Notes
NOTES Prologue 1 Sources for these and other reviews, as well as for the personal interviews I have incorporated into this book, are found in the References and Resources section. 2 Cinematic interpreters of Ahab have included John Barrymore in 1926 and 1930, Gregory Peck in 1956, Patrick Stewart in 1998, and William Hurt in 2011. In the course of this study I will present the work of selected artists whose dramatic or visual creations in response to Moby-Dick resonate with those of Heggie and Scheer. 3 My quotes from the text of the opera are from the libretto as reproduced in Part 2 of this book. Its text is nearly identical with that of the piano / vocal score, which, however, includes some stage directions not in the libretto. My citations of stage directions will preserve the italics found in both the libretto and the piano / vocal score. Part 1 1 Ironically, the absence of a role for a soprano had caused Samuel Barber to break off a brief flirtation with Moby-Dick as the subject for the opera he would compose to inaugurate Lincoln Center in 1966. Barber took careful notes about certain passages in “The Quarter-Deck” that would lend themselves well to music, but he finally decided against it “because an opera with a lot of whales and no soprano in the water is doubtful” (Wallace, Leviathan, 73). 2 For an account of Wilson’s life-long obsession with creating a Moby-Dick opera, see Schultz, 161–85. Over three hundred of his paintings and drawings for this project are now in the collection of the Swope Museum of Art in Terre Haute, Indiana. Part 4 1 The second song in the Starry Night cycle, “Celestial Locomotion” sets a text by Vincent Van Gogh, whose painting The Starry Night (copied by Heggie’s father) inspired the cycle as a whole. 2 Klauba’s Celestial Voyagers and Moby-Dick paintings are posted at georgeklauba.com. The Dickinson passage is from Heggie’s song “Go thy great way!” 3 For the genesis of Klauba’s Stubb, see my interview entitled “Birds, Carnage, Salvation.” 4 Pip: Alone was the first of three works in the Pip trilogy that Piercefield displayed in the exhibition Moby-Dick: Heart of the Sea at the Rockford Art Museum in Rockford, Illinois, from April–July 2009. The other two works were Struggle and Transcendence. George Klauba mounted his own Pip Trilogy in the same exhibition: Immersion, Struggle, and Rebirth. 214 notes Epilogue 1 For the creative genesis and cultural resonance of And God Created Great Whales, see my “Avoiding Melville’s Vortex” and “Fusing with the Muse.” 2 De los Reyes was immediately attracted to Heggie ’s operatic project; the catalog for his Santa Barbara exhibition, which opened five months after the premiere of the opera in Dallas, included “A Conversation between Jake Heggie and Tony de los Reyes” (36–44). ...
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