1991
1991 140 5 january 1991 George, dear friend, Once again I’m late with this, a response (inadequate, I feel, it will be) to your Nov. 11 letter. Things are, still, in flux, unsettled as to ‘the project ,’ and I find myself not quite ‘in harness,’ driving on to a goal/deadline , but I am not ‘free,’ ‘in-between projects,’ either, as this one continues to firm up in stages. 2 years ago, or slightly longer, I started a diary about this venture. This has grown, since, into a small book and there is much further to go (I hope) still. Since we spoke on the ’phone (so good of you to call, always a treat) I have in writing a formal ‘statement of intent’ to commission this opera from me, to be written on a libretto supplied (in the near future) by a very fine American/Canadian playwright. (My libretto, on which I’ve worked for almost 2 years was not acceptable to the company. Too ‘literary,’ they said.)1 This amounts to progress for both of us (librettist & composer). What’s missing? Money for commissioning fees. Some of it is to come from granting agencies, the rest from private sources, we were told. The timetable calls for a conclusion (agreement , hopefully) by the spring, the latest. In the meantime, I’m awaiting the slow birth of the libretto. Have you read Hans Busch’s masterful compilations about the geneses of Aïda and Otello?2 Other exciting tales, re collaboration between composer and librettist, are, of course, the correspondences of, respectively, R. Strauss, H. v. Hofmannsthal and R. S[trauss]-Stefan Zweig.3 Do you know that Strauss’s only daughter-inlaw was Jewish, and he had to exert himself mightily in the 1936–1945| 245 period to save her, and her two ‘Mischlinge’ [half-breed] children from the Nazi bloodhounds … There was a price to pay and he has paid it, with interest. I didn’t know it until recently. As will turn out, the Jewish angle in the opera will not be overt, but something that will ‘shine’ (sweat?) through the personality of the central figure. He was a ‘secular’ Jew, as I see myself being; there are, and have existed many of the kind over the ages. Presently, I am reading the 5th volume of H. Graetz’s History of the Jews.4 Anything but up-to-date (publ[ished] in 1895), but chock full of information and very readable. It paints fascinating portraits … What a story! What a people! Virtuosos in survival, near all! Just witness the present exodus of Russian Jews into Israel. I don’t fault them for leaving the USSR, the contrary, after what we saw in Central Europe this past May. Nevertheless, what a choice! Getting into that whirlwind of the Israeli–Arab contest. But isn’t this familiar? The choice, most frequently, for us, for our ancestors, was not between a hot spot and a peaceful asylum, but between an intolerably/dangerously inimical host/ place/population, and a somewhat less inimical one. There is, perhaps, no good reason for holding back info[rmation] about the central topic of the opera. Yet … while banana-peels are still around, I don’t feel comfortable getting into substance, not as yet. Please, bear with me, dear friend. (I know you’ll understand my nervousness, perhaps even superstition.…) I haven’t, as yet, looked up the D[avid] Rosenberg book.5 I did read P . Levi’s The Periodic Table, but not his If This Is a Man.6 (Do I want to read it after having ‘visited’—an obscene word in this context—Auschwitz?) Levi’s suicide/death occurred while we were in Italy a few years ago. For a full week the newspapers were full with the story, from many angles: reports, historical accounts, literary evaluation, his philosophy, etc. The whole nation (all across the political spectrum, so it seemed) was mourning a native son … No one came up with a firmly held hypothesis as to why he has committed the deed. Numerous commentators advanced the conjecture that it was the Auschwitz experience that killed him, after all those years, as if a delayed-fuse bomb … Who knows? Or will ever know. My attention span for ‘academic’ prose has shrunk lately, as yours, also, seemed to do so … Lots of fancy sentences, lurking, still-unasked metaphors , ornaments of diverse sorts … too rich for the digestion … Good music is so much more...
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