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Immersing yourself in another art form provides a nuance, a texture, an influence, that can be subtle, invisible to readers and critics, but of paramount importance to the authors themselves. Writers who keep their eyes, ears, and hearts open to the other arts are always collaborating, even if in secret.
For me, this cross-pollination has always come from opera.
To become a passionate opera lover is such an unusual, off-the-wall development that opera fans like me tend to have long, convoluted stories about where their passion came from. For a teenager to fall in love with the music of Giuseppe Verdi in the late l960s probably took more rebelliousness and non-conformity than it would have taken to fall in love with, say, The Beach Boys or The Doors.
So, a long story that involves a marvelously named elementary school teacher, Dr. Plinkavich, who produced specially adapted student versions of grand opera for her sixth-graders; me, a stagehand; and the girl who played Musetta in La Boheme, with whom I fell in love. (When she sang her gloriously teasing aria, Musetta’s Waltz, I almost swooned.)
Then, after a hiatus of several years when I forgot about opera entirely, lying awake in my darkened bedroom late at night, restless with all the things a 16-year-old is restless with, I turned the radio on, fiddled with the dial, stumbled upon a New York classical station playing opera. Through a magic that spoke to me straight through the heart — and very quickly, once I started really listening — that wonderfully theatrical music filled, illumined and orchestrated those lonely teenage hours when dreams and passions take hold.
When I was in my 20s I went to see opera in person — the New York City Opera, not the Met, where a good seat cost $5.50 and brought you singers like Beverly Sills, Norman Treigle and a young Jose Carreras. This was in the early ’70s, the same time I was beginning to write seriously, so both passions seemed part of the same over-the-top Romantic surge.
At first, opera’s influence was a generalized one. I loved it so much I wanted to emulate it, and since I couldn’t sing or compose, the only way to do this was in the art I seemed to have some aptitude for. Listening to Treigle sing the three villains in Tales of Hoffmann — enthralled by his satanic voice, his masterly acting — the only response I was capable of, once I stopped applauding, was to go home and write a story that aspired to the same kind of emotional impact, using prose rather than music.
Again, this was a generalized, compensatory sort of urge — at first, I didn’t glean any specific technical lessons I could borrow in my prose, as apparently Thomas Mann did, drawing from the operas of Wagner the technique of leitmotiv.
But if was helpful, learning the differences between aria and recitative, and applying that to my writing; namely, that it’s important to make your big scenes really big and in other spots merely take care of business in as lively, direct and interesting a way as possible.
Comprimario roles, singers who come on stage for only a few minutes, taught me the importance of doing minor characters right, taking the time and care to make them come alive. Rhythm and melody became virtues I
consciously worked toward in prose; often, I’ll delete or add words, not because of their meaning, but to give my sentences the right sound, albeit a sound that’s read, not heard.
Costuming and lighting, of paramount importance in opera, also play a part in fiction. You don’t want Scarlett O’Hara running around Tara in a tank top and capris; lush, tropical backlighting won’t suit the characters in Crime and Punishment, so Dostoyevsky kept his clouds gray and menacing.
But by far the biggest cross-lesson was the importance of drama in a work of art. Opera is mostly melodrama, but for young people this is fine — they need their drama in extravagant doses in order to match what they feel. This provided a handy antidote when minimalism came along, since I still measured my work, not against the desiccated, drama-free fiction then in favor, but against Giacomo Puccini — which is something of a exaggeration, but I needed to exaggerate those years, and then grudgingly learn the lessons of restraint.
Benjamin Britten was another influence, particularly his masterpiece Peter Grimes: Those dark, brooding undertones that suddenly swell into passionate, lyric surges knocked me to the floor. (I listened a lot on the couch.) His adaptation of Billy Budd, thanks to the music, is a more powerful, memorable telling than Melville manages with prose alone; Verdi, for that matter, outdid Shakespeare when he adapted Otello.
And while most operas have been adapted from plays, there’s a long list of ones inspired by novels, including Death in Venice, Of Mice and Men, The Turn of the Screw, and The Handmaid’s Tale — operas I’ve enjoyed and learned from, since, when novels are turned into operas, subtleties and colors that can be lost in reading are given the prominence they deserve.
The cross-inspiration goes on today. When I play a recording of Maria Callas singing Un Bel Di Vedremo from Madama Butterfly or play Jussi Bjorling singing just about anything, it makes me want to get down to business and write. An aphrodisiac for the aging novelist? Well, yes — and a badly needed reminder of the ardent young aspirant I once was.
Cynics and/or realists might say that opera and literature have one sad thing in common now: both are dying arts, cherished by geriatric bitter enders who will soon disappear.
Well, maybe so. But there are more powerful contemporary operas being composed than most people (including most opera fans) realize, just as there is much serious, risk-taking fiction still being written, even if the audience for both is shrinking. In my contrarian way, I love both art forms all the more for being so stubbornly anti-trendy, islands refusing to be swept under the devouring tidal waves of mass culture.
And since operas are often about unrequited love, it’s only fair in closing to admit to a secret longing I wouldn’t mind satisfying one day: I’d love to have a story or novel of mine adapted into an opera. Composers will find I’m easy to negotiate with over rights — all I want, once the opera premieres, is a small role in the chorus, somewhere way in back where my voice can’t be heard.
W.D. Wetherell is a novelist, essayist, and short story writer who lives in Lyme. His three books on fly-fishing will be collected into one volume this autumn,