Green Light for an American Dream

Right up to her death in 1986, Scottie Fitzgerald was pestered by people wanting the rights to make adaptations of her father’s novel “The Great Gatsby.”

Never mind that a play and silent movie (since lost) were produced soon after the book’s 1925 publication, then films in 1949 (with Alan Ladd) and 1974 (with Robert Redford), most all of questionable merit. Or that two TV Gatsbys (Robert Montgomery and Robert Ryan) quickly faded from memory. Or that an all-female troupe in Japan took a stab at a musical version.

Someone was always pleading with the daughter of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald for one more crack at the mysterious Jazz Age millionaire who throws parties that draw “sparkling hundreds” to his Long Island mansion, but whose eyes are fixed on a green light at the end of the dock across the bay, at the Old Money estate of a flame from his past, Daisy Buchanan.

“A lot of people wanted to do Broadway musicals, a lot wanted new movie options,” recalled Matthew J. Bruccoli, the Fitzgerald scholar who for years served as Scottie’s advisor. “Once when we were dining in a French restaurant in New York, our waiter was trying to get movie rights.”

What he didn’t understand was this: Why was no one knocking at the door asking to do a Gatsby opera?

“If any story provides material for an opera, it’s ‘The Great Gatsby,’ ” reasoned Bruccoli, now 69 and still teaching the book at the University of South Carolina, “because it deals with love and betrayal.”

John Harbison had the same thought.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based composer was convinced back in the early ‘80s. He just never got by the agent who screened requests for Scottie Fitzgerald and Bruccoli. Of course, this was before he had won his Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Foundation grant.

Harbison was well-known in classical music circles, sure, having turned out a symphony and an opera (based on Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale”) and numerous choral works inspired by poems (Blake, Yeats, you name it). But he still puttered about in a VW Rabbit and lamented, like other mainstays of new music, “there isn’t a big demand for what we do.”

By 1985, Harbison had given up on getting rights to do a “Gatsby” opera. He put his inspiration into a 6-minute, 17-second piece for the Atlanta Symphony, “Remembering Gatsby”--which didn’t require any rights--and went on to his gigs as resident composer for orchestras from Pittsburgh to L.A.

Zoom ahead to 1992, and New York. No less than the Metropolitan Opera was looking for ways to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its music director, James Levine. The Met was going to throw some sort of gala--what’s grand opera without galas? But the maestro was on a mission to introduce more 20th century opera into the repertory. What he’d like, he said, was to commission one by a composer “whose music speaks to me particularly strongly.”

Guess who?

Levine recalls: “I said, ‘Is there something you’d like to do?’ ”

“He said, ‘As a matter of fact. . . .’ ”

And that set the stage for this coming Monday night’s premiere of “The Great Gatsby,” music and libretto by John Harbison, an event billed as the highlight of the Met’s 1999-2000 season, with seven more performances to come, and a live radio broadcast on Jan. 1, the Met’s New Year’s gift to the world.

*

“I grew up,” Harbison explains, “in what was still sort of Fitzgerald’s Princeton.”

He was the 14-year-old son of a history professor, to be exact, when he began earning money on weekends playing jazz piano in the social clubs of the Ivy League campus in New Jersey--the same clubs his great-uncle had graced with F. Scott Fitzgerald as undergraduates at the onset of WWI. Even in the 1950s, when Harbison was coming of age, he sensed an Old South spirit, a blend of party mentality and old-boy arrogance. “The clubs were an experience,” he says, “I didn’t like.”

When it was time for him to go to college, he took his viola to Harvard.

He was recalling this over dinner last month in the Plaza Hotel off Central Park, another age-old haunt of the moneyed crowd--where a pivotal scene in “Gatsby” is set. On a sweltering afternoon, Gatsby faces off with Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, the ex-Yale football star who frets that civilization, as he knows it, is going to pieces.

The Palm Court restaurant still serves afternoon tea and has a roving violinist at dinner, now playing “Strangers in the Night.”

Harbison is in an open-neck black sport shirt, a black T-shirt peeking through. For all he’s accomplished, there’s an air of becoming about him--he has perhaps the most boyish smile on the planet. Gray hair or not, it’s hard to believe he’ll turn 61 opening night.

That is weeks off, though, and he’s still unnerved by not being allowed in the stage entrance of the Met for rehearsals.

“Are you a singer?” the guard asked.

“No.”

“In the orchestra?”

“No.”

“Production staff?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t get in.”

He sneaked in another door. “They hadn’t seen a live composer,” he deadpans, “in some time.”

“Gatsby” explores a range of themes, from human yearning for the unattainable to the American capacity for self-invention. It’s also social history, however, and that’s where we start--pondering Fitzgerald’s distinction between the rich and everyone else, and within the ranks of the rich.

Harbison sees Fitzgerald as being of two minds about the Old Money wing. When Fitzgerald’s drinking embarrassed everyone, he’d worry that he’d lost ground with that set. In his book, meanwhile, the characters who buy into the notion that they can move up in class--Gatsby and Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s mistress--wind up dead. And narrator Nick Carraway flees back to the Midwest, something Fitzgerald--originally from St. Paul--could never quite do.

Harbison is intrigued with the heartland as refuge--he goes each summer with his wife Rose Mary, a violinist, to compose and stage a music festival at their farmhouse outside Madison, Wis. But some things have changed since Fitzgerald’s time, Harbison agrees, like the standing of the Old Money folk who scoffed at Gatsby. “Oh yeah, the world’s passed them by,” he says. “Old Money by modern standards is not enough to intimidate anybody.”

Gatsbys abound, however. Harbison started the project in the junk-bond era, the “S&L; years,” struck by “this overheated quality of people getting rich without knowing what it was based on.”

More recently, as a professor at MIT, where he’s taught music since 1969, he’s seen how graduates become software and Internet millionaires. “One of my former students told me, ‘Our stock has zoomed.’ I said, ‘Sounds great--what do you do?’ He said, ‘Well, we haven’t come up with a product yet.’ ” Harbison calls it “a Gatsby-esque moment.”

There’s certainly something today about the party scenes set around Gatsby’s marble pool and 40 acres. “You must see the faces of many people you’ve heard about,” Gatsby promises Daisy and her husband as a silent-movie actress holds court under a white plum tree, a director bending over the “scarcely human orchid of a woman.” Rumors rumble: Who is this Gatsby, really? But no one cares in the end. They’re getting bombed, gawking at one another and taking “a shortcut from nothing to nothing.”

Though it’s been 75 years, it’s a good bet Fitzgerald would feel prophetic wandering into Spago in Beverly Hills, or rap mogul Sean “Puffy” Combs’ summer party in the Hamptons--everyone in white. “Or on Martha’s Vineyard,” Harbison says, “at the Clinton fund-raiser.”

To Gatsby, at least, the trappings alone meant nothing. He was doing it all “to impress a girl.” In that sense, he was an idealist, even naive.

Harbison is drawn also to the story’s low-rent victim. Myrtle, the earthy mistress who lives above her husband’s garage, is a major character in his opera. How can she believe the polo-playing Tom will drop his wife for her? Like Gatsby, she’s dazzled by the fanciful dream, he notes, “and gets caught in the wheels.”

When the Plaza violinist hits “Memory,” from “Cats,” it’s time to quit. Harbison has to shuttle back to Boston.

He’s not yet gotten to the main reason he wanted to do the opera, which isn’t the sociology or soap opera. He’s a composer, after all.

“Musical opportunities,” he says before we exit toward Fifth Avenue. “I could see the music.”

*

A few evenings later, he walks through Harvard Yard with a couple of CDs and copies of his libretto. He’s been invited by professor Rheinhold Brinkmann to talk to a class in “20th Century Opera.” Though he was an undergraduate and graduate fellow here, and lives minutes from campus, it’s his first time back to talk about his music.

One hundred saxophonists once commissioned a piece from him (“San Antonio”) as did the Israeli Consulate of Chicago, for Israel’s 50th anniversary (“Four Psalms”). His style is an eclectic modernism, with echoes of jazz, Bach fugues and Stravinsky’s atonalism, without eschewing melody. He won the Pulitzer for his 15-minute “The Flight From Egypt” (1986), which explored the darker side of Christmas. His publisher, G. Schirmer, calls him the “master of ambiguity.”

He began “Gatsby,” he tells the class, by imagining “what certain characters sound like.” He started with Jay Gatsby, no surprise. But not the man’s heavy moments. He heard his puffing first--this son of poor North Dakota farmers, born James Gatz, expounding a semi-invented past, “educated at Oxford . . . lived like a young rajah. . . .”

The overture came next, so Harbison pops in a CD. Now comes the heavy moment--one student later compared it to Wagner’s opening in “Tristan and Isolde.” This is Gatsby’s yearning, Harbison says. “I thought of it as Gatsby looking over the bay.”

But the music changes quickly into . . . a fox trot. That sets the tone for an opera-long interplay of popular and operatic music.

It stems from how Fitzgerald’s work is itself replete with references to music of the ‘20s. In an era when radio was novel and one dance craze followed another, there’s Myrtle gyrating to the box at her hubby’s garage or the party bands playing rumbas or some Broadway type crooning through a megaphone.

Harbison wrote 13 Roaring ‘20s-style tunes, some that would only be heard briefly through the radio, played by a band backstage, unseen by the audience. He got Murray Horwitz (co-creator of “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ”) to do pop lyrics without parodying what the ‘20s thought was “with it.” You can imagine their tunes as hits back then--or packaged into their own CD today.

In the opera, the tunes--”the popular idiom”--are the fast-paced surface of things. The “serious” music--there are plenty of arias--is the interior, what’s going on inside Gatsby, Daisy and the rest. The tension between them is one of the most significant artistic statements of the work, but Harbison worries that some listeners may latch onto the period melodies and not equally engage the rest of the music.

After he plays an Act 2 party scene that has three things going at once, including the famous episode in which Gatsby flings his rainbow of shirts before a crying Daisy, the class breaks into applause. Then questions--and a reminder why it’s risky to adapt a work that is required reading in schools.

Amid the musical queries (why did he make both Gatsby and Tom tenors?), a young woman asks, “Did Daisy really say . . . ?”

Harbison has to explain that, no, she didn’t--in the book. He had to fill in a lot because Fitzgerald left much to the imagination. He never lets us witness the reunion between Gatsby and Daisy, for instance--the narrator, Nick, sets it up and leaves. In writing an opera, Harbison could not pass up the chance to spell out what happens between old lovers, to let the voices come together.

Monday night, many in the audience will scrutinize how he imagined it, just as they will scrutinize whether tenor Jerry Hadley looks like the Gatsby they envision, or soprano Dawn Upshaw the Daisy, or Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, the salty Myrtle.

They will scrutinize, too, how he’s handled the final moment, when Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick, utters the line now etched on Fitzgerald’s grave: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Harbison does not use Nick as a narrator--that would be too static--but preserves that line word for word. Nick’s voice is secondary, though, at a time Harbison hopes all eyes are on a light--the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. His musical theme for Gatsby’s yearning is played by a lone oboe, while the rest of the orchestra, led by the violins, suggests the tide beating us back. Harbison calls it the “very Wagnerian way . . . the domination of the orchestra carrying the argument . . . because it’s what it’s about--the words are about giving over to something.”

“It’s a risky thing,” he says. “Some of those words are almost too famous.”

But most risky of all, perhaps, is how many in the Met audience will scrutinize how “Gatsby” holds up against, oh, “Aida.” Everyone involved in modern opera cautions against this, but it happens.

One popular music course at Harvard is “First Nights,” looking at how great works were initially received--not always well. The professor for that class, Thomas Forrest Kelly, recalls how people a century ago went to operas as we go to movies today, “looking for something new” and not putting too much pressure on the occasion.

“Now the opera houses are sort of museum showcases of treasures of the past,” he says. “The standard modern audience prefers to go to an opera it knows. But this ‘Gatsby’ will be a more authentic opera experience than a performance of ‘La Boheme,’ even though an audience may be a little nervous”--because it’s new--”whereas a Verdi audience would be going in excitement.”

As if Harbison needed a reminder of what he faces, the professor leading this evening’s class, Brinkmann, brings up some basics about “Gatsby’s” run.

“Is it sold out?” he asks.

“No, it’s not,’ Harbison says. “Plenty of cheap seats there.”

*

Three days later, he is back in New York for the stretch run. Wednesday before last was the first full stage rehearsal, the first chance for the orchestra and singers to run through “Gatsby” together while scenery and lighting people checked to see how close they were to being ready. At Harbison’s urging, they’ve re-created Gatsby’s world through impressionistic, dreamlike touches--billowing curtains in Daisy’s mansion, or a single car on a hoist in the Wilson garage--instead of the imposing sets favored by old-time operas.

The composer sits 20 rows back, going through his score on a lighted music stand. During breaks, he jumps up to consult Levine or director Mark Lamos, who worked on Harbison’s “Winter’s Tale” 20 years ago in San Francisco. Lamos also directed the recent “Central Park” trilogy at the New York City Opera and believes “it’s a wonderful moment” for the art form. “All of a sudden you don’t feel shut out. It’s not such an elitist game.”

But after four hours and two rehearsals of the first act, Harbison puts on his leather jacket and fretfully heads across Broadway for a cup of coffee, joined by Horwitz, the lyric writer. Harbison says, “A lot of stuff isn’t working.”

Where to start? Well, when Myrtle turned on the radio at the garage, you could barely hear what the band was playing backstage.

In another scene, the orchestra drowned out Daisy’s friend, Jordan Baker, the society golfer (sung by Susan Graham), when she began reading from the Saturday Evening Post--text that Harbison drew from one of Fitzgerald’s own stories.

Harbison wonders if he should thin out the orchestration. “This is the hardest part,” he says. “Figuring out what’s my mistake and what will correct itself naturally.”

He already has had to write 18 pages of new music to extend an interlude because the crew needed time to shift the action from Daisy’s living room to Myrtle’s garage. And Tom and Daisy’s little girl is no longer 2 years old. How could you count on a child that age to make an entrance? She is 4 now, “Which means you can use a girl who’s really 8,” Harbison notes.

In other words: Changes had been made, others would soon be, still others were contemplated. Thankfully, the next day was set aside for Act 2, and two days more for any scenes needing attention. Then the piano rehearsal, dress rehearsal, general rehearsal and final dress.

Horwitz has one piece of good news: The maestro commented on how real the popular songs sounded. Levine predicted, he says, that “some little old lady from Keokuk, Iowa, will write in to say, ‘I haven’t heard that in 40 years. We danced to it at our wedding!’ ”

Harbison laughs, finishes his coffee and hurries off for a meeting at the Juilliard School. “We’re not there yet,” he says.

*

An hour after rehearsal, Levine is relaxing in his office, a trademark towel--this one lime-green--draped over his shoulder.

“It is daunting to do justice to a new opera,” the frizzy-haired conductor says. “But this is the best new opera score I’ve seen in years.”

He continues, as if confiding a conspiracy, “Let me tell you something--I’ve already asked John for another opera. The first day we were together in the rehearsal period, I said, ‘This may sound strange, but before there’s any hoo-ha, before there’s anybody’s opinion, pro or con, I want you to know--I want another opera from you, if you can give me one.’ ”

If? Was he kidding?

The only question is what Harbison wants to tackle next. Levine swears they didn’t get into specifics. They had been rushed. He had a meeting.

Levine asks now, “He talks about subjects?”

How about Marilyn? As in Monroe.

If anyone thought Harbison’s experience with Gatsby would scare him away from characters who are icons, and who have been tackled by others . . . well, he’s been thinking of “Lolita,” too. But he keeps coming back to Marilyn.

He explained it the evening of his Harvard class, back at his house, late, over cognac. He recalled visiting the Brentwood home where Monroe died while he worked with the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1985 to 1987, just after completing his first Gatsby piece.

Think of it: Arthur Miller as a character. Joe DiMaggio. The three Kennedys.

And costumes. That dress they had to sew on her for JFK’s birthday in Madison Square Garden.

That scene did prompt a worry, though. Harbison launched into an explanation of how many songs you’d swear must be in public domain are still covered--like “Gatsby”--by copyrights. Even a certain ditty that two Louisville kindergarten teachers wrote in 1893.

So he could plot out his Marilyn opera all he wanted. “I don’t know if we could afford the rights,” he said, “to ‘Happy Birthday.’ ” *