Capturing the Soul of the ‘Body’

Eight years before Margaret Mitchell’s novel “Gone With the Wind” swept the country, Stephen Vincent Benet’s 1928 novel-long poem, “John Brown’s Body,” was America’s favorite Civil War tale.

The ballad-poem, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, remained a staple of high school education well into the 1950s. But unlike “GWTW,” which spawned a Hollywood movie, as well as Alice Randall’s recent bitterly contested unauthorized parody, “The Wind Done Gone,” Benet’s work--377 pages in the original edition--has largely been forgotten.

Now composer Kevin Puts revives it in a new short form--a 14-minute work for narrator and orchestra, commissioned by the Pacific Symphony, which plays the premiere Wednesday at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine.

Randy Johnson, a former symphony board chairman who with his family funded the work, will be the narrator.

“ ‘John Brown’s Body’ is arguably America’s only epic poem,” Johnson said recently. “I first read it in high school and I’ve read it every 10 or so years since then. I like it every time. It’s wonderful poetry that really speaks to people.

“It doesn’t take sides. It starts out with a captain and a mate on a slaving ship bringing slaves to America. It’s not a justification for [slavery]. There’s nothing uplifting about that part of it at all. It’s terrible and depressing. It’s not patronizing at all.”

Puts is an assistant professor of composition at the University of Texas at Austin who recently won the prestigious two-year Prix de Rome as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. For this composition, he worked from an abridged version of the poem, which was directed as a stage drama in 1953 by Charles Laughton.

When it first opened, New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson called the production--which starred Judith Anderson, Raymond Massey and Tyrone Power--a “brooding beauty of a literary masterpiece.”

“It was pretty daunting at first,” Puts, 29, said in a recent phone interview from Austin. “I struggled for a long time about how to deal with this text. I decided the best thing would be to introduce the main characters and some of their conflicts.”

The characters he focused on are Jack Ellyat, a Connecticut Yankee; Clay Wingate, the son of a Georgia plantation-owning family; Abraham Lincoln; and the abolitionist martyr and warrior John Brown.

“I just went from one character to the next, trying to write a different kind of music for each. I didn’t use any period music. But it’s reminiscent of that. It’s not going to sound unfamiliar.”

As models for a work for narrator and orchestra, the composer kept in mind Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” and Joseph Schwantner’s “New Morning for the World (Daybreak of Freedom),” with text based on speeches by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“The music is treated as background music for the narrator,” the composer said. “There’s not any real kind of coincidence that he has to make happen. He’s given a cue by the conductor at various places.”

Puts felt a connection to the material. He was born in Missouri, not only a Civil War battleground state but also the state that gave rise to the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision that slave Dred Scott was “merely property.”

“I’ve always been interested in that period, especially in Lincoln as a historical figure,” Puts said. “I’ve always been emotional about equal rights. From that perspective, I was very connected to it. The most emotion in the piece is centered around John Brown and the plight of the slaves.”

Puts grew up in Alma, Mich., where he lived until he went to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., to study piano and composition. “I was obsessed with learning all the big concertos,” he said. “But I had some success with composing. I won some grants and awards. I got more into the idea of the unknown, not knowing what I will be writing from one month to the next. I love the phenomenon of calculating the orchestration and everything. I could continue doing it all my life.”

He begins the process of composing by improvising at the keyboard until “I have enough in my head to piece things together, to put together a musical narrative that makes sense.”

“But I don’t literally translate piano ideas to an orchestra. I tell my students if you do compose at the piano, there has to be some balance between that and hearing things for orchestra. You can’t stick too closely to the piano.”

Lately, Puts’ style has changed and become more varied.

“A few years ago I was interested in a post-Minimalist way of putting together ideas,” he said. “But in the past few years, I’ve been thinking about telling a story musically, which is sort of an old-fashioned idea, though it’s not strictly program music.

“Actually, I don’t really have any bias about what kind of style I project. This piece is very accessible. In other works, I write in a more challenging style. But I don’t think I’ve written one piece that ends tragically. I’m an optimistic person.”

* “John Brown’s Body,” Pacific Symphony, Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, 8808 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. Wednesday, 8 p.m. $18 to $67. (714) 755-5799 or (949) 855-8096.