#29
Songs from the Underworld

Libretto writing is a neglected art. Spellbinding shifts its secret force among the dark initiations of poetry and the relentless transfigurations of music. Adding to the challenge, this art is a public one, a performance, hence ceremonial, and so calls for large-scale composition (compared to the confidential intimacy of a novel or the nanotech precision of lyric poetry). Libretto writing is writ large.

To claim the stage, above the well of the orchestra and before the many eyes and their one way down into the dark of the soul, a libretto has to climb a long inner stairway squeezed between two massive peaks of human experience: music and story. The finished libretto is the leap into this dizzying abyss. Like a cataract, libretto writing plummets through depths, emotional and psychic, serenely at first, a sublime tumult of mounting percussive drive, ultimately violent, exploding on the existential rocks, and then running off with our hearts in many streams of consciousness as the audience disperses.

Think how profoundly different that is from fiction, where the reader, usually solitary, comes and goes freely. With libretto writing, we are in collective attendance as wedding festoons at the feverish coupling of Logos with Eros.

My fantasy libretto, which I've been writing since high school, is “Songs from the Underworld.” I will sacrifice a goat if it's ever produced. Like librettists before me, I feel music eroticizes language so powerfully, the copulation of rhythm and meaning concentrates life to an ecstatic state, where we briefly stand alongside being and nothing. No wonder the ancient dream of retrieving the dead with music and poetry!

The first opera, J. Peri’s “Euridice,” and the first great opera, C. Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,” both draw inspiration from the Greek myth of retrieving the bride from the underworld. What compels us to this ground where the earth closed over Eurydice? What else but the hope of finding her again.

“Songs from the Underworld” ritualizes the grief of a fashion designer, Leander Beausoleil. Despondent at the failure of his latest line, he attempts suicide, initiating his journey to the underworld with a handful of oxycodone and a tumbler of peaty Islay whisky. The angel of darkness, who greets him in the realm of the shades, reveals herself as Persephone, Queen of the Dead. Bored with her classic wardrobe, she commands her new subject to design for her a fresh contemporary look.

The Queen wearies of the heteroglossia of the lachrymose dead, the oceanic droning from the gulf of irreversible sorrow that has been her apparel since Hades stole her away from the world of light. Among phantoms, garments are not material. Fabric is feeling and takes the form of music. The vast silence of the underworld numbs the common dead. Flitting, vaporous sounds swathe brighter souls. And great spirits dance to the cadence of vanishing.

Meanwhile, in the world of the living…

Leander lies comatose in a hospital bed, where his cutter, Rose Morgenstern, watches over him anxiously. Her career in the fashion industry evolved out of Leander’s genius, and she despairs that she is losing him. She has loved him from the first, though she has never told him, having sensed that he does not feel the same for her. Exhausted by grief, she falls asleep and wakes in the underworld.

Leander needs her help. His initial efforts to win the admiration of the Queen of the Dead failed. Rose, with her ambition, her faith in Leander’s talent, and her love for him, restores the driving impetus of their collaboration. She has had a dim view of her own talent, projecting all her skill and taste onto her partner, whom she has always considered masterful. In the underworld, they exchange attributes.

The story climaxes with a rampshow of musical and fashion fervor that wins the Dark Queen’s approval ... and the fateful ascent of the creative couple to the upper world.

“Songs from the Underworld” develops as an epistrophe --- a return through likeness --- literally, a turning about. In this work of story, music and couture, we go back to ancient myth and the earliest opera, and we see them new, remade in the style and images of our time. We, both artists and audience, experience the Orphic event. When we look back, we return the myth and the first opera to the underworld, the imaginary compass wherein they originated.

What we retrieve from this artistic event is exactly what Orpheus himself brought back from his incursion into the underworld --- nothing. This is the prime and ultimate enigma of life: the emergence of being out of nothingness. Only art can approach it.

The very name --- theater --- looks back to the Greek, “to behold.” In this act of beholding, we journey to the underworld, we face the mystery, and when the mystery that lured us disappears into itself, we return to the outer world with nothing but the experience. The journey is the art.