Foreground — Middle Ground — Background
In the theater it is referred to as “show, don’t tell,” but Orson Rehearsed is really an exercise in what some critics refer to as “emotional algebra,” where the non-linear narrative is comprised of 52 discrete “beats,” each of which shows and tells its own micro-story, that can be presented in any order. Each beat conjures its own set of emotions, of course; but it is ultimately the combination of beats that creates the overall effect, whatever that may be.
Music, words, and visuals — the sofrito of operafilm. The telling of the story is in (a.) the precise managing of the constantly shifting hierarchy of those three elements, (b.) the creation of a web of evolving poetic correlatives between the three, and (c.) a relentless commitment to manifesting the so-called “rule of threes.”
Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, in his Principals of Orchestration, described how people can typically differentiate three things going on in the orchestra at any given time: melody, harmony, and rhythm. Adding a fourth element prompts the listener to combine two of the three original elements to allow for the addition of a new third. Arnold Schoenberg’s string quartets leaned heavily into this triage for their complexity and nuance. Imagine how excited concert music composers were when we could hear, because of advances in recording and mixing techniques, a dozen discrete tracks in the mix of Madonna’s studio album Like a Virgin was released in November 1984. In the case of Orson Rehearsed, the so-called “live” composite soundtrack consisted at all times of at least three levels: a background of pre-recorded electro-acoustic sounds, a middle ground of what the space itself sounded like with the live performances and electro-acoustic pre-records mixed in the theater, and a foreground of the singers’ voices.
Painting, sculpture, and architecture rely on the rule of threes for coherence too. In two dimensions, the middle ground only exists because the foreground and background have been defined. The classic example in film is the shot from Citizen Kane where his parents are in the foreground, Bernstein the banker is in the middle ground, and Charlie is seen through the window on his Rosebud sled in the deep background. For content we have snow, which will end up in the snow globe that falls from his dead grasp at the end of the film, and the Rosebud sled burning in the furnace; instead of Bernstein the banker we now have Charon the butler, and so forth. In three dimensions (staged opera, for example, or sound / art installations), equating time with space can unlock the potential for music to help define what’s important (not to mention what’s being said) at any given instant. In the case of Orson Rehearsed, the subject was a filmmaker, so form followed function by placing the story inside his mind, which was manifested onscreen as the inside of an empty theater.
Non-Linear Narrative: Time in Music = Space in Visual Art
Since music takes place in time, and notated within a metric grid, it underlies traditional western notation like a heartbeat. I created 52 discrete grid-based electro-acoustic beats (all of which last between 3-5 minutes) organized rhythmically over some sort of expression of sixty beats per second. This organization determined, at least locally, a through-narrative beginning in one place and ending in another, unless it was a loop, in which case it created stasis. Each beat considered the eponymous subject of Welles from a different point of view, like circling a statue — the way Edgard Varèse in his music manifested the way Alexander Calder’s mobiles are apprehended.
Positioning live analogue performers playing shifting, non-notated improvisational elements over the steady grid (and superimposing other grids for varying amounts of time in a collagist fashion) served to alter the auditor’s perception of the rate at which time passed; I emulated Olivier Messiaen in creating underlying rhythmic symmetries that further disrupted the “forward” flow of the music — particularly during the all-important endings of beats, where a transition to a new emotional state was bound to take place.
Synchronized with these 52 beats were three sets of 52 short films which were screened over the heads of the three Orsons (young, middle-aged, and old) as they sang onstage. When I edited the film, I folded images from the three films into the “final” cut of the operafilm, which represented how Orson Rehearsed played out this time.
Thinking (and Shooting) in Threes: Id, Ego, and Super-Ego
Since Welles worshipped Shakespeare, who described the world as a stage in As You Like It, I chose to have the stage of the Studebaker Theater in Chicago stand in for the interior of his mind. Analyzing Welles’ films from a Freudian standpoint (they were born on the same day) is something of a cottage industry among film-buffs; it occurred to me that dividing up his self-image into three avatars would be a sensible story-telling strategy: one would be the residual self-image of his rollicking youthful self; another the fully engaged artist of his middle years; and the third his present self, dying.
For the narrative purposes of the operafilm, I manifested his ego by documenting the onstage action with three stationary audience point of view cameras positioned in the left, center, and right balconies, which I then bleached out into a sort of old-fashioned black and white. Luridly hyper-saturated full-color stream-of-consciousness images generated by his id were displayed on the movie screens. Welles’ “real-time” coming to terms with his imminent demise by way of his super-ego would be overlaid as semi-opaque images (screened either red, white, or blue and including an important bit of 30s stock footage of a boy walking away from the camera that stands in for Orson as a child) during the process of editing the id and ego narratives together for the filmic iteration of the work.
Still thinking in threes, the musical rhetoric was derived from (and strictly synchronized with) the visual rhetoric. The electro-acoustic component of the score represented Welles’ id. Acoustic orchestra and the singer avatars were his ego. The composite soundtrack, recorded live in the Studebaker in performance (as I feel that live performance before an audience is the lifeblood of music-drama) so that the electro-acoustic and acoustic (id and ego) mixed naturally, manifested his super-ego.
The electro-acoustic component of the score represented Welles’ id. Acoustic orchestra and the singer avatars were his ego. The composite soundtrack, recorded live in the Studebaker in performance (as I feel that live performance before an audience is the lifeblood of music-drama) so that the electro-acoustic and acoustic (id and ego) mixed naturally, manifested his super-ego.
Welles’ super-ego was expressed as old-fashioned “explanatory” onscreen intertitles framing the following scene, as scrolling text (the interview with Merv Griffin), the heartbreaking cri de cœur from Henry IV (“the true and perfect image of life”), and as a crucial revelation presented almost as an after-thought: “I had forgotten to wish for something.” His ego was expressed by the text sung by the onstage avatars, who sang mainly repurposed pertinent snatches of Shakespeare, (mis)remembered fragments of his interviews, radio broadcasts, and dialogue from scripts. His id erupted in samples of his own voice mixed into the electro-acoustic soundscape—from anguished utterances like “they destroyed Ambersons; the film destroyed me” to tender lines from a 1946 radio broadcast in which he gallantly compares Rita Hayworth to Helen of Troy.
Words, Words, Words
Since each beat functioned like an element in a mobile, every time it appeared it was recontextualized, its elements stripped of their original meaning and repurposed to different ends. I determined as author to (along with sound editing, which I had done before) film edit Orson myself in order to experience firsthand his life at the moviola, cutting film, recontextualizing scenes — whether forced, as in his filmed Othello (1955), when he reset a scene in a Turkish bath because the costumes never arrived; or unforced, as in F for Fake (1974) when he switched up locations to unmoor the narrative from time and place.
A mobile requires a central axis around which the various elements rotate just as the middle ground cannot exist undefined by near and far. I made Welles’ middle, or center, or “truth,” a textual idee fixe, literally a cri de cœur: “Edit! Edit! Edit!” which evoked the juddering sound of his heart in mid-attack while also serving as the mantra of any worthwhile artist. Welles’ edits, I am asserting, were the heartbeat of his search for truth.
To Welles’ beloved Hamlet, seeking the truth, words had lost their meaning; Didi and Gogo spoke gibberish in Waiting for Godot to mock pseudo-intellectuals who thought that they knew what the truth was; Robert Bolt puts these words in Claude Rains’ mouth in his screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia (1962): “The man who tells lies hides the truth, but the man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.” As Welles experiences each of the final heartbeats of his life, the poetic correlatives proliferate: Meister Eckhardt’s admonishment that “only the hand that erases can write the true thing” gets combined with Hamlet, Didi, Gogo, and even Hawkeye’s whistle from Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970).
In a later chapter I draw these themes together and track them as they reappear in all three operafilms, but, for now, I’ll just point out that in I Hear America Singing, Robbie’s truth was derived from his place in the world, and therefore spun around him in the Bardo; in Orson, Welles’ truth is the thing that the beats of his life spun around; in 9/10, the characters’ individual truths, while shared in revelatory, innig arias, gradually merged as they came to realize that the violinist was Charon.
Blocking as Character
By design, the three Orson avatars remained pinned beneath the movie screens playing out their internal dramas. When they did move, their motions were treated as highly stylized visual motifs that were paired with musical motifs: their hands flew to their ears when they sang “Edit!” for example, and “syncopation” was paired with a jabbing hand gesture. “This isn’t real” in various contexts was paired with a hand massaging a sore neck, culminating in Roy Cohn’s Ratso Rizzo squirming, self-pawing turn in the penultimate beat. “Singing” was paired with the outward spread hands of a priest offering a blessing to the congregation. Finally, a hand to the forehead consistently accompanied regret. While the intent of the stylization of movement was to manifest the reflexive movement of the diaphragm which chugs on even after the brain is in most respects dead, one of the chief psychological effects was to accentuate the mind’s inability to break out of its own grip.
Tracking the Web of Words, Music, and Sounds
Except for “All Through,” the aria in which Welles recalls Marc Blitzstein playing the piano onstage during the legendary premiere of The Cradle Will Rock (1937) for which I strung together the words based on John Houseman’s autobiographical account of the evening, every word he sings is drawn from public domain utterances.
These repurposed, recontextualized, and decontextualized fragments of screenplays, interviews, newspaper articles, and essays (all coordinated with images and musical motives) are littered throughout the operafilm, whether uttered by an onstage Orson, or in the form of type scrolling on a screen, or as pre-recorded sound / word collages in the electro-acoustic soundscape or sung / spoken by the orchestra. A lengthy recording session in Chicago in which the Fifth House Ensemble recorded key words and phrases (“Rosebud”, “It was too downbeat”, “Those that still lived had forgotten him”, and a half dozen others) for me yielded up a treasure trove of ghostly voices that are woven into the fabric of the film, always associated with the visual images projected on the screens.
For now, I will set aside an enumeration of the various “sound envelopes” (the ambient room sound of a recording) that come and go during the operafilm, as they cannot really be tracked unless one really digs in for a deep read while wearing earphones. Of the dozens of more easily detected and tracked musical, madeleine-like fragments that flow through Welles’ mind, supplying context to the dramatic beats and visual contexts, many are buried deeply in the electroacoustic (digital) and “live” analogue scores.
The overture, beginning with a crack of thunder and a muttered “Rosebud,” quoted fragments of Henry Mancini’s score to Touch of Evil and Anton Karas’ The Third Man (1948) zither theme, as well as about six seconds of digitally manipulated cascading “spectral trumpets” culled from an archival acoustic recording of my Symphony No. 5. When “Maybe a Man’s Name” quoted a descending chain of seventh chords from Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier (1911) as the Orsons discussed the fleeting nature of artistic achievement, it referred to the Marschallin of course; but it was also meant to allude to my use of the same trope in my own opera Shining Brow (1993) when characterizing architect Louis Sullivan’s achievements.
Welles’ F for Fake monologue appeared in both “Maybe a Man’s Name” opening and the closing “Go on Singing” “choruses” of Orsons as a counterweight to all the “truth seeking” in the piece. At the beginning, he was disoriented, talking to himself; by the end, he was in accord with himself, quite rightly asking what’s in a man’s name, and rightly pointing out that it may not matter much. The “edit” motive is introduced, and the Departing Boy first glimpsed as, alarmed by the heart attack, his mind raced for palliatives in the form of lines from Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Othello, Henry IV, and Julius Caesar.
Transitional sound environments (like the one between “Everybody’s Shakespeare and “Lament for Jacaré”) combined natural sounds like surf (which often was mixed with applause), the Chicago Elevated Train (which was mixed with the sound of ticking clocks and various ticking sounds created by the live orchestra), seagulls (combined with the sound of weeping) before “Myocardial Infarction” and “Jacaré”). Wind Chimes (and backwards tolling bells) were an important ongoing incantatory sound, appearing early on and growing in importance until their climax in “Consider the Chimes,” late in the game. I broke the bass player out of orchestra prison to personify the ghost of Jacaré and turned the orchestra into a choir for “Lament for Jacaré.”
The Departing Boy tied the visual images of tombstones and theater seats together in the “First Nach(t)spiel,” the entire ensemble transformed into a tolling bell / piano / heart monitor / pulse. Snippets of Welles’ voice from interviews were woven into “The Magnificent Downbeats,” as well as a heavily manipulated fragments of a few lines from the film. Accused of having made a film that was too “downbeat,” I associated the word with a beat of Welles’ struggling heart and kept driving at it until his first visual indication of the heart attack, which was accompanied by axial cuts and (rarely used) handheld camera.
Pre-recorded (by Gilda Lyons) fragments of Blitzstein’s music for Olive Stanton as Doll in Cradle are, along with fragments of me as a Spectral Blitzstein saying, “Scene One!” as he did at the start of the historical performance (these gestures return at the end of I Hear America Singing) woven into the music for “All Through,” which also enlists the orchestra to sing as a chorus of Dolls — an effect that I further exploit with Lyons singing not just the role of Eury on the soundtrack of 9/10 but also an entire Greek Chorus of female Restless Spirits. The beat also prominently features the first, clearly identifiable thunderclap (and ensuing rain) in Orson, a sound that returns repeatedly in Orson’s bardo, and which reaches its apotheosis in its reoccurrence in 9/10 when Tony hurls Bibi’s chair to the floor and the rain that accompanies the closing moments of that film begins.
This initiated, under the words “I’m going home now,” (Blitzstein’s original lyric is, of course, “I’m checkin’ home.”) and “I knew we had made history” an allusion to three measures of the instrumental music for strings that immediately precedes the “Rain Quartet” in Marc Blitzstein’s opera Regina (1949), which I also integrate into the “I was so sure” trio and again, when Welles has been brought to his knees at the end of the Falstaff Credo gloss and during the Rita Hayworth sections. This string orchestra music reaches its greatest depth in the use of sustained strings during the long Charon pantomime with which 9/10 closes, but returns, more gently, as a manifestation of Robbie’s poetic imagination, at key moments in America Singing.
In the “Manhattan Cab Ride” beat, the manic, sung dialogue (more about that in a moment) in the cab played out visually against sped-up, stylized images of traffic, was staged as a “theater game,” quoted the Georg Büchner play he was directing at the time, as well as the H.G. Wells excerpts he folded into the script of the War of the Worlds (1938) radio broadcast. Rather than the dreamy, acoustic soundscape of Welles’ memory of his mother, the cab sequence was underscored with amphetamine-fueled, herky-jerky octatonic ragtime first heard as a driving, hectic, march during the overture montage, and then, smoothed out into a traditionally tonal, gently nostalgic piano rag called “Charlie’s Rag” during Orson’s closing credits. (The title refers not to Charles Foster Kane but to Charlie Chaplin, as I am self-referencing a series of soundtracks for Chaplin films that I did that are all loosely based on the same tune.)
“Border Sequence,” repurposed the U.S.-Mexican border as the liminal zone between life and death (“This isn’t the real Mexico, you know that.”), recontextualizes bits of his frantic cables from Rio as The Magnificent Ambersons was being recut without him during the filming of It’s All True, as well as Tanya’s observation to Quinlan in Touch of Evil (1958), “you’re a mess, honey,” the forward from his (unproduced) screenplay for The Way to Santiago (1941), and the “Eye = I” opening description of his (again, unproduced) Heart of Darkness screenplay. Ominous drums recalled his Voodoo Macbeth in the electroacoustic soundtrack were augmented by waves of seething canonic spoken sound masses in the orchestra that, in turn, became the sound of surf, then of the studio audience’s applause during the Vegas sequence.
The live orchestra didn’t play during “Card Tricks and Talk Show Badinage.” Instead, they chatted amongst themselves and wandered around the stage as though on break. The score was by design entirely electroacoustic. It combined compressed, cheap-sounding, off-the-rack midi sound samples with hyper-saturated footage of a grotesque jerking puppet, snatches of Merv Griffin introducing his own show and, above all, playing cards flying upwards from the floor in the outer sections. Welles’ final interview played through his mind in script form on the movie screens as his avatars, entirely disinterested, flicked cards into his Hamburg hat, read a copy of Moby Dick, and (the dying one) practiced card tricks in his silk pajamas. During the final moments, the orchestra retook their instruments, the onstage Orsons assumed the same positions as their onscreen avatars (of avatars) and the cheap midi gave way to analogue clouds of pre-recorded “spectral trumpets” and bells, ushering in (with another crack of thunder) the “Second Nach(t)music.”
By way of contrast, it featured an intimate, entirely acoustic live string trio accompanying the youngest Orson singing words added by Welles to Henry Jaglom’s script Someone to Love (1987) as footage shot in Nicaragua of a hand inscribing those words and an older hand teaching a younger hand how to hold a quill screened. The beat counterpoises the earlier footage of the Departing Boy running his fingers along the names of tombstones by isolating him in a theatrical pin spot — a beat that returns as spinning seats and a disappearing and reappearing audience in America Singing.
The description of his childhood birthday party paired with entirely acoustic instrumentals, filmic slow motion, proliferating hands playing the piano and digging in the sand and a slow-motion birthday cake presentation derived from a reminiscence that he penned for Paris Match. Frédéric Chopin’s Prelude Opus 28, Number 19 in E flat major, which evoked the spirit of Welles’ pianist mother as it was deconstructed during the “Beatrice Welles Practices Chopin” beat. The skein of notes with which it began twisted in a different direction each time it unfolded, accompanied and commented upon by purely analogue instruments and vocal effects from the ensemble.
Time clearly running out, Orson, in “Consider the Chimes,” accessed his faith and summoned Shakespeare for humane guidance and solace. The orchestra became a roomful of ticking clocks, the bells ran backwards (paired, as ever, with the reverse filmic countdown), the orchestra cadged the brass ostinato from the “Sunday Morning” movement of the Benjamin Britten Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes (which I first allude to in the overture of Orson), snatches of Welles intoning “We have heard the chimes at midnight” alternated with thunderclaps, rain, and the oldest Orson “performing” my own gloss on Falstaff’s mighty credo, by way of combining Arrigo Boito’s version in his libretto for Verdi’s 1893 masterpiece Falstaff with the original Shakespeare speech. I used it to literally bring Welles to his knees.
Four looped seconds of Rita Hayworth dancing in slow motion accompany fragments of Welles’ actual 1946 ABC Radio announcement that her picture had been painted on the atom bomb in the electroacoustic soundtrack as the three Orsons sang the same text in “Serenade for Rita.” Rain, a soulful acoustic violin obbligato, and so on. The love was palpable in this “dealing” of the 52 dramatic beats of which Orson Rehearsed is comprised, particularly as it gave way, as it had to, to the “Myocardial Infarction.”
Welles’ passionate political and social progressivism are well documented. A patriotic American, I believe it is safe to assume that he shall have been horrified by the turn to oligarchy and fascism that began playing out in the United States during the Reagan administration, gained momentum and intensified during the Bush administration response to the World Trade Center terrorist attack (see 9/10), and hurtled forward during the first Trump administration. At the exact moment of his physical demise, I unmoored Welles from time and space (as in the “Maybe a Man’s Name” introductory beat) and introduced tweets by the president and his lawyer mentor against a background of the sun setting on the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus’ great poem “The New Colossus.”
The acoustic orchestra improvised excerpts from the repertoire over a pre-recorded orchestra tuning up and the Orsons became a Greek Chorus of Der Himmel ūber Berlin angels observing with interest as the sun set on the movie screens and the Departing Boy finally left. Dying, Welles recapitulated the little speech from F for Fake as the different aspects of his personality hugged, bade one another goodbye, and attained closure. A reunion with Beatrice Welles is hinted at when, after hugging his oldest avatar goodbye, the youngest avatar placed his hat on the sleeping orchestral pianist’s head as he departed, and the final tender “Charlie’s Rag” began playing “to an empty theater” under the credits.
Operafilm
Without going too far into the weeds, it seems to me that, when Francis Ford Coppola wrote that “the essence of cinema is montage,” he was taking after Sergei Eisenstein and Soviet montage theory. He was referring to the Kuleshov Effect, which derived from the strategic ordering of shots. “Meaning,” I take the theory to have promised, “was derived from a collective view of the entire sequence of individual shots, not the individual shots themselves.” The film lover in me always intuited the essential rightness of this. But I also remember reading — as a young composition student at Juilliard to whom François Truffaut’s films meant an awful lot — André Bazin’s dismissal of montage and Cahiers du Cinema’sfrank stance that film was built upon the primacy of auteurs.
The director of a given project determines just how montage is going to be used — whether, as it is usually used now — as a method for telescoping the passage of time, which is totally different from the idea that time is “subordinate to the collision of images and their symbolic meaning,” or as way to pause the forward flow of the narrative and linger on images while a song plays on the soundtrack. Occasionally, as in Stephen Soderberg’s wonderful films, montage will be used to deliver exposition (or to explain something after the fact) quickly over a cool song, as in the Oceansfilms. The soundtrack creates its own timeline, with which the montage may or may not cooperate; what’s important is that naturalistic time is suspended, and a new, filmic narrative tempo is asserted.
Operafilm doesn’t just pin musical ideas to visual ones. It is generated the same way that parola scenica is. A few years ago, in my memoir, I related what Menotti taught me about it:
“Why don’t we talk about la parola scenica?” I asked. “Ah,” Gian Carlo smoothed the tablecloth with his long fingers as though creating a space, “you are referring to Verdi’s phrase—well, let me tell you….” He began with Verdi, pinpointing the key phrase of music in his favorite scenes; then he moved on to Richard Strauss. His description of collaboration was trenchant: “A stage director looks at a scene one way,” he began. “The composer looks at the scene in another way. The librettist sees it a third way. The composer must craft a scene so clear in intent that all three are compelled to agree.”
For whatever reasons, we’re experiencing a period of hyper collaboration, even a collectivization of authorship, in the American opera world. The auteur opera composer (think Verdi, Wagner, and company) has given way to the elevation of creative producers, the primacy of librettists, the empowerment of stage directors — in short, everyone but the composer Gian Carlo referred to in his model as a leader among equals.
If the visual, musical, textual, and staging ideas are generated simultaneously by the composer, and then directed and film edited by the composer, the result is a new sort of gesamtkunstwerk, one that is, for better or worse, entirely out of step with the current opera world. I am calling the new genre operafilm.
It is from that place that I built up what became Orson Rehearsed. It begins with an overture / montage during which the visual “beats” that will be for the next hour shuffled, dealt, discarded, and redealt are introduced.
It would be pedantic to track down every visual image in Orson; to track each image’s evolving meaning, and to explain how it relates to the music and sound effects that are happening at the same time — particularly because there are three screened images and a composite onstage tableaux to consider at any given time. I will leave that to somebody else.
Instead, at this point, let me just submit that every visual image in Orson Rehearsed (scraps of film leader, the wing of a jet flying through the night, playing cards, waves, hands at a manual typewriter or a piano keyboard, a boy’s hand tracing letters etched into a gravestone, candles on a birthday cake being blown out, a woman running her hands through her hair, waves transforming into clouds transforming into white static, an eye superimposed over the lens of a camera, a spastic puppet dancing, a red satin scarf that transformed into Rita Hayworth’s tossing hair, and on and on) is synchronized to specific words, concepts, and musical ideas that were imagined together and are treated together.
Having said that, since every live production of Orson must consist of a differing set of chosen beats arrayed in a different order, each “live” performance must therefore yield, per the Kuleshov Effect, a different overall effect. That is why it is impossible to pin down an exact reading of what Orson is any more than it is possible to understand the complexities inherent in the real Orson Welles’ mind. It’s not a matter of being smart enough; it is a matter of being humble enough to acknowledge that the mysteries of the human heart are too numerous and too vast to be contained in a single film, a single opera, a single life.