Douglas J. Cuomo on Descent into Darkness, Departures From Schubert, and How Prince Says It
Douglas J. Cuomo has begun work on Winter's Journey, a new opera-oratorio drawing from 19th-century poet Wilhelm Müller's 24-part song cycle of same name, "Winterreisse". Müller's work met the German canon in 1837 when Franz Schubert set his words to music, authoring one of the most difficult and beloved works to enter the standard repertoire. As Doug will be the first to tell you, though, he's got different plans in mind for his first theatrical piece since 2008's Arjuna's Dilemma. Here in the first of a two-part interview, we begin to learn what's in store...
What do you think drew you to working with a piece like Winterreisse?
I always loved the Schubert piece obviously, and there's just something about that text--I'm not sure it's great poetry on its own, but the idea of setting it is something i've been intrigued with for a long time. And even though i'm not a particularly negative or depressive person, there’s something that really is drawing me to this. Because it is in fact a very depressive text in that it’s essentially a descent starting from a low point and only going lower and lower. But I've known a lot of people who've gone through this, I think everybody at times in life has gone through periods where things seem dark or are in fact pretty dark. So in some ways I think that's what's drawing me to look at this, the darker side of a person’s internal landscape. That being said, one of things that's challenging about the piece is working out how to make it something besides just one more depressing dirge following the next even more depressing dirge. So as I’m writing I'm dealing with finding lighter ways into the piece, at least some moments or flashes of lightness against all the rest.
Is your starting point the text as it's been split into poems, is it expansions on Schubert's setting of the music... how much are you drawing from each?
It'll be an evening-length pice directed with staging, and the form is the song-cycle, 24 songs, some of which probably will have no text, some of which will be very short. I'm starting with the poems in translation, sometimes setting text relatively straightforwardly from those translations, but in most cases i'm changing them to some degree, some just a little, some a lot. One of the ways that i wanted to work on this--and one of the ways I wanted it to appear or be perceived--is for the text to be relatively conversational. By changing the text at will I’m able to set it more quickly and I feel can achieve a more conversational sound that way. Having to solve problems is a great thing, but there's plenty of problems to be solved. This is a freedom I wanted to give myself.
It's also the idea of at least being able to get the first rush of it out. To use an example of music that doesn't sound anything like it, I think of Prince. Prince’s lyrics to me seem often like he's just kind of making it up, not that they don't have rhyme and structure, but there's something extremely offhand about them and really conversational. There's something about that that really appeals to me.
I also have this notebook with an ongoing list of different musical ideas, the conceit being that each song will feature a different idea. Some of these will make the cut, and others will not. For example, the idea of a sampled spoken thing looped behind the singer, or of all the accompaniment coming from a boom box on stage, or of extreme melisma. I'm then sorting out how these each feel emotionally and matching them to the various songs, trying to place everything throughout the overall emotional arc and tempo arc of the piece.
So this is another way you can sort of mix it up from the sort of descent from low to lower. You can add emotional-textural variation to it in the way you write and structure your ideas.
Yes. And at the same time there's a danger of it being extremely fragmented, 24 different songs each with a different sort of musical idea behind it. But the nice thing is when your instrumentation is so particular and so sparse, that that in itself adds a certain amount of continuity to things. There's a Kurtag piece called Kafka Fragments where the text is just sentences from Kafka here and there, and there's no attempt to make them coherent in some larger overall way. It's for just a soprano and solo violin and it's super dissonant, kind of tough sledding, but there's something about that idea, just the singer and the lone instrument, that really appealed to me, tough sledding though it is. There’s continuity built in. As far as Schubert, my plan at the moment is there will be a couple of instances where we'll be making references to Schubert music, maybe as jumping-off points for improvisation or something like that.
So it’s going to be variations on the original text and then possibly allusions to the original score, but by and large you're taking the text, modifying it, and then setting it to music that's of your own composition. Are you working with a translation, then?
I’m working with a couple different translations. Most of what i'm doing is getting sense of the pieces rather than exact words.
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My conversation with Doug continues in a week's time. Meanwhile you can visit www.douglasjcuomo.com to learn more about the composer, hear samples from his work, and make plans to attend an upcoming performance.