''I'm convinced I write amusical plays: that my texts 'swear at' music; that they're after totally different effects; that they delight in the homeliest aspects of our daily life . . . Music and particularly opera is for the unlocked throat, the outgoing expressive 'idea and essence' behind our daily life. I hope my plays don't lack that idea and essence, but they singularly shrink from an explicit use of it. They are homely and not one bit lyrical.''—Thornton Wilder, in a 1951 letter to Metropolitan Opera general manager Rudolf Bing, quoted in Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (1999)
Ironies abound when you read playwright Thornton Wilder’s views on what he thought was the tenuous connection between music and his plays:
* He broke out of at least one bad case of writer’s block by listening to music;
* Only 10 years before, Wilder formed a mutual admiration society with Aaron Copland, who’d been engaged to compose the soundtrack for his first Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Our Town;
* Copland’s lyrical score for the William Holden-Martha Scott film, which premiered 70 years ago last month, remains one of the best parts of that project;
* Copland adapted his score as a suite, which premiered on CBS Radio on this date in 1940 (four years later, a revised version, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, was performed by the Boston Pops);
* Anxious to transform Wilder’s play into an opera, Copland and Bing still, as the letter indicates, couldn’t overcome the playwright’s reluctance;
* By 1954, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen did come up with a musicalized (four songs) TV adaptation of Our Town starring Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, and Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager—yet, after the production aired a year later, even though it produced another hit for Ol’ Blue Eyes (“Love and Marriage”), Wilder exercised his contractual right to ensure it never aired again;
* In the early 1960s, Wilder collaborated with Louise Talma on adapting his The Alcestiad and with Paul Hindemith on The Long Christmas Dinner, two operas that premiered in Germany;
* In 1964, a musical adaptation of Wilder’s comedy The Matchmaker, Hello, Dolly, opened on Broadway. Its roaring success finally gave the playwright-novelist what had eluded him for years—financial security;
* At long last, courtesy of Wilder's literary executor, nephew Tappan Wilder, the dream project of Copland and Bing--an opera based on Our Town--premiered at the Indiana University Opera Theater in 2006—68 years after the play opened on Broadway—with the libretto by J.D. McClatchey and music by Ned Rorem.
Ironies abound when you read playwright Thornton Wilder’s views on what he thought was the tenuous connection between music and his plays:
* He broke out of at least one bad case of writer’s block by listening to music;
* Only 10 years before, Wilder formed a mutual admiration society with Aaron Copland, who’d been engaged to compose the soundtrack for his first Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Our Town;
* Copland’s lyrical score for the William Holden-Martha Scott film, which premiered 70 years ago last month, remains one of the best parts of that project;
* Copland adapted his score as a suite, which premiered on CBS Radio on this date in 1940 (four years later, a revised version, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, was performed by the Boston Pops);
* Anxious to transform Wilder’s play into an opera, Copland and Bing still, as the letter indicates, couldn’t overcome the playwright’s reluctance;
* By 1954, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen did come up with a musicalized (four songs) TV adaptation of Our Town starring Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, and Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager—yet, after the production aired a year later, even though it produced another hit for Ol’ Blue Eyes (“Love and Marriage”), Wilder exercised his contractual right to ensure it never aired again;
* In the early 1960s, Wilder collaborated with Louise Talma on adapting his The Alcestiad and with Paul Hindemith on The Long Christmas Dinner, two operas that premiered in Germany;
* In 1964, a musical adaptation of Wilder’s comedy The Matchmaker, Hello, Dolly, opened on Broadway. Its roaring success finally gave the playwright-novelist what had eluded him for years—financial security;
* At long last, courtesy of Wilder's literary executor, nephew Tappan Wilder, the dream project of Copland and Bing--an opera based on Our Town--premiered at the Indiana University Opera Theater in 2006—68 years after the play opened on Broadway—with the libretto by J.D. McClatchey and music by Ned Rorem.
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