This Day in Classical Music History (Shelved “Gatsby” Music Revived)

September 11, 1986—Jay Gatsby was not easily dissuaded from his great, shimmering dream, and neither was John Harbison (left). After the composer saw his request to create an operatic adaptation The Great Gatsby ignored by the estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he pulled together some stray ideas into the short orchestral piece, “Remembering Gatsby,” which was performed publicly for the first time on this date by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Shaw. Thirteen years later, when Fitzgerald’s classic novel finally premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Harbison’s “orchestra foxtrot” comprised the overture.

In choosing a topic for today, I felt strongly tempted to write about 9/11, or even about one of the objects of that day’s heinous attacks, the Pentagon, which began construction on this date exactly 70 years ago. But ultimately, this particular topic won me over, and not simply because it represents another oblique way to write about my favorite novel. (Even the title of this blog, of course, takes its inspiration from Fitzgerald’s rhapsodic ending to that book.)

Any foreigner who wants to divine the heart and soul of America can start with Fitzgerald’s perfectly crafted tale of his country at the height of the Jazz Age. There are things in it that al Qaeda—or, indeed, anyone of a fundamentalist faith—would find antithetical to their beliefs, notably adultery, heavy drinking, disdain for the past, the characters' overwhelming materialism and the absence of any real god (the famous “eyes of God” are depicted in a billboard ad observing “the valley of ashes”).

Of course there are so many things in the novel that abide, however, among them the belief that one can reinvent one’s self and the endless straining for grace. It depicts a secular society in a desert of spiritual values, but finds a kind of saving grace in the purity of purpose at odds with the violent trade of bootlegging at the heart of Gatsby’s quest (note that phrase about the “orgiastic green light”).

Adaptations of Gatsby have tended overwhelmingly toward stage, film and television, hinting at the deep respect for theater present in Fitzgerald even as a boy staging amateur plays. But I think he’d be equally delighted that the world of music—especially the world of classical music—has finally sat down and paid him attention.

A book of his short stories, titled Tales of the Jazz Age, has understandably led readers over the years to associate Fitzgerald with the new musical form taking his country by storm in the Roaring Twenties. But Robert Westbook, the son of the novelist’s later mistress, Sheilah Graham, reported in his book about their relationship, Intimate Lies, that it was classical music, not jazz, that really claimed his devotion. In fact, Fitzgerald was spending a quiet afternoon listening to Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony when he was struck down by his fatal heart attack in December 1940.

Now, let’s turn back to Harbison and his own indomitable attempt to capture the essence of Fitzgerald’s vision in music.

I haven’t been able to find any information about why the Fitzgerald estate turned a deaf ear to the composer’s wish to adapt Gatsby into an opera. It was just the kind of classy project that Fitzgerald’s surviving daughter Scottie always tried to encourage to preserve the memory of her parents.

But the request by Hardison--who, like many Princeton grads, was fascinated by the life and work of fellow alum Fitzgerald--went nowhere for a long while. (The subject matter held additional interest for Hardison because the time evoked, the Roaring Twenties, was when his father, an historian of the Reformation, held out youthful hope that he could carve out a living as a show-tune composer, “and this piece may also have been a chance to see him in his tuxedo again,” he recalled.)

In 1985, Harbison was prompted to revisit his aborted project when Robert Shaw, artistic director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, commissioned him to create a new work. Harbison scanned notes from his Gatsby opera and fashioned his “Remembering Gatsby (Foxtrot for Orchestra).”

I’ve heard neither this eight-minute creation nor the full-length opera that the Met eventually staged, but the most likely source for “Remembering Gatsby” would seem to be Chapter 3 of the book. Like all admirers of the novel, I’ve always retained a vivid mental picture of the summer parties at Gatsby’s mansion, and even recalled the marvelous phrase “yellow cocktail music” used to evoke the atmosphere. But it wasn’t until I re-read the chapter, in preparing this post, that I appreciated how subtly Fitzgerald worked his magic.

The chapter begins with a rather prosaic sentence: “There was music from my neighbors’ house through the summer nights.” The second sentence hints at the marvelous interplay between the actual event of the parties, how Fitzgerald employed this as a metaphor, and his further evocation of sound in non-music-related images: “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

A couple of paragraphs later we’re introduced to the orchestra, whose size is fully of a piece with the immensity of Gatsby’s ambitions: ““By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums.”

And now, the famous “yellow cocktail music” passage begins:

“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

“Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.”

This is such a bravura piece of writing that analyzing it is a bit like revealing the secrets behind a magic act. It ends with “the party has begun,” but already we have, in a sense, watched the entire movement of this event. The third sentence sounds like the swelling and diminution of instruments in an orchestra. It’s all so giddy, the way listeners can get caught up in intoxicating music, and yet there are already hints of excess, like an orchestra without a conductor (as, in a sense, Gatsby is, since he’s present but unknown by the great mass of party crashers here).

The laughter, for instance, is “spilled” and “tipped out,” like the illegal liquor everyone’s consuming. The party seems to stop on “the erroneous news” that the gypsy is an understudy from FOLLIES—an echo not only of the false rumors about to be spread about Gatsby even before Nick Carraway meets him, but also of the ludicrous falsehoods Gatsby has created in fashioning a backstory for himself. And there’s that especially piquant phrase, “yellow cocktail music.” It not only marries an aural and visual image (something that only Fitzgerald, I think, would ever have the brass and technical skill to pull off), but also further develops an association that “yellow” will have by the end of the novel with corruption.

The foxtrot is hardly the first musical type that one might associate with classical music, but ever since George Gershwin had daringly mixed jazz with classical music in Rhapsody in Blue in 1924, virtually nothing could be ruled out of bounds for the American composer’s aural palette. (More recently, another piece I saw performed at the Chautauqua Institution had used the foxtrot in a classical work: “The Chairman Dances,” an outtake “Foxtrot” from John Adams’ Nixon in China.)

The eight-minute piece begins with the novel’s ending, the green light that Gatsby sees, evoked here by a cantabile passage for full orchestra. “Then the foxtrot begins,” Harbison later summarized the piece, “first with a kind of call to order, then a twenties tune I had written for one of the party scenes, played by a concertino led by soprano saxophone. The tune is then varied and broken into its components, leading to an altered reprise of the call to order, and an intensification of the original cantabile. A brief coda combines some of the motives and refers fleetingly to the telephone bell and the automobile horns, instruments of Gatsby’s fate.”

So often, opera has taken the kind of low passions associated with tabloid crimes and wedded them to a grandiosity that spills out of the confines of its vast concert halls. Such is the case with The Great Gatsby, a work that practically screams with Jerry Springer material (“crooked millionaires and their mistresses!!!”) but endows it with so much more.