Hailing from St. Louis, Kevin Puts has become one of today’s most prolific and widely performed American composers. His oeuvre encompasses a wide variety of pieces, with a special emphasis on large-scale orchestral works, including four symphonies and numerous concertos for solo instruments and orchestra. He has also composed four operas, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Silent Night and The Hours, which was premiered in a concert version by The Philadelphia Orchestra earlier this year and has its world-premiere production at the Metropolitan Opera later this month.
His Living Frescoes is a musical meditation on Going Forth by Day, a work by video artist Bill Viola that was seen in Berlin and New York in 2002 and that was billed as “an epic, five-part projection-based installation that addresses the complexity of human existence and explores cycles of birth, death, and rebirth.” Consisting of five continuously looping videos projected onto the walls of a darkened room, it was inspired by Giotto’s famed 14th-century frescoes which adorn the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Each of the five main movements of Living Frescoes corresponds to one of the artist’s projections. These musical panels are interspersed with what the composer calls “a rather ghostly, transitional music” whose title, “Going Forth,” references the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, “a guide for the soul once it is freed from the darkness of the body to finally go forth by the light of day.”
Just as Viola’s installation explored “temporal stretching and the slowing of sensory experience,” so Puts’s chamber piece is on one level about the passage of time. Indeed, Living Frescoes specifically evokes Messiaen’s quasi-mystical Quartet for the End of Time, both in its unusual scoring (piano trio plus clarinet) and in its aural images of timeless eternity. On another level, Puts plays with the contrasting modes of storytelling represented by his visual antecedents. Whereas Giotto’s fresco cycle depicts the lives of Christ and the Virgin in a linear progression, Viola’s looping videos mirror the eternal cycles of nature and human existence. The tension between these two modes of musical narrative is intrinsic to Living Frescoes. Like Going Forth by Day, Puts’s music immerses the listener in a sensory environment in which time often seems to be suspended. Yet this sense of timelessness is contradicted by the “ghostly” Prelude and Interludes that punctuate the score; these function, the composer tells us, much like the recurring “Promenade” in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. In that light, Puts’s cycle of “living frescoes” can be understood as a meditation on how we experience both art and life itself.
Written in 2012, on the heels of Silent Night, Living Frescoes combines a forward-moving narrative structure with static, repetitive music characteristic of minimalism. Although today’s abridged performance omits two important segments of the story—“The Deluge” and “The Voyage,” as well as one of the Interludes—there is no lack of musical drama as we make our way through Puts’s equivalent of Viola’s architectural space. The restless rhythms and wide-open, Coplandesque harmonies of the Prelude are violently interrupted by “Fire Birth,” a seething, cacophonous maelstrom that features elemental imagery of flames and water. A languorous Interlude, marked “nostalgically,” leads to the jaunty rhythmic ostinatos and happy-go-lucky melodies of “The Path.” (Viola’s video showed a steady stream of people in profile walking through a sunlit forest.) After another brief Interlude, the luminously lyrical finale, “First Light,” culminates in a musical depiction of Viola’s Christlike figure emerging from the flood waters and ascending to heaven.
Although Puts was clearly sensitive to the multivalent resonances of Going Forth by Day, he cautions that Living Frescoes is more than incidental music. “While in many ways my musical ‘take’ on the five projections closely mirrors the expressive intent Viola likely had in mind, I often find my own meanings. For example, I saw ‘The Path’ simply as ‘the journey of life,’ which may not reflect Viola’s intent. In general, the demands of a piece of music, in which the audience must remain bound to their seats from beginning to end, differ from those of an art installation, in which one can move at one’s own pace from image to image. Rather than attempt to write music that exactly corresponded to the narrative of the projection, I let the music go where it needed to and, in the broadest sense, tell a story of its own.”
—Harry Haskell
Kevin Puts’s new opera, The Hours, is about three women in different times and places—and the spaces between them that both separate and connect them. It is based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Michael Cunningham and the Academy Award–winning film adaptation that followed. Both the book and the film make heavy reference to an earlier novel, Virginia Woolf’s 1925 Mrs. Dalloway, which forms a sort of parallel background narrative: During the course of the opera, Woolf is writing the novel, while the 1949 housewife Laura Brown is reading it and editor Clarissa Vaughan is seemingly reenacting its plot, albeit in late–20th-century Manhattan.
In adapting Cunningham’s novel, Puts sought to follow the shifting perspectives between the heroines while maintaining their separate dimensions—an ambition that can be uniquely accomplished with the tools of opera. The music for and around each of the heroines has a distinct tonal style: a stripped-down quality for Woolf, with harmonic shifts mirroring her fraught mental instability; an appropriately “light-pop” sensibility for the oppressive suburban conformity surrounding Laura; and a rich, colorful soundscape for Clarissa that evokes the vibrancy of urban New York City and alludes to contemporary film and Broadway composers. Initially, these worlds exist as separate musical entities, but over the course of the opera, they transcend the boundaries of time and space and increasingly overlap, culminating in a climactic trio for the three women that is the summary of their diversities and commonalities.
For today’s performance, Puts has created a new piece using material from three of Woolf’s early scenes in the opera. Initially, she muses on her husband, Leonard, who ran his own publishing company, Hogarth Press, from their home and who moved them out of the city in hopes that the quiet of Richmond would aid Virginia’s already precarious mental health. The middle section sees Woolf pining for the hustle and bustle of urban London—in contrast to the oppressive stillness of her new surroundings—before she ultimately meditates on the new novel that she is writing, Mrs. Dalloway, culminating with her settling on the book’s opening line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
Igor Stravinsky’s long and storied career took him from the drawing rooms of czarist St. Petersburg to the tinsel-town sound studios of Los Angeles. It was as a feisty Russian nationalist that he rocketed to international fame on the eve of World War I with a trio of colorful folkloric ballets—The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring—written for Sergei Diaghilev’s trendy Ballets Russes. The expatriate Parisian Stravinsky of the 1920s and 1930s cut a more cosmopolitan figure, characterized by such coolly neoclassical masterpieces as the ballet Apollo and the Violin Concerto in D Major. After emigrating to the United States in 1939, the protean master reinvented himself once again in works like the Hogarth-inspired opera The Rake’s Progress and the spikily serial Movements for piano and orchestra.
The original inspiration for L’histoire du soldat (A Soldier’s Tale) was money—or, to be precise, the lack of it. Both Stravinsky and his writer friend Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, who had previously produced the French texts for Stravinsky’s “histoire burlesque” Renard and the ballet Les noces, found themselves cut off from their usual sources of income in Switzerland during World War I. In early 1918, the two men hatched the idea of collaborating on a small-scale music-theater piece that, as Ramuz wrote, could be “mounted without trouble anywhere, even in the open air.” Based on a Russian legend about a soldier violinist who makes a pact with the devil and wins the hand of the king’s daughter, only to lose his soul, L’histoire du soldat is economical both in its musical means and in its performing forces: a handful of actors and dancers and a seven-piece chamber ensemble (clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, percussion, violin, and double bass).
The premiere in Lausanne on September 28, 1918, conducted by Ernest Ansermet, was an artistic success. “I have never since seen a performance that has satisfied me to the same degree,” Stravinsky wrote years later. As a money-making venture, however, the piece flopped when the Spanish flu pandemic that swept across Europe that fall forced the creators to abandon plans to take their show on the road. Fortunately, Stravinsky had a backup plan: The suite-like score was intentionally designed to be independent of the libretto (all of Ramuz’s text is spoken rather than sung) and had a profitable second life in the concert hall in arrangements for two different instrumental ensembles.
The score displays the hallmarks of Stravinsky’s eclectic and restlessly inventive genius as he made the transition from the opulent symphonic sound world of his prewar Russian ballets to the lean and transparent neoclassicism of the postwar period. The angular gestures, tangy dissonances, and shape-shifting, jazz-inflected rhythmic patterns, set against a throbbing ostinato beat, are as bracing today as they must have been to listeners in 1918. Echoes of the raucous street-band music that Stravinsky heard in Spain during the war permeate the score, from the jaunty, mock-militaristic Marche du soldat (Soldier’s March) to the more refined, pasodoble-like strains of the Marche royale (Royal March). A dulcet-toned, slightly spooky pastorale and a pair of unconventionally harmonized chorales contribute to the general atmosphere of genteel grotesquerie. Stravinsky’s budding interest in African American popular music is reflected in the pièce de résistance, a brilliant and slightly tipsy-sounding medley of popular dances of the day: tango, waltz, and ragtime.
—Harry Haskell