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From the Archives: A Quiet Place
Posted September 25, 2024
A Quiet Place
by Garth Edwin Sunderland
(as printed in the Fall/Winter 2013/2014 issue of Prelude, Fugue & Riffs)
A Quiet Place was Leonard Bernstein’s final work for the stage. The story of a fractured family struggling to come to grips with its past, and to reconcile, the opera was conceived with librettist Stephen Wadsworth as a sequel to Bernstein’s jazzy 1952 one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti. At its premiere in Houston, in 1983, A Quiet Place was presented as a single 110-minute act in four scenes, using a very large orchestra including synthesizer and electric guitar. Bernstein was dissatisfied with this first version, and the opera was revised, becoming a full-length, three act opera. The dramatic structure of the work was significantly altered, and a substantial amount of the A Quiet Place material was cut to ‘make room’ for the incorporation of the entirety of Trouble in Tahiti, now embedded within the later opera as a flashback. This version was finalized for performances in Vienna in 1986, and Bernstein subsequently recorded it for Deutsche Grammophon. Bernstein nevertheless continued to consider further possibilities for the work, at one point even proposing that the opera be presented on Broadway.
Although the Vienna version is definitive, The Leonard Bernstein Office has long felt that a smaller, shorter version of the opera, using a chamber orchestration, would allow for an alternate, more intimate experience of this very personal work. This new chamber version would not include Trouble in Tahiti, and would restore some of the very fine music that was cut from the Houston version, including full arias for Sam and François.
At its heart, A Quiet Place is the story of a father and his children grappling with their history of bitterness and anger, and ultimately attempting, tentatively, to overcome it. In the original Houston version, this theme was obscured by too much focus on the secondary characters introduced in the opening funeral scene. While there was some excellent material written for them, the time spent on these characters diffused the action and distracted from the central conflict of the opera, the family’s struggle to reconcile. Bernstein and Wadsworth understood that this was a problem. As recorded in Humphrey Burton’s definitive biography of Bernstein, “…Wadsworth felt the public did not want to know about Mrs. Doc’s lesbian feelings for Dinah.”
For the revised Vienna version of the opera, scenes were cut or adapted to eliminate these secondary characters after the first Act. At the same time, the entirety of the earlier opera Trouble in Tahiti was inserted into the middle of the opera as a flashback. This added 45 minutes to the work, and introduced a jazzy musical language that is only obliquely or ironically referenced in the music of A Quiet Place. It was felt that this music would provide the audience a ‘break’ from the more complicated music of A Quiet Place. Bernstein had crafted a complex and challenging musical language to match the spiky American vernacular of Wadsworth’s libretto, fully exploring the repressed emotions and psychology of the characters. At the time, the breadth of Bernstein’s compositional legacy was not yet understood and appreciated; Bernstein the composer was known principally as the creator of West Side Story, and audiences were expecting a work in the vein of Bernstein’s popular musical theater works. A Quiet Place is instead a deeply personal work, exploring difficult ideas and intricate relationships, and the score reflects that. Today, however, I think that audiences can be trusted to understand that Bernstein’s voice was as rich and multifaceted as the man himself. He is one of the greatest composers America has ever produced, and his ability to synthesize a plurality of styles is seen now as one of his greatest gifts.
For this new version, I have tried to go back to the original impulse: to take the lean, modern concept behind the Houston version, but incorporate the improvements that Bernstein and Wadsworth made for the Vienna version, while restoring both the music and the characterization that was lost in the process of revision. This required a delicate approach to the material, a respect for the authors’ intentions while ensuring that this chamber version would have a dramatic integrity of its own.
I have kept the focus always on the family, on the spine of the opera, on these damaged people fighting against their own instincts, against their collective past. I have maintained Vienna’s three — Act structure, which clarified the relentless, intermissionless 2-hour onslaught of the Houston version. As in Vienna, the secondary characters do not return after the first Act — in fact, due to the stripped — down, naturalistic approach of this version, even the choral writing from Acts II and III has been eliminated. I made a substantial cut in Act I, eliminating three of the ‘Dialogues’ for the secondary characters — it wasn’t necessary to spend so much time establishing their identities and their relationship with Dinah when we will never see them again. Two short arias for Sam have been combined into a single aria opening Act II. Most significantly, I have restored the 3 arias cut from the last Act, and reassigned the reading of Dinah’s letter, ‘Dear Loved Ones’ from Junior to François. This aria has a twinned role in the opera with another aria I have restored for François, ‘Stop. You Will Not Take Another Step.’ The letter aria allows Sam and his children to come together in their grief, and François’ fury in his climactic aria brings his character into focus, as he castigates the family for their refusal to be worthy of their loss, and tears the letter to pieces. The arias allow his role as the outsider in the family to have dramatic meaning.
A Quiet Place is unlike anything else in Bernstein’s catalogue, and really, unlike anything else in opera. It contains some of Bernstein’s very finest music (in my opinion, the Postlude to Act I is the most powerful music he ever wrote), and tackles a challenging subject in a way that is both radical and true, and utterly compelling. Like other works of Bernstein’s later period, it was not appreciated at the time of its premiere for the daring, provocative vision he brought to us, but now we have caught up to him. The opera is finally becoming recognized as the culmination of Bernstein’s many gifts as a composer, a theater artist, and a communicator. Working on this new version of the opera has been a powerful experience for me, and I hope that it will offer new audiences a similar experience of this great American opera.
Garth Edwin Sunderland is Vice President of Creative Projects for The Leonard Bernstein Office.