Dreaming Up the Lyrics for a Swan Song

The age-old question in opera is which comes first--the music or the words? In the case of Frank Ticheli’s “An American Dream,” which receives its premiere today at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, the answer is simple: the words.

Actually, the new piece is not an opera. It’s subtitled “A Symphony of Songs for Soprano and Orchestra.” Still, the principal applies.

“From the beginning, I wanted to string together a series of poems, which, in some loose way, was a song cycle, like Schubert’s ‘Winterreise,’ ” Ticheli said in a recent interview. “There’s not really a story there, but there is a story.”

The problem was finding the poems. “You name a poet, and I looked,” he said.

He didn’t find what he wanted until L.A. composer and USC colleague Stephen Hartke introduced Ticheli to playwright Philip Littell, librettist for Conrad Susa’s “The Dangerous Liaisons” (for San Francisco Opera in 1994) and Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” (to be premiered at SFO in September).

“Most composers cut their teeth on existing texts,” Littell said in a recent phone interview. “Frank said he was terrified about asking for a text he didn’t know. He knew he wanted it to be about being American and being American at a certain moment, the millennial moment.

“Apart from that, he didn’t know a lot. He wanted it to be about dreams. He was extremely honest. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I can do that.’ ”

The result is a seven-poem cycle that juxtaposes dreamlike scenes and real events, more or less following a night-to-day chronology. The work, which ends Ticheli’s seven-year stint as composer-in-residence at Pacific Symphony, took about five months, though he took two months off after the August birth of Hannah, Ticheli and wife Shari’s first child. (The work is dedicated to Hannah.)

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Littell’s first efforts, about his own childhood, proved a dead end for the composer.

“It was too much about him and his experience, and I wanted something broader,” Ticheli said.

A second installment, culled from about 30 sketches and poems, was much more interesting to Ticheli: “I loved it.”

Indeed, the second set contained five of the seven poems Ticheli used. (See accompanying story for the sixth poem.)

“One through four are the dark poems,” Ticheli said. “Then [Littell] had the light at the end. I wanted something to connect all this darkness to the light. So he wrote the fifth one, and I still wasn’t sure it connected.”

Ticheli asked for yet another poem.

“No. 6 is the last thing he submitted. He was very cautious about it. He didn’t want to do anything that would be too sentimental, and he was just very careful about it.”

Said Littell: “[Ticheli] wanted something about inner illumination, inner vision. I screamed loud and long. I don’t think of myself as a highly evolved spiritual being, and I wouldn’t dream of writing something like that. I said, ‘That’s where the music comes in.’ He was going, ‘No, I want your words to do it.’ That’s as hot as the kitchen got. So I wrote No. 6.”

Ticheli has an early morning regimen, getting up sometimes at 5 a.m. to compose. “Not me,” Littell said. “I get up, have breakfast, read a book. I sort of putter around. Around 10ish or 11, I call up the stuff I’ve done on the computer, stare at it--admire it, if the truth be told. ‘Aren’t I wonderful?’ Then I have lunch. Or nap, or take a walk. And then the engine is going. Sometimes it comes out all in one shape. Sometimes it’s a text I have to revisit and revisit. Both are fun.”

He began using a computer only recently.

“I was always wrote longhand,” he said. “I couldn’t type worth a damn. I grew up refusing all usable skills. The computer took me by surprise. I never had any money. Finally, I got one after ‘Liaisons.’ It’s friendly. It sits there and waits and hums expectantly.”

In fact, he says writing comes from that humming current.

“I believe it flows from somewhere mysterious to somewhere mysterious,” he said. “Your job is to have muscles and stay out of the flow.

“You’re perfectly allowed to think this is a phony haze, but I will tell you very clearly all of these poems wrote themselves a little bit. I didn’t direct the writing in any of them, except in No. 6, where I just cornered myself to get what Frank was looking for. Of course, he wouldn’t have gotten it if I hadn’t gotten it.”

Far from pumping up his ego with mystical connections, Littell calls his work “a knack, more than anything else.”

“I hear people articulating ideas about what is singable and what is not, whether a word is ridiculous or not,” he said. “My feeling is how you arrange the words is how you get the singing line.

“I got a very big lesson with the ‘Streetcar’ libretto. Williams writes unbelievable stuff, but it’s not singable. I had to put an invisible verse on it to put a pulse on it. It’s the art of somehow knowing so that things don’t clunk.

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“So much of what I do is a game. I have to create games for people to play. Certainly when working with a composer, with composers who are great big geniuses, they manipulate these huge multilevel crafts, [and] I have to create a toy they will play with. That’s really what this text does. First, it must either make the composer giggle or drill right down to where he gets his stuff from.

“Then, hopefully, something in combination with the music is a toy for the interpreter, who goes, ‘Oh, new! Me.’ Then having put it together, we roll this quite big toy to the audience, and the audience puts it all together in a new way. Really, that’s what I’m conscious of what I’m doing.

“The wonderful irony of this process is that Frank said, ‘I want something absolutely clear and absolutely concrete and completely understandable,’ and under his coaching we have something absolutely mysterious but completely to his taste.”

* Carl St.Clair will conduct the premiere of Frank Ticheli’s “An American Dream,” with texts by Philip Littell, today at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The concert will also include music by Barber and Tchaikovsky. Also Thursday at 8 p.m. $8-$48. (714) 556-2787.

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Excerpt from ‘An American Dream’:

See? like love the light is.

I don’t know what else it is.

Love inside me. Like a thought, around the thought, like breath . . .

But inside the breath, and, more than breath, a nourishment, like singing,

It’s like singing light is, and it is the longing to sing . . .

It’s the silence . . . it’s expecting . . . and it is a listening . . .

Just around the corner, just ahead and just behind me,

Whether I’m lost, or hiding from the light, I know the light will find me.

Here it is, my mother, close enough to kiss and kissing!

And it is the child grown up and gone away I’m always missing.

Inside me, is me, just me, busy judging and forgiving . . .

Light is laughing at me, all I am is light and . . . I am living.

--Philip Littell, sixth poem of “An American Dream”