Q&A; : Music for Our Time : John Corigliano finds a widespread audience drawn to his First Symphony, an intensely personal work written for friends lost to AIDS

John Corigliano was hardly unknown before his First Symphony, which had its premiere by the Chicago Symphony in 1990 and has since been performed by dozens of American orchestras and been a bestseller on the Erato label.

His “Pied Piper Fantasy,” a flute concerto written for James Galway and premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic 11 years ago, is one of the best known of modern American concertos. So is his Clarinet Concerto.

But both have been dwarfed by the composer’s powerful response to feelings of anger and frustration over the loss of his musician friends to AIDS that he pours into the symphony, which the Los Angeles Philharmonic will perform Thursday, Saturday and next Sunday under David Zinman.

Moreover, the 54-year-old composer, the son of a former concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, had a triumph at the Metropolitan Opera last season with his first opera, “The Ghosts of Versailles,” which will be released this year on video by Deutsche Grammophon. Corigliano was interviewed in the studio of his Manhattan apartment on Christmas Eve, under a huge Met poster for “Ghosts,” with “Sold Out” stamped across it.

Question: Your Symphony No. 1 has been so successful that I gather it has become impossible for you to physically attend every concert, as will be the case in Los Angeles, because it conflicts with performances of the work and other works of yours in Minneapolis?

Answer: I can’t get to a lot of them. I’d like to, especially because of the political aspects of the piece. I think it’s particularly important in certain areas, like Kansas City or Cincinnati, to be able to talk about AIDS awareness and education. And I think those things can be very important and that part of it is nice. And the (AIDS) quilt very often goes to these areas.

Q: So do you feel that your presence in places like the Midwest, where AIDS awareness may not be as great as it is say in Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York, can be as much for political as it is for musical reasons?

A: I think both are important and interrelated. I do like going out and speaking to people about my music, because sometimes the mystery of abstract music is such that people don’t understand the process a composer goes through. They have the least association in classical music with a composer. Everyone they love is dead, and the ones who are alive usually don’t visit them. So a composer can do a lot of good speaking to an audience about the composing process and music in general.

Q: Still, the unflinching personal nature of the symphony--with its specific references to your musician friends who have died from the disease--makes it cathartic to a great many listeners whose lives have been affected by AIDS. And, moreover, doesn’t it serve as a way in for many listeners who may not yet have come to terms with the meaning of the epidemic?

A: It does. One reason is that the symphony is nonverbal and, therefore, non-threatening to people who would not go to see a play about AIDS or go to see the quilt but who go to the concert hall to hear this symphony as well as a famous soloist in the first half. Then, if they’re moved emotionally, they, perhaps, will read the program notes and understand the situation a little better, and maybe it can open the door for some people to whom the door was closed. That’s a very valuable function, but I also think that if the symphony is only listened to as an AIDS piece a lot is lost. It’s also important to listen to the architecture of the work. After all, what symphonies can do is build structures that are quite beautiful and fascinating, and that’s what I try to do with my symphony. I think that a piece has to live on more than one level.

Q: Did you have any idea, when writing it, that the symphony would have the impact it has had?

A: I had no idea. I wrote it as a personal thing. I was writing it for a friend who was dying and other friends who have died. I had no idea what was going to happen after the concert, and I didn’t even think about it, because when people are dying you don’t want to think past a certain point anyway.

Q: Did that make the composition more difficult than usual?

A: I have to be honest with you. The “Pied Piper” was just as difficult. People think that happy music is easy to write, and tortured music is difficult. That’s a romantic notion, because the actual act of composing is always extremely difficult for me. But the emotionally draining part in this had nothing to do with coming up with ideas or the building of the symphony; it had to do with dealing with someone who was dying but who was very good at avoiding it. I would talk on the phone to him and joke about life. Then I would go back to my piano, and there is the memorial piece.

Q: How do you hear the piece now?

A: It’s very strange, because I’m a working person during performances. I listen critically. Is this piece going to work? Is it doing the right things? Do the players really know what’s happening here? Those are very strong feelings and I’m afraid that they take over at concerts. I don’t like listening to my pieces in concerts, because I grew up in a very strange circumstance going to hear my father play concertos and staying in the green room and listening on the speakers. I knew which were the treacherous passages, because I had heard him practice. I would hunch over when those passages were played and only straighten up again when he made it. And now the idea of sitting in a hall and listening to someone I care about or to my own work is always difficult.

Q: But you go anyway.

A: And I’m always worried. I heard the “Pied Piper” premiere in the bathroom of Jimmy Galway’s dressing room, sitting on the toilet seat with a little speaker playing the piece. Not only didn’t I have the nerve to go out into the hall, I couldn’t even go out into the dressing room to hear it. I just stayed in that little bathroom until I heard the last notes and then went out on the stage and took a bow.

Q: Yet the amazing successes of the symphony and of your opera, “The Ghosts of Versailles,” have made you a much more public figure than ever before.

A: I frankly don’t enjoy that aspect of it. Because of the way I grew up, the public thing has always upset me. People said how much I should have enjoyed “Ghosts.” But, my God, if you knew what I was like during each one of those performances. What a wreck I was! I didn’t enjoy a single second of it until afterward. Then I enjoyed the fact that I got it done and it went OK. So if anything, the success has made me want to become isolated a little bit more from things. I go out to my country place, and I just try to get myself in order, and my friends and relationships.

Q: But won’t those experiences at least make it easier to confront a second opera and symphony?

A: No. I want to direct my imagination inward and not deal with huge things. I just finished a 17-minute fantasy for cello and piano based upon “The Ghosts of Versailles,” which Yo Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax will premiere at the Library of Congress in May. And I’m now working on a guitar concerto for Sharon Isbin and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, which will be performed in October. And after that I want to write more chamber pieces. With opera and the symphony, I’ve gone as far as I want to go, maybe forever, but certainly for now.