore seems a perfectly natural setting in which to talk opera, the art that has largely taken over the last 10 years of Sendak’s life. Angeleno operagoers may remember the New York City Opera production of Janacek’s “Cunning Little Vixen” at the Music Center that Sendak designed, and now Music Center Opera has taken a fancy to him. This week, the company offers the double bill of composer Oliver Knussen’s “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Higglety Pigglety Pop!,” operas for which Sendak wrote the librettos and designed the productions based upon his books.

In September, Sendak will return to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to design a new production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” and he will be employed for the inevitable “Hansel and Gretel” the following season. For all of these productions, Frank Corsaro directs. Sendak and Corsaro have also together mounted “The Magic Flute,” a Ravel double bill of “L’Enfant et les Sortileges” and “L’Heure Espagnole,” and Prokofiev’s “The Love for Three Oranges.”

So popular has Sendak’s contribution been to these fanciful productions that they tend to be referred to, and sometimes even advertised as, “Sendak’s ‘Flute”’ or “Sendak’s ‘Wild Thing,’ ” as if he were composer and director. But it is easy to see why. Sendak has created a visual environment that, while being unmistakably his own, actually serves the music. It creates a habitat of fantasy that entices the mind to accept the non-rational world of music, and it helps music create a theatrical statement.

This is a touchy issue. Opera designers today have a habit of running away with a show when they can. That might lead to an entire rethinking of the art form, as when visionary visual artists such as Robert Wilson or Achim Freyer of Germany turn to opera; but it has also been responsible for the brazen spectacle of Franco Zeffirelli productions that dwarf singers but attract sell-out crowds to the Metropolitan Opera no matter who appears in the cast.

The ardent audience attracted solely by Sendak’s stage design, however, troubles the artist. “It is both flattering and nervous making,” he admits. “It’s not entirely different from people buying my books because they want to buy my pictures. That is upsetting to me, because I really take book making very seriously. Language comes first, and pictures are there to support and illumine.

“Why bother doing a book if you don’t love words?”

With opera, Sendak says he still holds to the old-fashioned notion that words and music come first, but that all elements must be in proper relationship to each other.

“If there is anything wonderful about an opera, it is the maddening, unusual fusion of all these elements. But how do you do it? You have music; you have set design; you have lighting; you have a director; you have singers; you have a conductor, and you have an orchestra. Man, you get that all together and you have performed a miracle. Occasionally it happens and it knocks you off your butt.

“I know I sound like an old fogy, and I am an old fogy, but I don’t like it when the sets take over, or when a prima donna takes over, or a tenor takes over, or the conductor takes over.”

In fact, Sendak’s operatic sensitivity comes first of all from his longtime love of opera as words and music. He has had a passion for opera since boyhood, and he can pinpoint exactly how it all began: during a radio broadcast of “Fidelio,” conducted by Toscanini, on a Sunday afternoon in the early ‘40s.

“It was the second act, and it was Jan Peerce singing Florestan’s aria, where he sees the angel, he sees Leonore,” Sendak recalls. “And I flipped out. I couldn’t believe my ears. That was it; I remember that precise moment of hearing that aria.”

Until 11 years ago, opera was just that, a personal passion. But at about the same time --and out of the blue--Sendak got calls from Corsaro and from Theatre de la Monnaie, the opera company of Brussels. Corsaro, long a fan of “Wild Things,” thought Sendak would be perfect for a production of “Magic Flute” that he was about to direct. Monnaie wanted to commission an opera of “Wild Things” as part of the celebration of the Year of the Child.

“Where the Wild Things Are,” the book that Sendak wrote and illustrated in 1961, has been phenomenally popular with children and controversial with adults. The popularity and controversy come from the psychological acuity of a story about a misbehaving young boy, Max, whose mother punishes him by sending him to bed without his supper. From his bedroom, Max sets off on a dream voyage to the land of the wild things, remarkable giant creatures both fearsome and friendly, familiar and strange at the same time.

These wild things translate into irresistible 10-foot creatures on stage. But who or what are they, and why do they so fascinate?

The inspiration for the wild things came, Sendak delightedly acknowledges, from his relatives in Brooklyn, and how ghastly he found them as a kid.

“They had huge yellowed eyes and stained mouths and hairs falling out of nostrils and boils and pimples and things that disgusted us as children,” he says. “So when the relatives came over, and these lumbering fat faces loomed over us, pinched us, mauled us, kissed us and said, ‘We could eat you up we love you so,’ we thought, ‘Hey, if Mama doesn’t cook dinner fast, they’ll eat anything.’

“That’s what the wild things are: revenge on the relatives.”

Turning the children’s book into an opera was anything but a natural prospect. “It’s a book of just barely 385 words, which would make about a minute-and-a-quarter opera,” Sendak explains.

“And the point of the book was its obliqueness. That’s the whole point of a picture book--you write obliquely and then you fill in with pictures and you tell as little as possible. You let the pictures tell more, but you let readers make it all up, the subtext.

“But opera is so literal. You have to tell everything in order to fill time, and the worry was that having to tell too much would wreck the book. What does Max know at 5? Is he going to sing ‘I am 5, but I know Freud said that at my age I should be hating my mother and have Oedipal feelings towards my father, but I’m controlling that as best I can’? So how do you give him an aria where he is as innocent and primitive as he is in the book but yet has something to sing? It is very difficult.”

But Oliver Knussen proved the kind of collaborator Sendak needed, a composer able to get into a child’s mind without writing childish music. And what Sendak and Knussen created became an opera that may be popular with children but is not “children’s opera.”

“We don’t know what children’s operas are,” Sendak says. “Ollie’s music is not children’s music, God forbid. But whatever is in me, and whatever is in him, that appeals to children--and we can’t even figure out what that is--works, it miraculously works.

“That is as close as we get to doing an opera for children. We have some kind of affinity. But he doesn’t compromise at all, he writes very dense and complicated music. And I write books that very often scandalize librarians and parents who think the subjects very inappropriate for children.

“You know there is such a thing as children’s opera, and they’re hideous because they’re condescending, because everyone sort of drops half their brain out of their left ear and thinks this is going to be easy, it’s only for kids. It’s despicable to treat children that way. It’s all right to treat adults that way, we do it all the time, 90% of the books published treat them like that, so they’re used to it. But we shouldn’t do it to kids.”

What, then, makes an opera suitable for kids? “When it’s very good, it’s probably suitable for children. When it’s very bad, it’s probably only suitable for opera lovers,” Sendak says.

Still, “Wild Thing,” and its successor, “Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life,” about an adorable dog who takes to the stage, have proven popular with children because the works never condescend to them. Instead, Knussen and Sendak have created operas written from the point of view of adults reliving childhood reverie. Knussen’s scores are sophisticated modern music, not simplistic tuneful “children’s music,” but the music is also stage music, able to describe action and thought and make a rumpus.

“The only ones who are going to love you being straight and honest with them and telling them like it is are kids,” Sendak claims, “because they are the most reasonable creatures on Earth. . . .

“Of course, I’m hopelessly generalizing. But there is a point to this. Children are so catholic in their tastes, so open. It doesn’t mean they love what you do. Sometimes they hate what you do.

“But it’s a passionate response. It has nothing to do with prejudice of any kind. They’re wide open, open to anything.”

And it is for that unprejudiced audience that Sendak would now like to create his own children’s theater. “We would do some classics, but primarily I would like it to be where I could commission young artists to write plays, write operas, ballets for children in the sense that all my work as been for children. I hope this will happen, because I want one last terrific career.

“I love the stage. There are maybe six or seven books of mine where the kids go on stage. I feel that affinity. That pull was there long before I was even conscious of it, that I wanted to get there, that I wanted to do it.

“So this is the career I want to begin now, and I hope it happens. It will,” says an enthused Sendak, standing up, forgetting his cane, “give me a new lease on life.”