Arts and Letters

Just two months ago my wife and I traveled for the first time to the Czech Republic. It was the land of Hugo David Weisgall's birth in 1912 (while it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and his home until the end of the First World War. Years later, after becoming an American citizen and an officer in the U.S. Army he returned to Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War as Cultural Attaché. Exploring Prague this past September, the Jewish Quarter, the Jewish Cemetery and Museum, the Old Synagogue, I wondered if I might find some clue, some influence—even in the spoken language—that would explain why his music, to my ears at least, sounds different from the music of his contemporaries here at home. I'm afraid it was a futile exercise. I came back to what I've always known: Hugo Weisgall, though he spoke with a unique voice, was a thoroughly American composer. It is especially apparent in the way he set text to music. His brief monodrama, The Stronger, is a superb example of what I'm talking about. He set the American, not the English, language to music, a distinction he frequently pointed out to his students. And that meticulous attention to language, its accent, weight, and pronunciation, coupled with his distinctive musical voice and strong theatrical sense, is why I do not hesitate to regard him as the finest composer of American opera we have ever had.

I met Hugo Weisgall in the winter of 1949-50, not long after his return from military service in Prague. That following summer I became his student at the Cummington School for the Arts in Massachusetts. In that bucolic setting, I was trying to compose my first song cycle to poems of e. e. cummings and Hugo, at the age of 37, was working on his first opera, The Tenor, based on the play by Frank Wedekind. (Strictly speaking, The Tenor was not his first opera: two earlier efforts preceded it, Night and Lilith, but he never alluded to them and as far as I know they were never performed.) Our late afternoon lessons were informal and consisted mostly of a quick glance at and brief criticism of my song-in-progress and then listening to Hugo sing—with considerable more gusto than necessary—the soprano, tenor, or baritone passages he had composed that day. It was in this latter activity that much of my education took place. To hear Hugo singing his own music was an unforgettable event—a kerchief tied around his neck, à la Boy Scout, his face glowing with perspiration from the heat of a New England July, accompanying himself on an out-of-tune piano, and content with an audience of one. But what struck me most forcibly was the passion: of all the professional performances of his music I would hear over the following four decades, no one sang Weisgall as well as Weisgall himself, no one became the characters of Weisgall's operas so well as Weisgall did. He never merely sang the notes, he transformed himself. Sharing a piano bench with him in those muggy summer afternoons of 1950 and feeling the excitement of his compositions and his execution of them, I knew that I too was going to compose operas.

Now and then, we analyzed together a score by the young Benjamin Britten. Hugo, seeing I had scant admiration for Britten's music at the time, pointed out the extraordinary technical accomplishment of his English contemporary, making me understand and finally acknowledge merit where I, the supremely confident undergraduate, had been oblivious to it.

I am recalling tonight, almost half-a-century after the fact, my earliest and simultaneous acquaintance with both of these remarkable composers of opera because of an obituary I read in 1976—in some English journal or other—and another I read this year in The New York Times. The former, with a perhaps justifiable tinge of chauvinism, spoke of Britten as the last in the royal line of opera composers, a line stretching all the way back to Claudio Monteverdi.

Undoubtedly my prejudice and love for Hugo Weisgall affect my judgment, but when I consider the man and his operas—from The Tenor, through Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Gardens of Adonis, all the way on to Esther—I see in his career so much that is estimable and noble that I am prompted to contend that the royal closure so triumphantly announced in that English article was twenty-one years premature.

To my mind, no word but noble can be applied to the perseverance Weisgall maintained decade after decade in the face of critical indifference and misunderstanding. Opera followed opera with increasing mastery yet he was largely ignored by producers entranced by the more gaudy mechanical nightingales.

There is also something approaching nobility in the generosity and largeness of heart he displayed to colleagues: I never heard him make a negative remark about a fellow composer's work, no matter how distant it was from his own outlook. His generosity was especially focused on younger composers (and I can speak of that, perhaps, better than anyone else); but, most of all, there is the aristocracy of the operas themselves: ethical, high-minded, and earnest—and, yes, difficult—without concession to fashion or popularity. It is the nobility with which he practiced and honored his art that leaves the strongest seal upon me: the literary themes that obsessed him; the unflinching musical sounds, tough yet beautiful, with which he enveloped these ideas for the lyric stage. Were it possible to make an incision into any of these operas, I am sure one would find that their blood was blue.

So, that proud English assertion notwithstanding, I do not believe that the royal line of opera composers came to an end in 1976 with the death of a composer Hugo Weisgall himself taught me to admire. I, at least, would prolong that regal succession to include the composer who taught me so much and whose works I regard as the finest operatic utterances we have heard from an American composer.