Gene Scheer. Photograph by Kate Russell.
In early March, a new production of Moby-Dick will open at the Metropolitan Opera. In some ways, Moby-Dick already has everything an opera needs: narrative drama, memorable characters, high stakes, and even the high seas. But to adapt Herman Melville’s classic text—sometimes called the most famous novel no one has ever read—into a three-hour stage production was no small feat. (Remember, after all, all those chapters in the middle about whale anatomy and theology?) Gene Scheer wrote the libretto for Moby-Dick, and composer Jake Heggie wrote the music; it was originally commissioned by the Dallas Opera. It was first performed there in 2010, and has since gone on to audiences in San Francisco, San Diego, Calgary, and elsewhere. We talked to Scheer about the process of adapting Moby-Dick into an opera—and doing the same for Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which comes to the Met in September. We touched on the nuts and bolts of staging whaleships, borrowing from and changing Melville’s language, and the surprising similarities between opera and silent film.
INTERVIEWER
Were you at all overwhelmed by the prospect of adapting Moby-Dick?
GENE SCHEER
When the composer, Jake Heggie, said to the Dallas Opera, “We want to do Moby-Dick,” the artistic director Jonathan Pell asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to do?” So, yes. It was a daunting prospect, and it took a long time to figure out a way into it. For the first six months of the process, I just read and reread the book, which I hadn’t done since high school—and back then I probably skipped some chapters. I was also reading criticism about it. I was concerned not just with how to cut it down but also with how to really adapt it for the stage. The nature of Moby-Dick, or any novel, is that it’s telling a story. The narrator is very prominent. In the theater, we’re in the business of showing a story. Rather than what the characters are saying, it’s a question of what they’re doing and how the action can bring life to the story. But I could also see the possibilities immediately for the adaptation. There’s so much about Moby-Dick that is operatic—the language, the themes, and the power of the story. Throughout the book, there are these dramatic, incredibly poetic passages that I could imagine being sung, especially if they were distilled down. And the thing about Moby-Dick is that while it is a very long book and one that’s deep and dense, it does have a very compelling adventure story at the center of it. I knew we could exploit that.
INTERVIEWER
Where did you begin?
SCHEER
If there’s a trick to writing a libretto, it’s thinking first about what’s happening onstage and not about what characters are saying. With that in mind, I realized early on that since the novel is narrated by Ishmael many years after the fact, I needed to change the dynamic of the story so that we’re watching Ishmael get on that boat as the only person who’s never been on a whaleboat before. This is why I call him Greenhorn. And we’re watching him as he’s taking in everything that happens—and ultimately, we watch him take on various perspectives on how to live one’s life. So my first decision, made together with Jake, was to make the first line of the book the last line of the opera, with the idea that since Ishmael has had this experience, which we’ve shared with him, he can go off now and tell the story. At the end of the opera, when the captain asks him, “Who are you?” he says, “Call me Ishmael.” I really wanted to tell the story in what I call “real time,” not as a memory someone was narrating. Then you can see things come to life. I wanted the audience to watch it all just take place, to watch Ishmael experience this adventure, which, again, prepares him to be able to tell the story of how his life changed.
INTERVIEWER
I noticed that the stage directions seem to do more work in this libretto than in others I’ve read, possibly because there’s so much action in the novel and thus the opera. How did you distill the narrative into those directions?
SCHEER
There were many more stage directions in earlier drafts. When this process started—and this is what I normally do—I wrote a forty-to-fifty-page treatment, which no one ever saw, of how the opera would unfold. And then I got that down to fifteen pages, which the composer saw, and then ten pages, which the dramaturge, Leonard Foglia, saw. It ultimately wound up being seven or eight pages and served as an outline for the work that I ended up doing later. But it started with a forty-to-fifty-page account of how each of these moments would unfold.
For instance, early in the opera, after Ahab has rallied the crew to hunt down Moby-Dick, they take their harpoons and drink out of them, as they do in the book. Starbuck, the first mate, gets this young Greenhorn-Ishmael character and instructs him on his duties as a tub-oarsman in a whaleboat. But while he’s explaining, he becomes so overwhelmed with thinking about the possibility of not seeing his children again, and what’s at stake here, that he hands off the responsibility to Queequeg. Then Queequeg and Ishmael continue, and their relationship develops. None of that is in the text of the libretto, or the stage directions, but I wrote it down before I began.
INTERVIEWER
Some of the text of the libretto comes directly from the novel. How did you approach that assemblage of Melville’s work and yours?
SCHEER
If there was any text that I could use from the book, I would use it. Sometimes I would use a key phrase from the book and then write around it. And in other places, there are long passages that are just really edited down from the book. Sometimes I changed certain things and kept others. In the first act, when the crew first sees a pod of whales and Ahab refuses to lower the whaleboats Moby-Dick isn’t among them—that’s not in the book. But it’s a way of distilling the conflict between Ahab’s desires to kill Moby-Dick and the crew’s desires to make money. Later, Starbuck says, Look, these guys have to earn some cash. There’s going to be a mutiny if you don’t allow them to go. And so Ahab says, “They pant like dogs for cash.” This draws from a line in the novel, about how “cash would soon cashier Ahab.” I used that line as a point of departure. It’s like when you throw a stone into a pond. But one of the things that’s so profound about Moby-Dick, is that when you drop the stone into the pond, it ripples out in an asymmetric way. Certain things are highlighted and certain other things aren’t. So the cetology, the history of whaling, all the stuff that is woven into the text of the novel—I’m trying to get that feel, all while telling this story of adventure and story of conflict that happens if you try to control the world, which ultimately is beyond anyone’s control.
INTERVIEWER
How did your collaboration with Jake Heggie work in this instance?
SCHEER
Our collaboration mirrored what has been traditional in opera—the writing happened first. When you think of La bohème, for example, that libretto was written completely before the music was composed. It took two years to write it, and Puccini was very demanding of the two guys who were writing it, but he didn’t really compose the music until it was done. That’s what happened here as well. I did my six months of—call it research. I had notes, which I shared with Jake, about how the story might unfold, and then we went to the Nantucket Whaling Museum together, and we started talking more about it. Then I wrote a draft of the opera libretto, which I shared with Jake, two or three scenes at a time, to get his input. Things changed based on the back-and-forth between us. And then when we had a draft done, we shared it with the dramaturge, Lenny, and we met in San Francisco at Jake’s studio, the three of us, and just went through it, dramatic beat by dramatic beat.
INTERVIEWER
Tell me a bit about the visit to the Nantucket Whaling Museum. What were you looking for there?
SCHEER
It really was a pivotal moment. I had done my due diligence and read lots of books on whaling. I read a fantastic book from the late forties, probably the most important book I read, called The Trying-out of Moby-Dick by Howard Vincent, about the sources Melville assembled in order to write the novel. But there’s something about being in the museum and seeing the models and the actual whale boats. There were so many things that found their way into the opera based on that visit. And one, which was absolutely crucial, happened when I was looking at a model of a whaling ship. I saw that there are three mastheads with crow’s nests. I had just missed this in my reading. I assumed that there was one guy or two guys on a single masthead who would be on lookout. But there were three. And then I thought, Oh my God. Queequeg gets sick on the ship and has Ishmael make a coffin because he assumes he’ll die. I knew he had to get sick, but I didn’t know when. Looking at this model, I saw what would happen if these two close friends were on two mastheads when Queequeg gets sick, and Ishmael is unable to reach him because he is on the other masthead. It was a very theatrical way of depicting what’s happening. Imagine two close friends, and one of them is going to fall off the masthead because he is convulsed with pain, and his friend is unable to help him. It’s a very dramatic point of departure, even without words.
INTERVIEWER
We keep returning to the challenge of dramatization without language. How do you think about that when writing a libretto?
SCHEER
Ironically, the art form that opera has the most in common with is silent film. In silent films, the gestures are so much larger than in later films. The subtlety in a silent film comes principally from the cinematography. With opera, it’s very similar. Think of the operatic gesture, the broad dramatic gesture. In the opening act of La bohème, Mimi is coming up the stairs, holding an unlit candle. And Rodolfo sees her and lights the candle, and then she drops her key on the floor. He takes the key and puts it in his pocket, because he doesn’t want her to go, and then he pretends to be looking for the key, and he takes her hand. All of that is part of the libretto, not part of the staging. Then Rodolfo sings, “Che gelida manina,” or “How cold your little hand is.” He sings the aria, but everything is set up by the action I just described. You can imagine that in a silent film all of this could happen without any words—a person comes up to get her candle lit, the guy sees her, she drops the keys on the floor, everything.
With the silent film as my North Star in a way, I was imagining Ishmael-Greenhorn on top of one mast, Queequeg on top of the other, and Queequeg gets deathly sick, and he’s reaching out for Ishmael-Greenhorn. You see Ahab on the deck saying, “Hold your post; don’t come down.” And Ishmael-Greenhorn says, “But my friend.” All of this could happen with almost no text, just with pictures, right? If you look at every scene in Moby-Dick, you really could break it down as a silent film. That’s part of writing the action for the libretto. Then, of course, the magic sauce is the music. In the end, the subtlety and depth opera comes from the music, and my job is to set it up so that the music can win the day. That’s what cinematography does for a silent film, and what music does for opera.
SCHEER
You also wrote an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Did you approach the scenes in a similar way?
INTERVIEWER
It was a very similar process, with a similar but unique challenge. I was overwhelmed with the task of Kavalier & Clay, in a way even more so than with Moby-Dick. It’s true that Moby-Dick is a very long novel, and yes, a very profound and deep novel, and there’s a lot about portraying whale hunts and so forth that is challenging, but the story is very concentrated. It’s very focused. The whale bites the guy’s leg off, and he wants to get revenge, you know? The challenge with Kavalier & Clay, right from the get-go, was the length of time that the story takes to unfold. I had to be very bold in terms of compressing it, because I didn’t want to tell a story that took place over fifteen years. The story in the libretto takes place over four years or so. And once you change that one thing, you change lots of things. So it required not just cutting but also finding ways of reinventing the story.
INTERVIEWER
How did you deal with that challenge of time?
SCHEER
With Kavalier & Clay, the big aha moment for me was to bring three different worlds to life, each of which had distinct musical styles, distinct looks, and distinct textures. First, there is the world of the Holocaust, the world of Europe. The composer Mason Bates and I brought this to life with a harsher tone that depicted what was going on in Europe in the thirties. And then when the protagonist, Joe, comes to New York after the war, it’s the Superman comic-book world, it’s the Chrysler Building, it’s the energy of these immigrants who are arriving. It’s the Jazz Age. It’s swing music and warmth and life and the energy that was going through the world, clearly in response to the war, but also just as part of America blooming into a new age. And then the third world was that of the art itself, the world of the comic-book characters that is being created by Joe and his cousin. Mason created this electro-infused musical style to animate that world. We have these three distinct musical and visual worlds, so that when Joe discovers that his sibling has perished and his entire family is gone, and he runs away from Rosa without any explanation because he’s so distraught and lost, we have a way of depicting it by letting these three musical worlds collide. And that’s what happens.
INTERVIEWER
How do you think about your role in writing a libretto?
SCHEER
There’s an old Spencer Tracy line—he told Burt Reynolds, “Don’t let them catch you acting.” It’s a bit like that with writing a libretto. The problem with many librettos, especially those written over the past thirty years or so, is that they depend too much on language to tell the story. They become scripts rather than librettos. And then you have a lot of words dancing on top of chords. That is not, I think, the most winning formula for writing a really compelling opera. What you want is to distill it down so that the music can really convey the emotional stakes, and the reality of these characters. Which is not to say a great turn of phrase can’t be really important, and I hope I have been able to provide that in both of these pieces. But the thing that ultimately is going to dictate the power of these operas, or any opera, is how the music succeeds in telling the story. Because in the end, why sing? That’s one of the big questions. Why are these people singing instead of speaking? And it’s because they need music in order to express what’s going on in their hearts and what’s at stake in their lives. And that’s why stakes are usually very high in operas—so we have to distill whatever those are down into text, down into scenes, so that the music can be the marrow of the operatic experience.
Sophie Haigney is The Paris Review’s web editor.
