I’m very pleased to have this opportunity to interview Daron Hagen, the prolific composer, about his new film/opera Orson Rehearsed. The film explores the moment after Welles’ heart has stopped, and he lingers in the bardo, the moment between life and death as his thoughts and life flash before him. This is a powerful film accompanied by powerful music.
UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): Orson Rehearsed is set in the mind of Orson Welles in the moment between life and death. First off, why Orson Welles?
Daron Hagen (DH): Several years ago, my cardiologist diagnosed me as having the same degenerative congenital heart defect that took my namesake older brother’s life. Like any mindful person, I began taking stock. Since I’m an artist by inclination and profession, I began looking for a creative project that might facilitate that stocktaking. I’ve been fascinated with the mind of the great American director, actor, visual artist, and social activist Orson Welles since childhood — as a Wisconsin kid in sixth grade, for example, I was permitted to recreate over the school’s public address system for Halloween the complete War of the Worlds broadcast. I have striven to “become” every major character of every one of the dozen operas I have composed over the past as I wrote them. Welles lived a rich, intelligent, soulful life; naturally, I reached out to him to serve as my avatar.
(UM):The Filmopera was shot in Chicago, various parts of the US and Nicaragua. This is quite a tantalizing list of locations. Can you describe the production? How long did it take? What brought you to Nicaragua?
(DH): The interior of the beautiful old Studebaker Theater in the Chicago Loop stood in for the interior of Welles’ mind inasmuch as it served as the site for shooting the physical live performance component of the film. Each year (depending on politics and pandemics) our family spends as much time as we can at a humble cottage on an estuary on Nicaragua’s west coast. It allows us not only to visit with our relatives there but enables my composer wife and me to take time to sketch new creative projects. I shot a lot of the films-within-the-opera-within-
Production itself took 18 days from discovery to load out. The Chicago College of Performing Arts, which co-produced the live production, booked us four days in the Studebaker Theater. Chicago-based Atlas Arts Media documented two live performances and the dress rehearsal with three stationary cameras and one rover. They also facilitated the live playback of my pre-recorded electro-acoustic tracks and the screening of the three onstage films in performance with the onstage acoustic instrumentalists (Fifth House Ensemble, a terrific new music group in Chicago) and the three singers who portrayed Welles. They did a terrific job. I left town with hard drives full of audio and video that I then spent the next two years manipulating in the editing bay.
(UM): This is, I believe, your directorial debut. Could you tell us about your approach to film direction?
(DH): This is my first film, but I’ve stage directed a fair amount. During a staging rehearsal of my opera A Woman in Morocco at the Actors Theatre of Louisville for Kentucky Opera (it’s a three-quarter thrust stage) utilizing Welles framing techniques and Grotowski “poor theatre” conventions when David Roth, the artistic director of the company, observed to me that really it looked like I was directing a three camera Rod Serling teleplay for live broadcast. At that point, we couldn’t afford to emplace cameras (I still regret that) but he was absolutely right. I took the same approach for the film. The big difference, of course, is that in “Orson” I directed the onstage action knowing that an enormous number of storyboarded transparencies and overlays not possible in the theater would be mixed in later, when I edited the film.
(UM):Orson Welles is supposed to have said that “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” What limitations did you struggle with in making Orson Rehearsed?
(DH): Welles’ comment echoes a paradoxical observation that Stravinsky makes in Poetics of Music: “My freedom consists in my … moving ahead within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.” The irony is that Welles made Citizen Kane — relatively speaking — without limitations. And then they came. Boy, did they come. Sooner or later and for whatever reasons, limitations, like death, will come. When they do, how we cope with them is a measure not just of our creativity but our character. There were all the usual limitations—money, of course, and time. But I entered into the thing in the spirit of adventure resolved to lift up everyone involved. One learns at some point that grace and genuine collaboration begin when you learn to play the clarinet in the room, not the one in your head.
(UM): As a follow up, I’m personally not an expert on music, but I very much enjoy and admire composers such as yourself, John Adams and Steve Reich. I once saw John Adams conduct his piece, City Noir and I was astonished at how vital and energizing it was. But to my inexpert ears, this seems to be music without limitations. Or perhaps the freedom composers have today is somehow its own limitation? Could you comment on the role of freedom and limitation in your work?
(DH): Inspiration’s the key, of course. I make a conscious effort to imagine musical environments that defy conventional notation. Having developed the chops to conceal one’s chops enables a composer to create music that sounds inevitable and spontaneous, without limitations, free—even inspired when one feels anything but. It’s easy to sound complex; it’s hard to sound easy. Without diving too deep down the rabbit hole, I will observe that a lot of the music created with digital audio workstations (DAW) is pedal point- and beat-driven; if harmony and counterpoint play a role, then it is a rudimentary one. There’s not a lot of emotional depth to it. Superimposing notated music that is “off the rhythmic grid” on music that is on the grid is easy in Logic, but difficult in the real world. The same is true with complex harmony and thematic and motivic development.
(UM): One of my favourite moments musically was during the “Manhattan Ambulance Ride,” when there’s a brief and catchy piano tune (this is while we see the newspaper headlines about the War of the Worlds broadcast). But we only hear this one time. I once heard a professor of classical music say, “do it one time – it’s a mistake. Two times – genius. Three times – too much.” I also once read a review of Verdi’s Falstaff that made the same point; the opera had several fantastic phrases that were only repeated once. Could you comment on this?
(DH): Like a capstone at the top of the dramaturgical pyramid, the very most important moment in an opera must, as Verdi knew so well, happen but once. Puccini knew, for example, exactly how long to make people wait for it. After that, it can be alluded to, but never literally repeated. Orson Rehearsed is comprised of dozens of musical motives and textures that undergo constant shuffling and alteration. They serve to spin the psychological and emotional web, or rhetoric of the piece’s world. Spinning that web of reality is half the fun of being an opera composer.
I love that your ear was tickled by that little ragtime riff in the piano. It is meant to embody the manic joyfulness of Welles’ heyday. Shakespeare’s witches speak in triads, of course; and there is the “rule of three” in poetry and visual art. Your professor was probably referring to literal (or “exact”) musical repetition. Recontextualization is everything. Franz Liszt, in his great B Minor Sonata, took three ideas and, through a developmental technique called thematic transformation, spun them into a thirty-minute piece! When the little eight measure tune you refer to returns as a poignant three-minute piano piece for the End Credits in Orson Rehearsed, it serves as balm and affectionate recollection of Welles’ heyday.
(UM): We see a quote from Welles in what I assume was his last interview for Merv Griffin, when he says, “I’m not an essentially happy person. But I have all kinds of joy.” Since this film is, in layman’s terms, Orson’s life flashing before his eyes, do you think he’s in the process of assessing his life and judging whether it was a life well-lived? Or, since we hear the word “edit” so often here, is he trying to make sense of his life, or shape it into a story that makes some sort of sense at the end?
(DH): Yes to all of that. A “life review,” as we all know, is a phenomenon widely reported as occurring during near-death experiences, in which a person rapidly sees much or the totality of their life history. After all, an unexamined human life, as Socrates reminds us, is deprived of the meaning and purpose of existence. I’ve been fascinated with transitional states — what anthropologist Victor Turner describes as being between “no longer and not yet” — all my life.
Who doesn’t wish they could go back and edit what they once said and did? In Welles’ case, the loss of creative control that others editing his work constituted must have felt as profound a violation as a composer sitting in a concert hearing their piece badly performed. Human beings have a tendency to believe that they can control or at least influence outcomes when, in fact, they cannot. Artists can control an awful lot … at least until they collaborate. Hence, the failing, stuttering heartbeat of “Edit, edit, edit” that flows through Orson Rehearsed as his heart literally fails him.
(UM): As another follow-up, at the end of Beat X, Orson brags about living well, gambling only seven days a week, only occasionally kissing his children and forgetting what the inside of a church looked like. But then he falls to his knees and says that he repents, and that maybe he did forget. This is a very powerful moment. But here, he can’t be talking about forgetting what the inside of a church looked like. What did Orson forget?
(DH): When Orson sings all that he is singing my gloss on Shakespeare’s great Falstaff Credo speech. As in all the repurposing of Welles’ beloved Bard in Orson Rehearsed it serves as a way to probe his psyche. What did he forget? It is always better to ask, and not furnish answers, just as only literal-minded amateurs think that an onstage murder with gore is scarier than one that takes place offstage. We all forget things; the things we forget might have been, in the end, more important than the things we remember.
(UM): Do you think film operas such as Orson Rehearsed are the future of opera? What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of this approach?
(DH): COVID-shuttered theaters have compelled bricks-and-mortar opera companies to commission composers, librettists, and directors to create digital content that they can stream to tide their audiences over until we can all gather together again in the dark to assay Plato’s cave. Orson Rehearsed is not a filmed staged production (though a staged production plays a role) like the MET’s theatrical broadcasts; it isn’t a television opera like Menotti’s Amahl. It isn’t an opera written to be sung on film like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. I love all of the existing genres, in all their wild variety. Orson Rehearsed is simply something stubbornly new—something the newness of which is plain to see but hard to explain, like any good magic trick.
by: Darida Rose
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