This week, composer Robert Manno talks about his new work, Dylan and Caitlyn, which will premiere at this year's VOX festival in May.

 

Oh yes!  I have steered away from large orchestral pieces as well as opera, simply because of the difficulty of getting them performed.  I also wanted to wait until I felt completely ready to undertake such an insane challenge!

 

However, I knew in my early thirties that eventually I just had to write an opera.  So I started researching many topics that interested me.  Among them were Hesse's Siddhartha (that's really Phillip Glass territory), Dylan Thomas's film script to The Doctor and the Devils (got quite a bit along with re-doing the script, but then realized it was just too gruesome for what I wanted to do musically), The Picture of Dorian Gray (too... well... whatever), the life of E. E. Cummings (not dramatically convincing), the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (now there's a good story to play on the stage, especially with the controversy surrounding her death), and countless other possibilities.

 

I also knew that I would not be able to compose an opera without the free time to do so (i.e. I had to leave the Met Chorus), and I knew I needed a great librettist.

 

 

As I researched the various possibilities, I kept coming back to Dylan Thomas, who -- along with Rilke and Cummings -- are my "desert island" poets.

 

But it was the re-reading of John Malcolm Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America about eight years ago which turned the switch on for me.  I had quite a few books by and about Dylan and quite a bit of Thomas memorabilia.  (I had even clipped out and saved Caitlyn Thomas' 1994 obituary from the New York Times.)  So I went down to the Strand Bookstore and bought up everything they had on Dylan (that I didn't already own) and started reading it all.

 

During 2000-2001 (my last year in the MET Chorus), I drafted a rough outline of various scenes from the opera.  From a web search, I found that there was to be a "Dylan Thomas Festival" in Swansea, Wales, in the fall of 2001, and that Dylan and Caitlyn's daughter, Aeronwy Thomas, would be attending and speaking.  I was put in touch with her by the trustees of the Thomas Estate.

Then, I sent her a commercial CD of my music, which includes a 1973 setting of "Fern Hill" for baritone and chamber ensemble, and told her about my idea for an opera about her parents.  She wrote back and agreed to meet with me at the Festival.  We talked quite a bit in Swansea in the fall of 2001, and Aeronwy was most helpful to me in putting the story of her parent's life in perspective.

 

I went home excited and drafted a scene by scene synopsis of the opera.  Then the search for a librettist began.  I tried a number of possible persons, but I was unable to come up with someone whom I felt was up to the task and willing to undertake something of this magnitude -- with no certain possibility of remuneration of any kind.  In short, I couldn't find anyone as crazy as myself to get involved in something so uncertain.

 

 

First, I should tell you how I met Gwynne Edwards.

 

By the fall of 2006, I had grown discouraged, thinking that I might never write this opera.  Through the periodic Dylan Thomas Centre email postings, I kept seeing the name "Gwynne Edwards" as having written a number of plays about Dylan and Caitlyn Thomas.  So I tracked Gwynne down online and sent him some CDs of my music along with the scene by scene opera synopsis.  He, in turn, mailed me copies of his plays.  Then, to my good fortune, he agreed to be the librettist, and between September 2006 and March 2007, we did the entire libretto by email.  Since Gwynne had the synopsis, he was able to flesh out each scene with dialogue, some of which appears in his earlier biographical plays about Dylan and Caitlyn.  Gwynne's brilliant libretto is entirely factual, even though the time frame for some of what happens in each scene had to be transposed for dramatic purposes.

 

Amazingly enough, we met for the first time last October in Wales, long after the libretto had been finished.

 

 

You're not the only one who's thrilled to have Emily singing the role of Caitlin!  Yes, absolutely; The part is definitely written for her.  I met Emily at the Met in the mid-nineties and I greatly admired her singing.  In 1999, she gave the premiere (and recorded) my 1987 setting of Rilke's Stiller Freund at Merkin Hall with violinist Raymond Gniewek and pianist John Churchwell.  The next year, also with John Churchwell at Merkin, she gloriously sang my 1975 song cycle, Portrait of Millay, on five Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnets.

 

Just last summer, Emily was the featured guest artist with the Windham Chamber Music Festival Orchestra (with me conducting.)  She sang Mozart's "Ch'io Mi Scordi Di Te" with pianist Simone Dinnerstein, Grieg's "Solveig's Wiegenlied" (in Norwegian!), the "Jewel Song" from Faust, and encored with "O Mio Babbino Caro."  What great singing, especially in "Babbino Caro," where she sounded like the young Freni!

 

 

Well... [sigh]  I guess the ultimate hope would be a commission to finish the piece.  Of course, I will finish it regardless.  However, there's nothing like a commission to get the creative juices flowing fast!  But, baring that, feedback from the audience and from the musicians (constructive criticism, pros and cons, etc) would be a great help to me.

 

It's going to be great to be back at the State Theater for the first orchestral read-thru on April 29^th.  I was a member of the New York City Opera Chorus from 1967-77, and this will be a great homecoming that I could never have imagined 30 years ago!