| Description |
With my musical mono-drama "The Mind's Eye", I tried to capture the most essential element of opera: its "real-ness." As I wrote it, I thought back to a scene in Peter Schaffer's play Amadeus in which the Mozart character explains his philosophy of opera to three members of the Viennese court. He explains that opera is more real than any play because of its immediacy that a poet would have to write down each person's thoughts separately, but a composer can play them all at once and "still make you hear each one." The Mozart character then stops in mid-sentence as he realizes the dramatic possibilities of the real-life scene before him. "Just look at us: four gaping mouths," he says. "What a perfect vocal quartet! I'd love to write it just this moment in time: this now." The "nows" I tried to capture in The Mind's Eye had to do with the creative process. I first explore the other-worldly quality of inspiration. The artist has a vision in which everything makes sense and the path is before him. The path becomes obscured and appears hopelessly unattainable when the artist must face the banalities of "everyday life." The second movement is a "mighty struggle" to squeeze a creation out of the original version, and ends with a simple and resigned melody. It is the most tuneful part of the whole piece. It will sound familiar, because the melodic and tonal structure of the first two movements is based on the first eight notes of this closing theme. The artist doesn't finish his creation and only finds peace when he resigns himself to the fact that it's unattainable. This ending was the only honest one I could come up with. Perhaps when I "break through" the banalities of life and express my own personal vision, I'll change the ending to a more hopeful one. |
