'Reckoning' with Whitman

Three years ago playwright Alan Brody and the composer Peter Child were having a friendly dinner at the Marriott Hotel when the subject for their future collaboration introduced himself, unbidden, into their conversation -- Walt Whitman.

Both men teach at MIT; they had long admired each oterh and each other's work. Brody had heard Child's "Embers" and "Estrella" and loved his music. Child had read Brody's novels and had seen and been moved by Brody's play about Yiddish actors trying to reestablish their theatrical tradition in postwar Germany, "The Company of Angels."

Child wanted to write an opera based on Somerset Maugham's "The Moon and the Sixpence." Brody had been trying to talk Child into writing a chamber opera based on Carson McCullers' "The Member of the Wedding."

Over dinner that night three years ago, the two friends were talking about the issue of the personal integrity of the artist, how he integrates his life with his work -- a question that affected both men personally. This discussion led, inevitably, to someone mentioning Whitman. child recalls, "Right then a light bulb went off. What about Whitman?" The next time Child ran into Brody at MIT, Brody said, "I am getting excited by this Whitman idea," and so the project was launched.

Thursday night in Jordan Hall, the John Oliver Chorale presents the world premiere of "Reckoning Time: A Song of Walt Whitman," with music by Child on a libretto by Brody. The Chorale has publicised this new work as a "concert opera"; Child himself describes it as a "dramatic oratorio." Brody thinks the work is comparable to Honegger's "Joan of Arc at the Stake," which the Boston Symphony stages a few seasons back. "It has that same combination of lyric music and dialogue, but it probably could be staged in some kind of minimal way, like 'Joan of Arc.'"

Almost all of "Reckoning Time" is a flashback; it takes place in the moment between Whitman's last breath of inspiration and his last exhalation, and it evolves through dialogues between Whitmand and his lover, Peter Doyle. Whitman is a baritone; the part will be taken by James Maddalena. Doyle is a speaking part, which will be taken by Michael Ouelette.

"For Alan," Child says, "the notion that Peter Doyle should be portrayed by an actor rather than a singer was an instinctive idea that was there from the beginning. Since then we have had to formulate a rationale that we had never articulated before, but it has to do with the fact that Peter, the most loving of Walt's many youthful lovers, was a tram car driver with a very mundane world view, and with very little knowledge of Whitman's work, or appreciation for it. Having him speak embodies the fact that his two feet are on the ground.

The visionary story of "Reckoning Time" finds Walt Whitman on the beach. Three ships approach, and Whitman must decide which one to board. The first one, a freighter, is Paumanok, the ship representing his chronological life. The second, a ferry, specifically the Brooklyn Ferry, is the ship of his work. The third, a hospital ship, The Good Gray Poet, represents the Walt Whitman myth. "He can't board just one of them," Brody explains. "At the point of departure, he realizes his life, his work, his legend have not come together, and if they don't come together, he will have no validation. But then the fourth ship appears, a four-masted schooner bearing all the colors of the rainbow and carrying aboard all the poets since his death, and they take him out with his own words from 'Passage to India.' The text picks up on the transcendent visionary quality in Whitman's work, but at the same time it is always dealing with his expansive earthiness."

Brushes with Whitman
Child came to this project after a couple of earlier brushes with Whitman. He had once proposed a Whitman cantata or oratorio to John Oliver, and Oliver, in turn, had culled some Whitman texts he thought might lead to a strong AIDS piece, of the kind John Adams' "The Wound Dresser," on a Whitman text, eventually did. Whitman has of course long attracted composers, and not just because his poems are in the public domain; it's remarkable how much he has appealed to composers in Child's native England -- Vaughan Williams, for example.

"I had to put all the famous models out of my mind," Child said. "And there were important local models as well, like Charles Fussell's 'Specimen Days,' which the Cantata Singers are performing next week as well. For me, the real challenge was the sheer dimensions of this piece, the monumentality of it. Alan's original libretto was much longer than it is now, and when I began working on it, I felt like asculptor chipping away at a mountain. It was hard to feel that I was making any progress. But working together was a wonderful collaborative experience -- I am very attracted to the sensibility embodied in Alan's plays and novels. As a playwright, he has terrific craft, and he dotted every 'i' and crossed every 't.' A very important part of the process had to do with making the right cuts, of letting the music take over and participate in defining the feeling. I feel sure this will carry forward into the next work we do together."

In a way, Brody faced the same problem; it must have been intimidating to interweave his own words with those of Walt Whitman. "That was very scary," Brody admits. "But I sort of trusted Whitman to lead me. I had a sense of his voice, and that helped me through it. In the late '50s and early '60s I know Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg had helped open Whitman up to me, and all of that came back to me when I started to write." Ginsberg, in fact, makes an appearance in "Reckoning Time," beckoning Whitman onto the fourth ship.

Asked to describe his music, Child says, "The important thing for me about the music is what it attempts to do -- to embody in musical terms the sense of motion that is embodied in the libretto, to capture the affect of the moment. It is certainly my intention that the music should carry the drama, project the drama, and not get in the way of it."

'Very direct' music
John Oliver, who has been busy rehearsing the piece, says, "I find that the music is very direct. 'Reckoning Time' belongs to that genre of music which has come back to me audience. I think it is quite a good piece and it has the kind of structure that I like -- it goes on a through-line from beginning to end. Initially I was skeptical about that speaking character, but I think it's going to work out very well. There's a bit of everything in the music -- jubilance, sensuality, intimacy and the music about Whitman's work as a nurse in the Civil War is touching and chilling. Peter might disagree with me, but I even hear a little jazz in it in some places."

In a way, Oliver became an active collaborator on the piece as well. "Peter and Alan came out to Tanglewood a couple of summers ago and played the piece for me, and I made some comments and suggestions. I felt at that point that there was not enough variety in the writing for the chorus, so they added a whole scene that treats the chorus in a different way."

Now the piece is in the hands of the audience. Child says, "In a way 'Reckoning Time' is still evolving; I don't think we will understand all the possibilities until after we've experienced it in performance. The whole thing has been a tremendous learning experience for both Alan and me.

There may even have been an additional collaborator overseeing the whole project. Brody tells the story.