Gunther Schuller, A Life in Opera:

Prelude, Five Acts, and an Epilogue

By Helen Greenwald

Helen M. Greenwald is the author of numerous scholarly articles on vocal music from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and the editor of the critical editions of Rossini’s Zelmira (Fondazione Rossini, 2005), and Verdi’s Attila (Ricordi/University of Chicago Press, 2013), which was premiered in 2010 by Riccardo Muti in his Metropolitan Opera debut.  Other publications include the Oxford Handbook of Opera (Oxford University Press, 2014; paperback, 2022) and a monograph on Verdi’s Rigoletto she is currently writing for Oxford University Press. She has written program essays for an international array of arts institutions, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, La Scala (Milan), The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden (London), the Teatro Regio (Parma), The Bavarian State Opera (Munich), the Gran Teatre del Liceu (Barcelona), the Glyndebourne Festival (UK), the Baltimore Symphony, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Metropolitan Opera. Greenwald teaches music history at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

​

Prelude

​​

I was Gunther’s colleague at the New England Conservatory for nearly fifteen years (1991 to his death in 2015). In that time, I barely had a conversation with him. But I knew a fair amount of his instrumental music, had heard him speak, and seen him conduct on several occasions; he surely did not know me. I have listened to opera since the age of five and spent years playing the cello in orchestras and in the opera pit. I probably played some of Gunther’s instrumental music along the way. Never once did it cross my mind that Gunther Schuller had anything at all to do with opera. When Charles Peltz asked me to write something about Gunther and opera to celebrate his 100th birthday, I agreed immediately: I enjoy a new challenge, especially if I don’t know anything at all about it. I got to work and learned that Gunther had written two operas, The Visitation and The Fisherman and His Wife, and that he had orchestrated a third, Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha. Ok, I thought, let’s look at those things and that’ll do it.

​

That was not to be: once I started scratching the surface, beginning with Gunther’s autobiography, Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty, [1] I realized that Gunther’s life with opera was organic, opera-adjacent from cradle (or potty or bathtub, as the case may be) to grave, leading to the obvious question: why didn’t he compose more operas and sooner? The easy answer is that Gunther Schuller was interested in everything and there simply was not enough time.

​

This essay is organized in “acts,” referencing the acts of an opera, but also physical acts or “activities: singing, composing, listening, and writing to name a few. But this essay is hardly an opera; for one thing, it lacks dramatic coherence, an argument. The only “through-lines” in this piece are Gunther and opera.​

​

Act I: Gunther sings

​

If family lore is to be believed, Gunther began to sing at the age of one and a half, when the family visited his father’s home town in Germany, Bürgstadt. I’ll let Gunther tell the story himself:

​

“From that trip there also exists a photo of me—used in later years to amuse guests and embarrass me---sitting on the potty . . . while (according to my Aunt Lydia) I was trying to sing the melody of the first waltz from Johann Strauss’s Roses of the South and waving my hands as if conducting.”[2]

 

A bit later on, like other six-year-olds, Gunther liked to sing in the bath tub, as he played with his rubber duckies. But unlike other children, one of his splash-time “songs” was the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser. [3] He was able to imitate Wagner’s instrumental sonorities, ultimately favoring the lower trombone parts, an early manifestation of what would become a sustained attraction to sounds in the lower range.

 

Music, of course, was mother’s milk to him, growing up with a violinist father (Arthur) and a mother (Elsie) who had a keen musical sensibility and often played the piano for family caroling at Christmas and other occasions. Gunther’s father played in the New York Philharmonic, but also loved to sit at the piano and play from memory “huge chunks” of operas and operettas by Puccini, Strauss, Wagner, and even Schreker, which he had performed as a young man in German theater orchestras. [4] Gunther had a beautiful voice, and on the recommendation of John Barbirolli, who was then conducting the New York Philharmonic, Gunther’s father took him to a studio to make an audition recording (on a ten-inch acetate disk) of the duet from Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. [5]  In 1937, at the age of twelve, Gunther became a pupil at the St. Thomas Church Choir School in New York.

​

Gunther’s natural inclination to express himself in song was now part of a systematic and daily routine in which his gift was nurtured and polished. He sang the treble parts in the choir, often as soloist, at least through the age of fourteen; from 1939 through early 1940, his name appears on the programs for various Sunday services in the trio from Haydn’s The Creation, “On Thee Each Living Soul Awaits,” which was used for the anthem. [6] Gunther’s musical experiences were expanded considerably at the school, where he sang all the major choral works of Handel, Haydn, Franck, Bach, Palestrina, and Isaac. [7]  The most frequently programmed works, however, were those of T. Tertius Noble (1867-1953), organist, choirmaster, prolific composer of choral, symphonic, incidental music, and opera, [8] editor of Handel’s Messiah (Schirmer, 1912), and founder of the St. Thomas Choir School. Noble became Gunther’s principal instructor in harmony, counterpoint, and composition, the only formal tutor in music that he ever had.

 

T. Tertius Noble, despite his strict enforcement of rules regarding behavior and education was an open-minded and liberal thinker, who gave his new pupil many books, including Arthur Eaglefield Hull’s Modern Harmony. [9] Hull’s ideas encouraged Gunther’s nascent love for chromaticism and introduced him to excerpts from several contemporary operas, including Schőnberg’s Erwartung, Strauss’s Elektra, and​Symanowski’s King Roger. [10]  Noble, on the fiftieth anniversary of his career as a church organist, wrote an article in The Diaposon, in which he exhorted organists and composers to step out of their comfort zones:

​​

“Write music other than hymns and spiritual songs; even write jazz, play jazz, write comic songs. It all helps to broaden one’s view of life. There are too many strait-laced organ grinders today.”[11]

 

Act II: Gunther has Ideas for Operas (and abandons them)

 

By the time Gunther was sixteen years old, he had left St. Thomas and gone on to Jamaica High School and the preparatory division of the Manhattan School of Music. On the side, he “gigged,” playing horn in many local opera companies, the sort that gave performances in improvised surroundings such as apartment living rooms on the upper West Side of Manhattan. Those experiences increased his opera literacy multifold, and from a performer’s perspective. As a teenager, Gunther was fluent in much of the standard operatic repertoire, works by Verdi and Puccini, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, and the occasional outlier such as Flotow’s Martha.[12]  But there were numerous other significant encounters, large and small that preceded Gunther’s first “professional” life in opera and frequently led to ideas for operas, almost all of which never came to fruition. 

​

One early connection to Gunther’s ideas about opera was film. Throughout his autobiography, Gunther refers to films, aspects of cinematography, direction, color, costumes, make-up, casting and more. As he mentions in the introduction to his autobiography, he always considered film and music to be intimately connected:

​

“Great films related significantly to me as a composer, for films seemed to me so much like music, like symphonies or operas, with thematic developments and variations, primary and secondary subjects, expositions, codas (dénouement); both were narrative forms, occurring and of necessity experienced in time, although the one, music, is abstract and nonspecific, the other, cinema, generally chronicles particular identifiable events.”[13]​​

​

Gunther made one early connection between opera and film when he heard Orfeo’s “Che farò senza Euridice” from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, which was sung in a German Film, Die grosse Liebe [The Great Love]. He saw the film in New York with his parents on one of their many excursions to Yorkville for meals, treats, and a dose of German culture.[14]

​

When he was thirteen years old, Gunther saw the film that most directly led to an “opera idea,” Marcel L’Herbier’s Rasputin, a character that had already become an obsession. (That the young man was allowed to see this film on his own is another matter completely.)  In any case, in his youthful fervor, Gunther vowed to compose an opera on the subject of the mad Russian monk; it was never realized.  But, much later, on a trip to Florence with his wife Marjorie, Gunther’s interest in religious zealots was revived, this time by his encounter with historical sites associated with Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498), best remembered as a book burner who called the Catholic church “a pockmocked harlot” and was executed for heresy. Such a colorful character could inspire an extraordinary musical drama and Gunther took the idea to Dmitri Mitropoulos, who absolutely recoiled at the idea, ending all discussion with the declaration: “Oh no! Don’t do that! [15]

 

Stories of famous operas were also a significant part of Gunther’s childhood, particularly at their vacation home in Rocky Point, Long Island, where family and friends would gather. He specifically recalls “sanitized” versions of Carmen, Salome, The Barber of Seville, and Wagner’s Ring cycle, among others that elicited bouts of nearly uncontrollable laughter rather than actual inspiration. [16]  One of Gunther’s early operatic experiences was owing to his Uncle Alex (Elsie Schuller’s brother), a frequent visitor to the Schuller Rocky Point summer home; Alex was one of Gunther’s favorites. He was a plumber by trade, but also a great prankster, who might place a fart pillow where it could cause the most embarrassment. And, he was also an opera lover. He took Gunther, now age 12, to a performance at the New York City Hippodrome [17] of Verdi’s Il trovatore. More than the music, Gunther was impressed by the staging, in particular the lighting and the colors (aspects of theater that would assert themselves later on in Gunther’s own works). [18]

 

Colorful locations, situations and characters appear repeatedly in Gunther’s descriptions of possible subjects for opera, beginning with his childhood love for Karl May’s stories of the American frontier:

​

“My fascination with Karl May’s stories continued well into my early teen years, for I recall that when I was about thirteen and had begun writing music, I had the grand idea of composing an opera based on one of May’s books that had as one of the more fascinating fictional characters a German music professor who had gone to the New World after the 1848 German uprisings to bring “the great German music culture” to the “barbarian” American West. But I never got past a dozen pages of the libretto and the beginnings of an overture, one of many soon-aborted composition projects of my very early teen years.” [19]

 

One story that stayed with Gunther from his school days well into adulthood and his career as a horn player at the Metropolitan Opera was that of Prometheus. The allure of the story and a first hearing around the age of 14 or 15 of Scriabin’s masterpiece for piano and orchestra, Prometheus: Le poème du feu, led to something of an obsession, first to learn the entire piano part of the work, despite his lack of sufficient technique and the deep concern of his parents. While this work unto itself did not –at this time-- awaken Gunther’s latent operatic curiosity, his reaction to it is worth quoting here as evidence of his passion, musical proclivities, and a subject he would revive much later in a very early operatic effort:

​

“My parents became really alarmed at this turn of events; they thought I had become emotionally unhinged, and tried to bring me back to reality. But I was so possessed by the mesmerizing force of this music that I was unreachable for a while, trapped in some almost out-of-body experience, orbiting helplessly in some vertiginous musical outer space. This strange, overwhelming, and almost hallucinatory state of affairs lasted nearly two months, by the end of which I did learn to play almost the entire Prometheus piano part. Days and days of struggling four or five hours at a time went by as I was enveloped in some wondrous Scriabinesque acoustic and harmonic haze. A few of the trés animé and prestissimo episodes were clearly beyond my non-technique, but I could and did play those passages at a slower tempo.”[20]

 

Well after he joined the Metropolitan Opera as a horn player, who had by then enormous experience of Wagner, Gunther decided to read George Bernard Shaw’s insightful and hilarious riff on the Ring cycle, The Perfect Wagnerite.[21]  The experience, rather oddly, brought on, as Gunther described it, “an irresistible urge to write an opera, something I had not thought about very much.”[22]  The Prometheus story, which had lived quietly these many years in Gunther’s subconscious, resurfaced, now in the form of Shelley’s four-act drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Gunther sketched out a libretto for it and some musical themes, but became distracted by other things and abandoned it.

 

​Act III: Gunther Loves Basses (and Mezzo-Sopranos)

​

In 1947 Gunther composed his Quartet for Double Basses and devoted no fewer than five pages to it in his autobiography.[23] While this particular composition most likely appeals to a niche audience, it’s a work that explicitly defines the sounds that gave him the most pleasure. In his autobiography, Gunther returns numerous times to his affinity for the lower part of the sonic spectrum.  Here are some examples, begin with his experience at the St. Thomas Choir School:

 

“Having by nature a special love for low- and middle-register sounds and instruments, I would encounter the ultimate acoustic sensation when, in the exiting procession at the end of the four p.m. Sunday service, we choristers passed right under the organ’s magnificent thirty-two-foot pipes, and literally felt the slowly throbbing vibrations physically in our bodies and under our feet—an incredible ear-expanding experience!” [24]

 

In another passage he provides even more detail:

​

“There is something in my physical makeup and particular aural capacities that inclined my ears to unhesitatingly focus in on the lower octaves of the human audible range, especially the particular sonoric quality of cello and bass, with their comparatively darker color and full-blooded sound. I remember well that even in my childhood I was always attracted to those two instruments.”[25]

​

It’s no surprise that Gunther’s love for deeper sonorities also extended to vocal music, and, specifically, opera. An iconic instance is Gunther’s description of the joy he felt when he discovered Mozart’s concert aria “Per questa bella mano,” K. 612 (1791), which Mozart composed for the bass Franz Xaver Gerl and double bass obbligato. [26]

 

Most of the operas that Gunther talks about in detail in his autobiography are those he performed at the Metropolitan opera.[27] His comments are mainly about conductors, singers, horn parts, 28] and harmonies that he finds particularly sensual. The range of pieces that he discusses is wide, the languages varied, the structures incompatible. What they tend to share in common are strong harmonic language, often marked by chromaticism or surprising “moves,” colorful characters, situations, and locations, and especially compelling roles for lower voices and instruments. In this respect, Gunther seems to have had a particular affinity for Verdi, whose numerous achievements include a career-long exploration of what I call the “vexed male,” mostly sung by basses, baritones, and the occasional tenor, with a heavier voice.

 

Orchestral parts are inevitably on the darker side, intended to expand the individual character’s sonority and situation.  Here are a few notable examples:

​

Gunther mentions Verdi’s Otello [29] no fewer than 43 times in his autobiography. He called his first experience of it during his second season at the Metropolitan Opera “overwhelming.” While he loved the cello ensembles, it was the first fifteen minutes of the opera, the victorious but stormy return of Otello to Cyprus that stunned him with “an overpowering, aural, palpable force, as I had never experienced before.” The essential element was the fact of sitting in the middle of it, feeling the vibrations in the floor of a familiar sonority, a semi-tone cluster played on a six-foot organ stop, specifically a “contrabass and timpani stop that was held for about 250 measures.”[30] Gunther was astonished by the beginning of the final scene of the opera:

 

“The high strings are followed by string basses playing (all alone) their lowest note, as Otello furtively enters the room. This sequence is one of Verdi’s greatest strokes of genius; it moves abruptly from the key of A flat to the dramatically distant key of E [major], all via a four-octave downward leap from the high strings to the sepulchral low-register basses . . . [a] musical-dramatic miracle.”[31]

 

Gunther was “transported” by Verdi’s Don Carlos, which takes place in Spain in the late 16th century and, among other things, concerns the star-crossed love of Prince Don Carlos and Elisabeth of Valois, who has been married for political reasons to Carlos’s father, King Philip. Gunther speaks rapturously about the first 25 minutes of Act III, “which also in its daring exemplifies the highest levels of inspiration and imagination—in short, of musico-dramaturgic creativity.”[32] The scene begins as King Philip of Spain (bass), alone in his study, sings his heart-breaking soliloquy, “Ella giammai m’amò [She never loved me],” introduced by a mournful cello solo. The king’s reverie is interrupted by the arrival of the Grand Inquisitor, also a bass. What ensues is a conversation never meant to leave the room: the King has befriended a rebel, Rodrigo, and the Inquisitor wants Philip to relinquish him to the church to be burned at the stake for heresy. Philip refuses and offers his son to the Inquisitor instead of his friend.  It is a dark moment dramatically, but also musically. Gunther calls the scene a “trio for three bass voices,”[33] the third being the double basses, contrabassoon, and low brass that play a ritornello as the Inquisitor enters and leaves the room.   

 

There are many more “favorites,” a number of which reveal similar reactions to the sound of lower-range instruments. For example, the “Card Aria” in Bizet’s Carmen, sung by a mezzo-soprano sends Gunther into a “tailspin.”[34] Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, with a bass singing the title role, was a “stunning revelation (and especially when Cesare Siepi sang the role of Tsar Boris).”[35] Mezzo-soprano Rose Bampton sang the role of Kundry in Wagner’s Parsifal with an understanding so deep it was “as if she had composed it herself.”[36]

 

Act IV: Gunther Fuses Jazz and Opera: The Visitation

 

An important intersection between jazz and opera was Gunther’s friendship with Bill Evans, whom Gunther first heard and met around 1955. Evans, as it turns out, had a profound interest in Wagner’s operas, not least owing to their chromatic harmonies. In the late fifties Evans came to Gunther’s apartment in New York City and the two played four-hand through all of Wagner’s Ring Cycle as well as Parsifal. Those evenings led to deeper conversations about other late 19th-century and early 20th-century composers and operas, including a detailed conversation about Schoenberg’s Erwartung. One notable aspect of the Schoenberg discussion was a lengthy digression on the history and use of the so-called “Erwartung” chord, its influence on Bill Evan’s work and on jazz in the 1940s and 1950s. [37] Twenty years later Gunther would absorb jazz into opera.​

​

In 1947, on a Metropolitan Opera national tour, on the Cleveland stop, Gunther made two side-trips to Cincinnati, where he had many friends, especially at the old Cotton Club. It was an incident that took place on the second of these two visits that had a profound impact on the composition of The Visitation, Gunther’s first opera. Margie had flown out from a visit with her Aunt Harriet in Omaha; after a late night at the Cotton Club, Gunther, Margie, and Will Wilkins, headed to an all-night café. What was intended to be lovely evening turned into a brawl; the Schullers and Wilkins were pelleted by broken bottles and trash thrown from a car by three drunken men, who shouted unprintable racial epithets at them. The police caught up with the men, but let them go after a “fatherly” admonishment to go home. Wilkins, a Black man, was by no means surprised by the turn of events.  But Gunther and Margie were stunned; it was a scene out of a Kafka novel. Gunther never forgot about the incident, as he explained in his autobiography:

​

“Many years later, when I wrote my opera The Visitation, a conversion of Kafka’s The Trial to an American setting of racial hatred and bigotry, I felt compelled to incorporate my Cincinnati Nightmare, with its close parallel to one of Kafka’s episodes, as one of its most relevant scenes.”[38]

 

A First Encounter: Gottfried von Einem’s Der Prozess

​

In the early 1950s (1953 or 1954), on an extended trip to Europe, Gunther and Margie visited Berlin and were deeply impressed by Gottfried von Einem’s opera Der Prozess, based on Kafka’s novel The Trial, staged by Günther Rennert (who would later stage Schuller’s version of the Kafka novel). [39] The opera follows the structure of the novel with notable precision and draws musically on tonality, atonality, 1950s dance music, and from at least one critic’s perspective, jazz. [40] It is difficult from the contemporary perspective not to consider von Einem’s opera and Gunther’s later work together.  A closer study might yield some substantive comparisons, especially since Gunther was an admirer of von Einem’s compositions overall. In any case, Gunther’s interest in Kafka’s novel as a possible operatic text coincides with his fortieth year, a significant juncture for many people.

 

In 1963, Rolf Liebermann, director of the Hamburg Opera, met with Gunther, who was then on a State-department sponsored tour. The commission for The Visitation was a product of that conversation; there was, however, a single condition, that the work would be a “jazz opera.” The Visitation would also be the first English-language opera to premiere in Germany. 

 

The idea of a “jazz opera” resonated well with Gunther, who spent much of his professional career with a foot in each of two worlds: jazz and opera. Such an amalgamation, moreover, seemed like the perfect opportunity to widen his experiments with the union of classical music and jazz; he had been thinking about that merger at least since the early 1950s and eventually dubbed it “third stream” in a lecture he gave at Brandeis University in 1957. [41]

 

But a dramatic work had additional complexities beyond the music, and, specifically to Gunther’s mind, any use of jazz for a musico-theatrical work had to be dramatically justified. In fact, he considered the proper realization of such a task to be not only an honor, but also a historical and social mandate. Employment of jazz in the operatic sphere must not be some diluted “popular” version of what he considered to be the singular contribution of American Black culture. Rather, as he remarked, “Jazz in my opera is a modern, partially improvised, spontaneously creative art music, measured by the same kind of rigorous, demanding disciplines and aesthetic criteria as any other art music.”[42]

 

The subject matter had to be drawn from Black history, and Gunther, well-known as a socially conscious man, found the perfect starting point in Kafka’s novel. His goal was not so much, as he put it, to compose a “Kafka-esque” opera, but rather to use Kafka’s absurdities as a template for the Kafka-esque experiences of American Black people, especially in the Jim Crow era. By transposing the tragedy of Josef K. in The Trial to the realistically catastrophic experiences of Carter Jones in an American setting, “the opera's identification with a more specific subject could gain in intensely felt realism what it may lose in symbolistic power.”[43]

 

With The Visitation Gunther added another layer to the long and fraught history of musico-theatrical works by and about the Black community, many of which were born in the Harlem Renaissance or “New Negro Movement.”  There were operas and musicals by African-American composers, including Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s all-Black Shuffle Along (1921), Clarence Cameron White’s Quanga! (1932), and Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha (1911), which, remarkably, Gunther orchestrated for its 1975 premiere at the Houston Grand Opera (at the very same time that he was composing The Visitation). Gunther’s new opera would also join a long tradition of operatic “byproducts,” shows by white authors and composers, which were either multi-racial --Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Showboat (1927) or featured all-Black casts: Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1927-28). Lewis Gruenberg’s The Emperor Jones (1933) premiered at the Metropolitan opera with a “blacked-up” Lawrence Tibbett in the title role, and, of course, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which Gunther knew intimately.[44]

 

Gunther wrote his own libretto for The Visitation and unfolds the story episodically in ten scenes plus Prologue and Epilogue over three acts. A revolving stage is required because of the many scene changes and detailed visuals written into the libretto. The title itself offers itself to interpretation. Does it have religious significance?  Does it refer to the Virgin Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth, who is also pregnant? This biblical encounter inspired many artists, including Rembrandt (1640), whose painting The Visitation Gunther describes in his autobiography. [45] The German words for “The Visitation” are Die Heimsuchung, which most frequently translates to “the visit,” or “Visitation”; Gunther uses the word liberally throughout his autobiography as a synonym for “visit.”[46] It’s possible to take the title at face value. There are many “visits” in the narrative — men who invade Carter’s space, visits to an abandoned mill, a courthouse, Uncle Albert, and a club, to name a few. But the title is singular, not plural. Gunther, a German speaker with native fluency, surely knew well that the word “Heimsuchung” has other, more relevant meanings for his work, specifically, the notion of something being “visited upon” someone, as a profound misfortune, plague, affliction, or scourge. [47]  And that is, indeed, what this opera is about.

 

The opera is scored for 3 flutes (piccolo/alto flute), 3 oboes (English horn), 3 clarinets (Eb, bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (contrabassoon), 4 French horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, piano, strings, timpani, and jazz combo: trumpet, trombone, percussion, piano, and double bass. The vocal parts lean heavily to the lower end (unsurprisingly) and include 5 Baritones, 3 Basses, 2 Mezzo Sopranos, 2 Sopranos, 6 Tenors; Bass Baritone. There is also a mixed chorus.

​

The main characters are Carter Jones (baritone), Mrs. Claiborne (soprano), Teena (mezzo soprano), and a host of minor roles, including Miss Hampton and Uncle Albert, plus several speaking roles, most prominent among them, the Preacher, and non-speaking/non-singing parts.

 

The opera looks at the Black experience, past and present, through the eyes of Carter Jones, a young, educated Black man, first seen in his room, lying on a sofa, reading, and listening to an old phonograph recording of Bessie Smith’s “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out.” As to be expected, given Gunther’s ongoing love for the visual arts, the recorded music provides a backdrop to Carter’s vision, staged as follows:

​

“As the record plays, we become aware of a vision –in C.J.’s mind—on left: a ‘colored’ Baptist church in the 1880’s. As the scene comes into focus, a preacher is exhorting his congregation to repent; [the] congregation answers in chanted response. Suddenly—in [the] middle rear of [the] stage—another scene appear to D.J., revealing the auctioning of slaves in the early 1800’s. The scene is acted in pantomime: an auctioneer gesticulates; two guards wield ships. C.J.’s reverie is suddenly interrupted by the harsh, long ringing of his doorbell and loud knocking on his door.”[48]

​

What follows is an increasingly downward spiral, both musically and dramatically. Jones is suddenly thrown into a series of situations, all beyond his control: a home invasion and search, a “trial” for an infraction that is that is never definitively stated, racial slurs, and an assault by “drunken punks” (“The Encounter,” drawn from Gunther and Margie’s “Cincinnati Nightmare”). He seeks help from his Uncle Albert, a lawyer, his “friends,” a nightclub operator, and, finally, a clergyman, all disabled, unable, or unwilling to help. Carter loses everything, and is eventually beaten to death.

​

The subject matter is a grim commentary on the past, but it has retained its relevance over the course of nearly 60 years into the present, which even a short study of history and current events will affirm. There is little “lyricism,” meaning music that is melodic and/or strictly tonal. The vocal lines are mostly syllabic or declamatory, launching into rare coloratura, almost always by a soprano in a situation that requires extreme emotional expression. 

​

Stylistically, the opera should be understood as a “third stream” work: the jazz and symphonic elements cannot be separated and classified as independent genres or types that can be experienced at a club or in a concert hall. The main musical substance is in the twelve-tone idiom. There are a number of additional styles and sounds integrated into the whole, including two rock ‘n roll juke box numbers and a New Orleans funeral procession. The jazz combo plays onstage, where appropriate, and in the pit. Gunther described the compositional process as a melding of two styles, “something that can be done nowadays, because most modern jazz musicians” can improvise atonally or tonally free. [49] There is a single tone row that governs the entire work, and, as is the norm in twelve-tone composition, other rows are derived from it. For the improvisatory passages, the jazz musicians would improvise on gestures derived from the original row and its progeny. 

 

The Hamburg premiere of The Visitation was an enormous success, rewarded with a lengthy standing ovation. The response to its New York premiere in June of 1967 was quite different. Harold Schoenberg, then lead music critic for The New York Times, described the scene:

​

“When "The Visitation" was over, its composer, Gunther Schuller, came on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera to take a bow. Most of the audience sat on its hands. Of those that did respond, half cheered. The other half booed. Mr. Schuller grinned. There was more cheering, more booing. Then everyone went home convinced [they were] right.”[50]

 

Act V:  Gunther’s Fairy Tale Finale: The Fisherman and His Wife

​

​The Fisherman and His Wife was commissioned by the Junior League of Boston. The organization wanted a children’s opera to celebrate its sixtieth birthday in May 1970. They began planning in 1967 by contacting Sarah Caldwell, who was then enjoying her twelfth season as founder, director, and conductor of the Opera Company of Boston. Caldwell, in her memoir, expressed her excitement and interest in the subject matter and looked forward to collaborating with a composer on a new work. Things, however, did not go as well as she had hoped:

​

“I find it fascinating to work with live composers. Some you can work with easily and some don’t give you any help at all. You don’t work easily with Gunther Schuller. Conversations with him were not enlightening. If I didn’t do precisely what he had in mind, he looked at me as if I were retarded. He managed to antagonize almost everybody involved in this production.”[51]

​

But, there is much more to this story: Gunther was equally displeased with Caldwell because, without consulting with him or telling him, she moved the premiere date of the opera to May 7, two weeks earlier than the original agreement.  He learned about the change through Margie, who had discovered a brief article in The Boston Globe announcing the new date. The news put enormous pressure on Gunther to finish the opera a lot sooner than he had anticipated, requiring the cancellation of a conducting date in Zagreb in order to do so.  But the situation soon deteriorated in a way that neither Caldwell nor Gunther had predicted. [52]

​

By 1970, the Vietnam War had dragged on in one form or another for nearly twenty years. When the US became increasingly involved in what would become a shameful quagmire, the anti-war movement grew proportionately. A series of offenses, including the My Lai massacre in 1968, aroused young people to take action; college campuses were an obvious forum for protest, as they are today. However, it’s easy to imagine that the rarefied music conservatory could remain unaffected by worldly events and continue to “fiddle” as Rome burned, so to speak. Not so at the New England Conservatory, then under the watch of a very socially conscious president, Gunther Schuller. In April of 1970, the North Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and the US launched the so-called “Cambodian Campaign.” Protests escalated on university campuses and on May 4 US National Guardsmen sent to quell the uprising killed 4 unarmed students on the Kent State University Campus. The response was nationwide outrage, and at the New England Conservatory, students called for a strike.

​

Gunther Schuller, of course, was already composing The Fisherman and His Wife, which was scheduled to premiere on May 6 at the Savoy Theater. [53] He had only three days to deal with the catastrophe at school and finish his opera. A “New England Conservatory Student Strike Press Office” was established to handle communications and Gunther set about finding a meaningful and peaceful solution to the student unrest. The students sent a Strike Proposal to the faculty with two demands:

 

“1. We the students recommend to the administration and faculty that all graduation exercises be cancelled.

 

  2. We the students recommend to the administration and faculty that all facilities be kept open here until the end of the school year,          May 31, 1970.”[54]

 

In addition, the Black Student Committee sent a “Manifesto” and, while numerous alumni supported the students, most of them expressed outrage at even the idea of cancelling Commencement. Nonetheless, on May 8, the Board of Trustees of the Conservatory voted to cancel all graduation activities. Gunther, however, devised a creative and meaningful response to the war and the strike: a two-week musical “Peace Marathon” that took place in Jordan Hall uninterrupted between May 14 and 16. There was a concert or event every hour round the clock; the program lists a roster of dearly departed NEC eminences, including Rudolph Kolisch, Russell Sherman, John Heiss, and Lyle Davidson.

​

Gunther wrote letters to worried and unhappy alumni and donors, before, during, and after the premiere of his opera. Somewhat like the Light Brigade in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s iconic poem, Gunther, under siege, managed it all, composing the last bits of The Fisherman and His Wife on the morning of the first performance, handing off manuscript pages to a team of copyists who, while holed up in a local Holiday Inn, produced the orchestra parts and whisked them off to the theater. At the end of the autograph manuscript, Gunther wrote,

“End of Opera/Hallelujah!/ the morning/ of the 1st/ performance/ May 6th, 1970/ Boston.”[55] 

​

Later, on July 9, 1970, Gunther published a letter to alumni expressing his thoughts about the events of the previous May. He pointed out that none of the students acted in a “radical” or violent way; they protested in the best way possible:

​

“Our students voted to express their feelings, not by roaming the streets of Boston creating various kinds of havoc, indulging in often senseless demonstrations, but rather by doing the one thing they knew best: performing music. . . . As it turned out, the New England Conservatory students were almost the only students in the Boston area who, although, on strike, did something constructive during the strike period. . . . Remember that many students began to feel that there was not much point in saving the Conservatory unless they first save the country from the horrors of a senseless war, of air and water pollution, of racial division, of political corruption and the uncontrolled deployment of science and technology. It is their future and the future of music in our society which seems to them to be at stake.”[56]

​*  *. *

 

​Not surprisingly, Gunther had learned the Grimm Brother’s story of “The Fisherman and His Wife” as a child: its episodic and repetitive structure had a certain rhythm to it that a child would find comforting and an adult composer would see as viable scaffolding for an opera. The story is a familiar one: a poor fisherman on a routine day has an encounter with a magical fish, able to grant wishes. The fisherman is content with his cozy hut and hum-drum life style, but his wife, upon learning about the wish-granting fish, initiates a series of growing demands that climax in her desire to become god. With that, an increasingly angry magical fish, sends the couple straight back to their meagre abode, where they learn true happiness. After all, there really is no place like home.

​​

Novelist John Updike agreed to write the libretto; he and Gunther had met in the late 1960s through former Chairman of the NEC Board of Trustees, David Scudder. The result of the collaboration was an opera in one act unfolded in thirteen scenes. The characters include The Fisherman (tenor), The Fisherman’s wife (mezzo-soprano), The Magic Fish (baritone), The Cat [a character added by Updike] (soprano), The Gardener (tenor), and a chorus.

​

The libretto is full of charm and humor, as in the following exchange: [57]

 

“FISH: Fisherman, listen to me! I am not a real fish; I am an enchanted prince. What good will it do to kill me? I shall not taste well. So put me back in the water again, and let me swim! FISHERMAN: Spare me your speeches. A fish that can talk is no fish to eat. I never eat talking fish. They do not taste well. So, back you go in the water again. Swim away.”

​​

There is a ritornello between the episodes of the story in which the Fisherman returns repeatedly to the Fish to ask for another wish, each time beginning with an exhortation: “Man, O man, if man you be, or flounder, flounder in the sea. . . .”

​

The libretto is full of imagery, elaborate stage directions and vivid scene changes that correspond to the Wife’s every wish. By scene VII, the hut has become a cottage and then a castle:

​

“The cottage is now a castle. Windows give on great rural vista; furniture within is large, tapestries, great heavy table, ivory canopied bed, etc. Crucifix now quite dwarfed on the wall. Wife, dressed as medieval lady, seated in throne-like chair, feet off the ground. Cat dressed in frilled collar, velvet slouch hat with plume, boots, holds guitar. Servants, maids dusting, footmen in attendance, etc.”

​

Lighting plays an important role, as each successive demand elicits a reaction from nature: the sky transforms over time from faint yellow and green to purple and murky blue to dark grey to a red-tinted sky, emitting “the feeling of damnation,” and finally, “Storm, lightning, sea quite black, the pit of creation.” The importance of color extends to the orchestra, which is small, but richly hued, comprising: flute (doubling on piccolo and alto flute), oboe (doubling on English horn), clarinet in Eb (doubling on bass clarinet), alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, bassoon (doubling on contrabassoon), 2 trumpets, French horn, trombone, tuba, 2 percussionists, electric guitar, harp, celesta (doubling on piano), Hammond organ, 6 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos, and 2 double basses. 

​

The music is eclectic, ranging from jazz to impassioned grand-opera lyricism; the score is character-driven, but also a clear response to the repetitive structure of the story:  it’s possible to understand the whole as theme and variations that accrues complexity, volume, and intensity in a giant crescendo that rebounds quickly to its soft beginnings once the Fisherman and his Wife are returned to their hut.

​

 Critical response was mixed. Michael Steinberg of the Boston Globe set a snarky tone in his review by quipping, “Going by what I saw and heard on Friday, the thing laid an egg.”[58] He praised the libretto, but called the music “devoid of profile . . . lacking anything arresting or memorable.” Steinberg did, however note the clarity of the score and its response to the form of the story:

​

“It is clear that there is a musical and dramatic plan to the score, and it comes through plainly enough on a single hearing; you can, in other words, at any given moment hear what Schuller means to be producing.”[59]

​

Epilogue: Gunther Gets the Last Word

​

Opera was invented by a group of Florentine intellectuals around 1600, and since then, composers, performers, theorists, and critics have worried about its future. Those concerns resulted in several major periods of operatic reform that almost always hinged on the relationship between words and music; in theory, opera had to return to an imagined classical ideal: simple plots, syllabic vocal settings, and less emphasis on vocal virtuosity. In a 1967 article for Opera News, “The Future of Opera,” Gunther took a different perspective by thinking about the fate of opera in the context of rapidly changing musical materials and values. [60]  The final words of that essay seem relevant today:

​

“Opera is still a superb arena for the projecting of dramatic situations, emotional states, philosophies, even political creeds, not to mention the sheer joy of experiencing that most personal of musical instruments, the human voice. There is a timelessness about these ingredients to which human hearts and minds will continue to respond. The care and feeding of opera is, of course, a precarious business; and if the operatic masterpieces of the twentieth century are still small in number, they have nevertheless proven that opera is capable of development and rejuvenation, and […] of absorbing its conquerors.”[61]

​​

Footnotes:

[1] University of Rochester Press, 2011.

[2] A Life, 16.

[3] A Life, 15. He sang the 1845 version as he is quick to note in his autobiography.

[4] A Life, 582, n. 8.

[5] A Life, 39. Gunther sang both parts, since the characters sang in dialogue and not together.

[6] Gunther sang the role of Gabriel, Robert Betts (tenor) sang Uriel, and Robert Crawford sang Raphael. See the Music logs of the St. Thomas Church, as led by T. Tertius Noble, May 1913-June 1943, transcribed by Joseph Cody Causby, “Who dares stand idle? Thomas Tertius Noble: A Life in Church Music 1867-1953,” PhD dissertation (Durham University [UK], 2014), 187-888, especially 787, 799, 811, and 823.

[7] A Life, 40.

[8] His single endeavor was the comic opera Killibegs. See W.G. Alcock, “Mr. T. Tertius Noble,” The Musical Times 54/840 (1 February 1913): 97. The opera was presented in 1911 with a book written by K.E.T. Wilkinson. The opera follows the style of Gilbert and Sullivan. Noble also conducted the “Hiawatha Trilogy” by Black British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor (1875-1912). See “Other Towns,” The Musical Times 53/827 (1 January 1912): 52.

[9] Modern Harmony, its Explanation and Application (London: Augener, 1915). The book has been reprinted several times and is still highly regarded.  A pdf of the first printing is available on ISMLP: https://imslp.org/wiki/Modern_Harmony,_its_explanation_and_application_(Hull,_Arthur_Eaglefield)

[10] A Life, 54.

[11] T. Tertius Noble, “T. Tertius Noble’s Fifty-years’ Career as Church Musician,” The Diaposon 22/4 (1 March 1931): 35.

​[12] A Life, 82.

[13] A Life, 4.

[14] A Life, 48.

[15] Mitropoulos never provided an explanation for his reaction to the idea. See A Life, 556 and 626, n. 64.

[16] A Life, 72.

[17] Opened 1905, demolished 1939, the Hippodrome was located on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets. It had a capacity of 5,200.

[18] A Life, 75.

[19] A Life, 21.  Gunther described May and his stories (572, n. 8): “Karl May’s stories were to German kids what Zane Grey’s and Max Brand’s Westerns were to Americans. May’s books were hugely popular in Germany, especially Winnetou (1893) and Old Shatterhand (1894). What is truly remarkable about May’s work is that he never visited America or any of the other exotic places (North Africa, East Asia) in which he placed his novels. Incredibly, he wrote almost all his books in prison (spending many, many years in jail for a series of petty crimes). His writings are filled with an astonishing array of fascinating detail, conceived almost wholly out of his own vivid imagination, although, I would guess, with occasional doses of Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain thrown in.”

[20] A Life, 56.

[21] Originally published 1898 by Herbert Stone, London, and reprinted and re-edited many times.

[22] A Life, 328.

[23] A Life, 313-317.

[24] See A Life, 54 and 65.  NB: Gunther became a bass baritone after his voice broke in the summer of 1940.

[25] A Life, 313.

[26] Gerl premiered the role of Sarastro in The Magic Flute and also sang the roles of Don Giovanni, Figaro, and Osmin. The concert aria Mozart wrote for Gerl is a pastoral serenade in D major and 6/8 time, most similar, perhaps to Don Giovanni’s “Deh, vieni alla finestra,” in the same key and meter.

[27] He played in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra from 1945-1959.

[28] Noteworthy is an unusually difficult and highly placed third horn solo in Act I of Die Meistersinger. See A Life, 295 and 593, n. 40.

[29] Cited 43 times in A Life, notably 244, 279, and 280

[30] The pedal continues for approximately 250 measures.

[31] A Life, 281.

[32] A Life, 393.

[33] A Life, 393.

[34] A Life, 575, n. 27.

[35] A Life, 282. The reference to Siepi and Tsar Boris is on p. 408.

[36] A Life, 300.

[37]  A Life, 452-455.

[38] A Life, 306. That scene, “An Encounter,” takes place in Act I.

[39] A Life, 529. Von Einem’s opera was premiered at the Salzburg Festival on August 17, 1953. The performance the Schullers heard in Berlin was likely within two years of that initial run.

[40] See Rebecca Schmidt, “Salzburg Pays Tribute to Gottfried von Einem” [review of the 2018 revival of the opera at the Salzburg Festival], The New York Times [international edition], July 18, 2018. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/arts/music/gottfried-von-einem-rebirth-salzburg-festival.html  Accessed July 29, 2025. 

[41] A Life, 437.

[42] Schuller, “Concerning My Opera The Visitation,” in Schuller, Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (Oxford University Press, 1989), 230.

[43] Musings, 231.

[44] See, for example, Mile Davis' Porgy and Bess recording project with Gil Evans (1958), which Gunther discusses in some detail in A Life, 384, 465-470.  See, also, David Gutkin, “American Opera, Jazz, and Historical Consciousness, 1924-1994,” PhD dissertation (Columbia University, 2015), who offers a detailed discussion of Gunther’s score for The Visitation.

[45] A Life, 290.

[46] I have not (to date) located a source in which Gunther discusses the meaning of his title.

[47] There are many German dictionaries that provide these meanings, in print and online, including Langenscheidt’s, available at:  https://en.langenscheidt.com/german-english/heimsuchung

[48] Schuller, The Visitation, libretto (Associated Music Publishers, 1967), 1.

[49] See the Documentary about The Visitation.  These particular comments occur at 9’ 45”. The video is available on the Gunther Schuller Society website: https://www.guntherschullersociety.org/films-and-docs

[50] Harold Schoenberg, review of the American premiere of The Visitation, The New York Times, 30 June 1967: https://www.nytimes.com/1967/06/30/archives/opera-the-visitation-in-debut-here-boatwright-sings-lead-in.html?searchResultPosition=2

[51] Sarah Caldwell and Rebecca Matlock, Challenges: A Memoir of My Life in Opera (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 61-62.

[52] Gunther offers an account of the turmoil in the days before the premiere of the opera in a video, “The Storm before the Calm: the Story of Gunther Schuller’s opera The Fisherman and His Wife.” His account of the debacle over the premiere date begins about seven minutes into the discussion. Available online:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxI3Rvij_tQ

[53] The theater later became known as the Boston Opera House.

[54] New England Conservatory Archive, Gunther Schuller Box 3, Folder 12—Strike 1970. All information and documents pertaining to the strike were retrieved from this same source. My sincere thanks to Maryalice Perrin-Mohr, New England Conservatory archivist, for all of her help.

[55] There was a student preview on May 6, but the official premiere took place on May 7. Gunther’s autograph score can be viewed at: https://issuu.com/scoresondemand/docs/fisherman_and_his_wife_32662?fr=sZGU1YzcyMzYxOTk

[56] The New England Conservatory Alumni News 2/2 (July 1970): 3.

[57] All references to the libretto are taken from the booklet enclosed in the recording of the opera by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose. BMOP/ Sound 1070 (2020).

[58] Michael Steinberg, “The Fisherman/A Review,” The Boston Globe, 9 May 1970, 10. 

[59] Steinberg, 10.

[60] The essay was reprinted in Musings, 168-173.

[61] Musings, 173.

​

​

•    •   •

​

​

​