For Eisner’s Kingdom, a New World

Music experts told him he was imagining things, but Michael Eisner swore he’d read it somewhere--right in the concert program, perhaps, that Mahler had composed his lavish “Symphony of a Thousand” to celebrate the end of the last century, “commissioned by an Austrian duke.”

The Walt Disney Company chief executive couldn’t believe it when even the Mahler Society told him that the symphony had nothing to do with the year 1900. For this was how Eisner’s own millennium brainstorm had come about: listening to Mahler’s piece in Carnegie Hall four years ago, dragged there by his wife, and letting his mind wander to the question he asked himself everywhere he went: How can I turn this into something for the company?

It was no different, really, than when he went to a hockey game and, bingo, Why don’t we do a hockey movie? The Mighty Ducks!

Except here he was at Carnegie Hall, noticing Robert Shaw’s impassioned conducting and “all those voices, the horns, the concluding brass finale, the three endings, the spectacle. . . . “

He thought, “This symphony is totally a Disney-type production.”

Thus did Eisner set in motion Disney’s “Millennium Symphonies,” commissioning works from two acclaimed contemporary composers--Michael Torke and Aaron Jay Kernis--that will have their premieres this evening, at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, performed by the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur.

Disney Goes High Society

What the audience will hear is the result of an old-time concept--arts patronage--brought into the modern world of consumer-conscious media giants, companies that believe that any well-conceived product should be able to find an audience, and make a few bucks. Or as Hollywood might put it, Michael Eisner meets the Medicis.

So it was that the highbrow realm of classical music was given a few Disney-style “suggestions”: Art should provoke, sure, but perhaps these symphonies did not have to be totally anti-establishment, or atonal, or so intellectual you don’t know what’s going on. “I tried to convince everybody,” Eisner said later, “that it wasn’t a crime to have a melody.”

It might not be a crime, either, to have a story. In fact, Eisner wrote one himself, pounded it out on his laptop on a cross-country plane trip, 20 pages of plot. Then he had Disney artists turn the document into storyboards--30 feet of storyboards--you’d do with a movie.

Eisner’s story followed one family through the last 50 years of world history. He started with the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.

“I wanted,” he confessed, “a big opening.”

This is--understand--a Fortune 500 CEO who once earned $565 million in a day cashing in his stock options. He is plenty smart enough, in other words, to understand how all this sounds: comparing the genesis of a symphony to making “The Mighty Ducks”; pleading for a melody like some musical troglodyte; having Disney artists sketch the story like it was “The Little Mermaid”; and proposing to start with the atom bomb because “I didn’t want to sit there for an hour waiting for something to happen.”

He stood to look like that moron in “Amadeus,” the emperor who witnessed Mozart’s genius and muttered, “Too many notes.”

Then again. . . .

Disney was paying big dollars to have its name on those symphonies. If Disney didn’t know something about pleasing the customer, who did? Most contemporary classical music wasn’t exactly knocking ‘em dead, now was it?

And even if Eisner’s story proved “sophomoric” (his word), and if his own musical experience was humble (he played the glockenspiel in grade school), he felt comfort in the fact that he was not exactly the key creative force here. Indeed, his company was entering uncharted waters. “We have a movie department, television department, parks department,” he noted. “We don’t have a classical music division.”

He could guess what would happen when his storyboards were passed to the people who had to make the symphonies a reality, two young composers and, eventually, a world-renowned conductor.

They will probably go off “and ignore most of all of that,” Eisner figured, “and just do what they do.”

*

“I’m glad he said that,” Michael Torke remarked, “because that’s the truth.”

Two weeks before the premieres, the 38-year-old composer, dressed in his favored black, carried a shopping bag holding the score for his 65-minute symphony, “Four Seasons,” marked “Commissioned for the Third Millennium Celebration by Disney Enterprises.”

Torke was in Aspen three summers ago, conducting, when the London office of his music publisher faxed him that an unlikely suitor was interested in some sort of work from him. “Please call.”

Torke had been getting commissions from the time he was a composition student at Yale. He had written for the New York City Ballet, the 10-minute “Javelin” for the Atlanta Symphony and the 1996 Olympics, and “Brick Symphony” for the San Francisco Symphony. But those were arts organizations, not a Disney. One of his first thoughts was--why not?--”deep pockets.”

Before he knew it, he was lunching at New York’s elegant Aquavit restaurant with the man Eisner had assigned to supervise the project, Jean-Luc Choplin. If Torke feared he would be dealing with “some purely bureaucratic executive”--well, forget it. Choplin had been managing director of the Paris Opera Ballet, and worked with such legends as Rudolf Nureyev and composer John Cage. He’d been lured to Disney in 1989 to oversee entertainment at the EuroDisney park in Paris and now was a vice president for creative projects.

For this one, Choplin listened to 127 composers to come up with four finalists. “We had a little jury,” he informed Torke. “Eisner’s given his OK, you’re the guy.”

Soon after that, Aaron Kernis--later to win the Pulitzer Prize for music--would be asked to write a second work for the evening.

The project then was “this big jiggly thing,” Torke realized--the only aspect seemingly set in stone was Disney’s determination to use a children’s choir somewhere. “It was very seductive,” the composer said. “They have the resources to make this as big as they want.”

Then a dose of reality: It took 15 months to negotiate a contract. Unlike arts outfits, Disney wanted to own the copyright to the symphonies and control who performed them. Never mind that a symphony rarely is a big moneymaker--this is how they did it with movies.

They finally agreed to share ownership, and Torke did enjoy one thing about the negotiating. “The longer it took, the more the ante”--his fee--”was upped.”

No Fan of the Current ‘Dark Ages’

It was understandable why Disney wanted him. Torke sympathizes with critics who see the 20th century as a “dark ages” for classical music, its difficult abstraction having “lost our audience.” He does not apologize for having melodies in his highly rhythmic works.

Torke wondered, however, if Disney understood something else about his music--he did not write it based on stories. If you said, “Picture an old woman who’s really sad because her mother died--write music for that,” he couldn’t do it.

“To me,” he said, “there’s like some kind of energy inside and it comes out through music, and I just splatter the notes on the page.” Although those notes often captured the desired emotion, he viewed his music as “really just vibrations in the air.”

Torke recalls that Eisner’s treatment was described at the lunch as a “friendly” suggestion. “Don’t overreact,” Choplin implored.

“What Jean-Luc said was, ‘You are the creativity. We’ll supply the frame. What Disney’s good at is telling a story.”

Torke had qualms. Reassurances aside, the Disney people talked about Eisner in hushed tones. But this was the kicker: Torke was dying to do musical storytelling. He was about to embark on a high-profile commission for the New York City Opera--writing one portion of its upcoming “Central Park” trilogy--and hoped eventually to write for Broadway and film.

The Disney job carried pressure, then. “Good pressure,” Torke insisted.

He had this fantasy--that he would create something catchy. “There was part of me that thought, ‘Wow, what if I could get a 32-bar phrase that really acted like a pop song and everyone got really excited about it. Think where that could go. But it didn’t work. When I was thinking that way, not a thought came to my head.”

Then he had an epiphany: They hired him because they liked his work. “Get back to what you do.”

But what to do about Eisner’s story?

“I felt strongly,” he said, “that I didn’t want a Life magazine pictorial. ‘1963! Kennedy Assassinated!’ That’s the last thing we need, to docudrama everything the media has distilled, which I don’t think is really our history.”

Though he agreed his piece would look back--while Kernis’ would point to the future--he decided to compress the time frame to one year, then break that into seasons, and those into months. Choplin and Philip Littell, the librettist brought in, found a way to tell a story--actually 12 of them--within that structure.

“Jean-Luc felt we could find stories of individual people and create poetry on that,” Torke said.

Here, the sprawl of Disney was a bonanza. Littell “ferreted about” in the archives of its subsidiary, ABC.

Eisner had a long section on the Korean War, which was fought while he grew up in the early ‘50s. Littell found a veteran’s account that inspired images chilling in more ways than one: “This war’s very different/so cold that no one bleeds to death/the blood it freezes/nothing’s moving on the ground. . . . “

Hardly stereotypical Disney, this became the first verbalized image of Torke’s work.

The next “month” was drawn from Levittown on Long Island, which set the trend of conformist suburbia. A man coming home from a party couldn’t find his own house--they all looked the same. Torke used the man’s plaintive call, “Show me my way home,” as the cry of a people losing their way after World War II.

He came up with his finale in Los Angeles last January. Disney officials had asked to hear the work in progress, as they might review a movie’s daily rushes.

Sitting at a piano with Choplin, Torke disclosed that he was toying with a familiar schoolyard taunt, “Na na na na na na.” Kids in France, Choplin told him, used the same ditty.

“Jean-Luc said, ‘That’s it!’ ” Torke recalled. “He danced around the room, ‘That’s it!’ ”

The last 31 pages of the score now carry the orchestra, and children’s choir, through “na na” variations.

Before the January preview, Torke worried that Eisner or other Disney higher-ups would hear his 15-minute sample, then say “You know, that theme. . . . Maybe you should. . . .” But it didn’t happen.

“They were like, ‘Well, OK. This is better than we expected. Keep going!’ ”

It was not so easy for Aaron Kernis.

*

The score of Kernis’ “Garden of Light” was open on the desk of Kurt Masur, the musical director of the New York Philharmonic. It was the middle of last week and the maestro was on the phone, breaking some news to the 39-year-old composer. Masur had just auditioned boy singers and he wanted to change how the piece would be performed.

“I must tell you, all of them are disappointing,” Masur said into the phone, in his thick German accent. “I didn’t get them to be boys anymore. They were like trained singers.”

He said it wasn’t authentic--or even understandable--when the boys sang, “I left my home to discover the world,” a setup line at the beginning of the piece.

“I made the decision by myself,” Masur continued. “I let them tell the stories just narrating. This was very convincing. All of them went to be boys again.”

There was a pause and you knew what Kernis was thinking--”My score was written to be sung.”

“The problem is,” Masur said, getting blunter, “they want to sound beautiful and it sounds just stupid. They behave like opera singers. Maybe you find someone on the street.”

The composers had already been selected when Masur was recruited to lead the symphonies. He himself had commissioned shorter musical “messages” for the millennium from around the globe, and he sensed why Disney might want “the best orchestra in the world” to showcase its works, too.

“Eisner, especially,” Masur said, “wanted to have the kind of documentation that Walt Disney doesn’t mean only Mickey Mouse. It also means serious classical symphonic music.”

He was not being condescending. Like many in the music establishment, he admires how millions of youngsters have been introduced to classical music by Disney’s “Fantasia,” a new version of which opens over Christmas.

The deep pockets also commanded respect, and a laugh. “It’s a great decision,” he said of the symphony project, “and it’s surely not a cheap decision.”

No one will say what Disney is spending. Regardless of his orchestra’s share, Masur insisted on creative input. His initial suggestion: Shorten the program.

When first shown the works, he was pleased at how they were “very humanistic . . . absolutely clear, a message for the new millennium [and] also looking back. Both of them created very beautiful sounds. Both can compose.”

But he sensed that everyone had gotten carried away by the unlimited opportunities Disney offered. “If you have 100 people onstage, you use them,” he laughed.

“When we discovered the dimension of both compositions together, both over one hour was really . . . just too bombastic,” Masur said.

Kernis took the big hit. Choplin asked if he’d cut two movements he was considering, including a huge “dance of celebration.”

In fairness, not everything was a trial for Kernis while he was working on the commission. Last year, the slight, reddish-bearded composer was awarded the Pulitzer for his String Quartet No. 2. Like Torke, he was a former Yale hotshot who got plenty of work. He too was eager to start writing opera.

Yet his trip to Los Angeles last January could not have been fun. There was consensus “we had to change course,” Kernis said. He had written 20 minutes of music by then. He threw away 12.

He had not used Eisner’s treatment at all. His approach was to look at the concept of “home.” His arias were grim, focusing on conflicts between generations, a homeless child, a man dying of AIDS. “I wanted to reflect on the idealized version of home and then look at its breakdown,” he said. “The words unfortunately were not very convincing and the trajectory was darker and darker.”

Kernis got a new librettist, David Simpatico. They came up with a new vision.

The text would now follow a boy leaving home and encountering fire, a symbol of the promise of human discovery and its downside. If there were sparks of spiritual enlightenment, there also was the fire of intolerance.

It now fit Kernis’ view that life was an interplay of joy and pain, light and darkness. “My music,” he said, “is about the balance.”

His ending, like Torke’s, offers hope through voices of innocence--the universal reminder that children are our future. Before that, however, comes a warning about the consequences of one human discovery, atomic power.

“Hiroshima,” said Kernis, “became the last story.”

*

The stage was full Wednesday at a rehearsal at Avery Fisher Hall: orchestra to the rear, women’s choir left, men’s right, children’s center, Masur at the podium.

In the audience, Jean-Luc Choplin was exclaiming, “Fantastique! Fantastique! I am moved!”

The mini-crisis over Kernis’ work was over. Masur had given in. “I left my home to discover the world” would be sung.

It was uncertain by whom, though. Someone found a girl who sounded good. But a boy was still possible.

It was 48 hours to showtime.

They tried out a novel way to bring the kids on stage for the finale of Torke’s “Four Seasons.” Masur, the tough old German, came up with the idea, “They should come in from the back--and run down the aisles.”

So the young singers were practicing running down the aisles.

“Music and fun,” Choplin exclaimed, “at the same time!”

His boss, Michael Eisner, took the stage and congratulated the two composers and Masur.

Eisner asked the New York Philharmonic’s conductor, “Have you ever done the Mahler in here?”

None of them has any idea what will happen after the three performances here--tonight, Saturday and Tuesday. The symphonies may be picked up and played everywhere. Disney may have children’s choirs around the world sing excerpts simultaneously, New Year’s of 2001. Choplin may use portions for a Millennium Parade at Disneyland. He may lobby to make the works part of another “Fantasia.”

Or. . . .

“Or they will play these three days and be in the archives of the Walt Disney Company for someone to discover in 100 years,” Eisner said. “I don’t know.”

There will be a need for symphonies, though, when a certain long-awaited new concert hall, designed by Frank O. Gehry, finally opens in Los Angeles.

“Maybe we’ll do them in Disney Hall. I hadn’t thought of that. Or maybe we’ll do another one,” Eisner mused. “Now that we have a classical music department.”