Some of the best children`s operas did not start out as ”Children`s Operas.” Rather, they came about as the result of sophisticated, adult artists confronting the darker feelings and fantasies of their early childhoods-creating music and words that would draw those images out of hiding, make them visible on stage, and, by sharing them with other people, make them less disturbing, more benign.
These operas-think of Ravel`s ”L`Enfant et les Sortileges” and Humperdinck`s ”Hansel and Gretel”-are, in that sense, acts of artistic exorcism. Their effect is to charm young audiences even as they remind adults of the fanciful beasties that went bump in the night of parents` own youthful imaginations.
”Where the Wild Things Are” is such a work. The acclaimed fantasy-opera`s local premiere will be given by Chicago Opera Theater in its first collaboration with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Five holiday performances will launch the opera company`s 15th anniversary season, beginning Saturday night at the Auditorium Theatre.
An opera with music by Oliver Knussen to a libretto by Maurice Sendak
(based on his picture-book), ”Wild Things,” will be presented in tandem with Prokofiev`s orchestral children`s tale ”Peter and the Wolf.” Michael Morgan and Steven Larsen will conduct. Sharing the narration for ”Peter and the Wolf” will be Alan Stone, COT artistic director, and Joan Harris, Chicago commissioner of cultural affairs.
Sendak hardly requires an introduction. The grinning serpents, quixotic lions, shaggy dwarfs and other lovable creatures that populate his award-winning books are permanently lodged in the minds of children and parents throughout the world. Not only is ”Wild Things” the author-illustrator`s best-known book, it is one of the most popular children`s books of all time, having been translated into 22 languages. Since its publication in 1963, it has sold more than 2 million copies.
Knussen, however, is less familiar to American audiences than to those in England, where the Glasgow-born composer is based. He is among the most prolific and widely performed of the younger British composers and he pursues an active parallel career as a conductor. The son of Stuart Knussen, a former bass player of the London Symphony and Grant Park orchestras, he has strong family ties to Chicago (his mother and grandparents were born and worked in the city) and even lived here for a time during the late 1960s.
Their collaboration on ”Wild Things” was beneficial for both artists, they say, and gave rise to a close working partnership that continues to this day.
”Both of us went into it straightforwardly, with no preconceptions,”
Sendak explains. ”Both of us have a realistic view of childhood.” Unlike some composers of children`s operas, ”Ollie didn`t reduce himself to an idiot to write something for children. Kids can smell when they`re being pandered to. Meeting Ollie was nothing short of miraculous. I thoroughly love the opera. Ollie was so imbued with (the book) that he didn`t take anything away from me, but, on the contrary, expanded what I had already written.”
The music, Knussen says, is about ”the feeling one had as a child in that moment before the light is turned out.” His intention was ”not to dilute my own musical speech but simply to respond to the subject as immediately and colorfully as I knew how”-using Franco-Russian music from the early 20th Century, the music he found most exciting as a child, as a starting point.
Knussen and Sendak created the original version of ”Wild Things” on commission from the Brussels National Opera, which gave the world premiere in 1980. But a number of revisions ensued and the first full production of the definitive work was given by the Glyndebourne Opera in London in 1984, with sets and costumes by Sendak and direction by Frank Corsaro, who will stage the Chicago performances.
Minnesota Opera gave the American stage premiere the following year, with Karen Beardsley (who also heads the Opera Theater cast) in the lead role. Chicago will see a slightly revised version of the Minnesota production. The Auditorium performances represent only the fourth time that ”Wild Things”
has been staged in the United States.
The story, related in nine short scenes that total just under an hour, concerns a disobedient 5-year-old, Max, who is sent to bed without his supper and transports himself to a magical island inhabited by five fiercely adorable creatures known as the Wild Things. They crown the boy their king but hunger drives him back to the real world of his bedroom, where dinner, still hot, awaits.
Without disparaging the considerable merits of Knussen`s score or the pastel charm of the stage settings, the element that most grabs audiences is the Wild Things themselves: gallumphing 12-foot monster puppets with gnashing teeth and rolling eyes. Each hairy, feathered creature requires three people to make it work-a singer stationed in the orchestra pit, a mime inside the monster suit and a technician to operate its radio-controlled eyes from out in the audience.
Given the amount of controversy that surrounded Sendak`s book at its appearance 25 years ago, both Sendak and Knussen were apprehensive about how the opera would be received.
”Back then, some people felt that I had tapped too deeply into the dark, Freudian fantasies of childhood with my book,” says Sendak. ”It portrayed a child realistically, that`s all. You must remember that children`s books of that era softened the view (of childhood) considerably. Anything that was different was automatically suspect.”
To expand a story of only 380 words into a viable opera libretto was a daunting task. The character of Max, who speaks only a few words in the book, had to be a ”real” 5-year-old, a boy of genuine feelings but not aware beyond his years. Max`s mother, absent from the book, had to be put on stage. There had to be arias, duets and monologues.
”The most crucial problem was not spelling out the theme of the book, of not having Max think things that would betray him,” says Sendak. ”So I had to be as unaware of his situation as he is in the book, giving him a kind of poetry that was both oblique and clear. Olly laid out the blueprint and I filled in the blanks. It could only have been done with his close
collaboration and friendship.”
For his part, Knussen says it was as much a matter of artistic intuition as luck that Sendak`s ideas about how to convert his book to the lyric stage completely jibed with his own. ”I had loved and admired Maurice`s pictures long before any thought of the opera,” he has declared. ”If I have preserved any of their fantasy, richness and directness in my music, I will be happy.” Do adult viewers and children react differently to the opera? No, says Sendak; yes, says Knussen.
”The reaction is the same,” insists the author-designer. ”When they`re into it, they drop their jaws at the same time-they are caught up. There shouldn`t be any difference other than one group of listeners is taller.”
”Children seem to have an intuitive reaction,” Knussen reports. ”The music doesn`t bother them because harmonically it is no more elaborate than the music they`re used to hearing in today`s movie soundtracks. Adults seem to go more for the words, which are very intelligent and psychologically probing. Some of them find the music difficult, which is very curious to me, especially since the kids all come out humming the tunes. In England, the adults who most miss the point are the music teachers.”
