Ashokas dreamer

·期刊原文

Ashoka's dreamer

by Justin Davidson

Opera News

Vol. 61 No. 17 Jun.1997

Pp.28-30

Copyright by Metropolitan Opera Guild Inc

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Composer Peter Lieberson takes on the legend of India's warrior king

If there is an artistic aristocracy in America, composer Peter Lieberson is

its reluctant scion. His father, the late Goddard Lieberson, was a composer

and the revered president of CBS Records. His mother (born Eva Brigitta

Hartwig and now Brigitta Lieberson-Wolf) had been the ballerina Vera

Zorina, a former wife of George Balanchine and a principal dancer in the

Ballets Russes of Monte Carlo. Igor Stravinsky was a regular

Thanksgiving-dinner guest at the Lieberson town house on East Sixty-first

Street in New York. Richard Rodgers, Alan Jay Lerner, Rudolf Serkin and

Vladimir Horowitz were part of the circle. Leonard Bernstein gave the

sapling composer one of his early jobs, and for a while Peter dated the

maestro's daughter, Jamie.

But if a youth spent in the company of such glamorous elders seems as

though it should have eased the way for an aspiring composer armed with

talent, Lieberson has always considered his breeding to be a burden. Today,

he is a trim fifty-year-old who speaks and moves with the quiet politesse

of someone who has never needed to be pushy, but he recalls himself as a

distant, anxious young man who shrank from the silver platter. "I kept my

compositions secret," he confesses. "I was very uncomfortable about the

idea of being boosted into a world I couldn't handle."

Still, the opportunities have come, over the years, with breathtaking

regularity. When Lieberson was twenty-five, Pierre Boulez asked to conduct

a work of his. A dozen years later, his first teaching post was at Harvard.

Peter Serkin, with whom, as a child, he frequently shared a sandbox, has

commissioned two piano concertos and a fistful of shorter works. And next

month, his first opera, Ashoka's Dream, will have its world premiere at

Santa Fe Opera, which commissioned it.

How Ashoka -- the third-century B.C. Indian warrior-king who unified the

subcontinent, even as he killed off a sizable portion of its population --

groped his way to tranquility is the story of the opera. How Lieberson came

to set that Buddhist myth to music is the story of the composer's life -- a

life that, like Ashoka's, has lurched from malaise to epiphany. While

Goddard Lieberson was busy selling records that were quickly taking the

place of sheet music in America's middle-class homes, the musical life in

his own family was a more participatory one. Lieberson pere would read

through symphonic reductions at the piano after dinner, and the children

would play a parlor version of Name That Tune. Zorina was starting a second

career as a narrator and actress, and Peter would coach his mother in works

such as Stravinsky's Persephone. The business of school was show business,

too: Peter and his brother attended Dalton, a swanky private school where,

he recalls, his classmates read Variety.

When Lieberson reached high school age, though, he was sent to board at

Deer field Academy in Massachusetts, where he drifted into what he

describes as a nearly decade-long period of numbness. "I wasn't interested

in anything," he says. "I remember very clearly being in a fog." His grades

unraveled. An exasperated teacher called him "a bump on the wheel of

progress." It wasn't until he was halfway through college at New York

University that his crust of ennui cracked. "I had a sort of awakening, or

a collapse," he remembers. "The anxiety just broke through, and I was a

complete wreck. I went into therapy -- that was the route in those days --

and I became interested in lots of things." New York City, for instance,

and its music. "Breakfast at Tiffany's, that was my image of the city. I

can visualize almost every street in New York, because I've been there, and

loved it so much."

Lieberson began listening to jazz, to the Broadway musicals his father had

fought to record on CBS, and to late Stravinsky. The elderly, ill-mannered

Russian, whom he had watched drink from the fingerbowls at the dinner

table, be now considered an object of veneration. By the time he was

twenty-two, Lieberson had declared his vocation, and his father took him to

see Stravinsky, telling the fading luminary, "Maestro, Peter wants to be a

composer." "He looked at me and said" -- Lieberson approximates a Russian

accent -- '"It is not enough to want. You must be.' It was powerful, like a

transmission of some sort."

And so Lieberson was. A job as a broadcast engineer at WNCN led to

composition lessons with Milton Babbitt, who steered him into a Master's

program at Columbia and the tutelage of Charles Wuorinen. From the moneyed

music world in which he had grown up, Lieberson turned to the austere

cloisters of academe, writing solo flute studies and brief, bristling

pieces with studiously neutral rifles like Concerto for Four Groups of

Instruments. A Charles Ives Award from the American Academy and Institute

of Arts and Letters gave him confirmation of his abilities and a cash prize

large enough to carry him through the summer of 1973.

Though buoyed by recognition, charged with the drive to compose, and flush

with the money Bernstein paid him to help him prepare material from the

Young People's Concerts for publication, Lieberson was still, he says,

"living under tremendous inner turmoil. My stomach muscles hurt." Four

Groups is the legacy of that tense period -- a score full of spiky lines

and rhythms that are furiously exact, written in the tiny hand of someone

who is gripping his pencil hard. "I was desperate enough," Lieberson

recounts, "to look outside my own culture to find the source of all that

pain." It was time for another awakening.

It was then that Lieberson met Douglas Penick, who, twenty years later,

would write the libretto for Ashoka's Dream. Lieberson, like many of his

friends, had begun reading books on Eastern religions -- "Drugs and

spirituality were the main things floating around in those days," he says

-- and Penick took him to meet the Tibetan Buddhist Rinpoche (teacher)

Chogyam Trungpa.

In 1976, at age thirty, Lieberson told his friends and parents he was

giving up music and moving to the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to

study Buddhism. His leave of absence from composing lasted only a matter of

months before he began writing a piece for the contemporary-music ensemble

Tashi, but it was nevertheless "very upsetting to my parents. My father

died before he could see that this was just a kind of evolution, rather

than a rejection." Now, two decades later and himself a father of three

daughters, Lieberson has been immersed in the story of Ashoka, who emerges

from his murderous murk into clear-eyed benignity, thereby raffling his

courtiers. "What's interesting about this story is that his transformation

was very confusing to all the people around him."

Lieberson's Buddhism has infused his music for twenty years, but he has

nothing but scorn for the ersatz religiosity of a mystical style in which

the notes are few and far between. His years of meditation have not

attenuated the clenched-gut rhythmic drive of scores that still have some

of the density he absorbed from Wuorinen. His first, fifty-five-minute

piano concerto is a vast, churning expanse, but shorter orchestral pieces

like Drala and Fire pack a lot of mercurial intensity into a few minutes.

Even his dreamier, lyrical piano bagatelles, written for Serkin, have an

undertow of tension. Lieberson's music can be difficult, certainly. So too

was his immersion into Buddhism. "If you're fortunate enough to meet an

authentic teacher," he says, "it's not really any fun. Just to sit down on

a cushion and let be, to experience the space around you, was terrifying to

me."

After two years in Boulder, Lieberson and his new wife -- another refugee

from music, jazz singer Ellen Kearney -- moved to Boston to found a branch

of Trungpa's Shambhala Training Institute. With a first child on the way

and an eye on a teaching career, Lieberson went back to school. A Ph.D.

from Brandeis led to a job at Harvard, where Lieberson found himself once

more stagnating and distant, teaching students the techniques of musical

expression but unwilling to discuss the substance of his own music or his

life. Buddhism, he felt, was not a topic of polite conversation in

university company. And so he abandoned his fledgling academic career after

only four years and moved to an even quieter, more reflective life in

Halifax, Nova Scotia. These days, he visits his once beloved New York a few

times a year and finds it shocking -- "a medieval place, with people of

enormous wealth and others of complete lunacy and degradation wandering the

streets."

The Buddhist ideal of simplicity should, it seems, be incompatible with the

complex of egos, money and machinery that constitutes the opera world, but

Lieberson, Penick and director Stephen Wadsworth have worked hard to

streamline Ashoka's Dream. "My greatest fear," Penick says, "was that it

would end up turning into some kind of Hindu Aida."

Neither the Santa Fe budget nor the opera house is designed for extravagant

spectacle, however, and Ashoka's journey is an internal one -- just as

Lieberson's own period of greatest tumult in the mid-1970s was, he recalls,

"very uneventful, externally." Wadsworth calls the opera "a drama of inner

action," and Penick declares himself suspicious of "requiring the singers

to move around too much." So the success of this production will hinge

partly on the abilities of its principals, Kurt Ollmann and Lorraine Hunt,

to act as translucent scrims into a hidden emotional world. To get the

fight balance of passion and austerity, they might cast an analytic eye on

Lieberson, for while his manner is one of spare, wry reserve, his music can

be inflamed.

[PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): ABOVE: LIEBERSON, THE LATEST COMPOSER TO HAVE A WORLD ... ]

ABOVE: LIEBERSON, THE LATEST COMPOSER TO HAVE A WORLD PREMIERE AT SANTA FE

OPERA

[PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): LEFT AND OPPOSITE: MARTIN PAKLEDINAZ COSTUME SKETCHES FOR ASHOKA'S ... ]

LEFT AND OPPOSITE: MARTIN PAKLEDINAZ COSTUME SKETCHES FOR ASHOKA'S DREAM

[PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): ILLUSTRATION]

ILLUSTRATION