Philippa - an opera [blog 3]

As mentioned in my previous blogs on this subject [Philippa blog I, 16 September 2012 and blog 2, 18 September], I have been talking to people for some years now about an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, the Harlem-born concert pianist who died in Vietnam rescuing schoolchildren in 1967. But now I've decided to work on the piece in the open, via my blog, until such time as someone commissions it, or the libretto (or opera) is finished. Below I've written a complete if rough synopsis which has placed the action mostly within the years 1966-67, ie. in a tighter time-frame to increase the urgency of Philippa's need to find a solution to her life's dilemma.

Philippa - an opera, ROUGH SYNOPSIS

5 October Amendments in red

Cast

JODY – mezzo

GEORGE – bass

CARDINAL SPELLMAN / Mr PERFECT QUALIFICATIONS – tenor

PHILIPPA – soprano

THE CHAPERONE - mezzo

SERVICEMAN / JACQUES (AFRICAN POLITICIAN) / MILITARY LIAISON - bass

SERVICEMAN / SOLDIER – tenor

VIET CONG COMMANDER / PRIEST – baritone

YOUNG PHILIPPA – child soprano

VIETNAMESE CHILD - child soprano [or is this the same singer as for YOUNG PHILIPPA?]

CHORUS, CHILDREN’S CHORUS

 

In English, French, and Vietnamese

Prologue

A Pontifical Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, 18 May 1967. We hear messages of condolence from luminaries of American public life – “to our beautiful black sister” from Ella Fitzgerald and Sammy Davis Jr., “to a fine American” from President Johnson…

The bereaved parents GEORGE SCHUYLER, the African-American journalist, and JODY (JOSEPHINE COGDELL), the wealthy white Texan, sit together. While the organist plays Philippa’s music, CARDINAL SPELLMAN mounts the pulpit. HE says they have come to commemorate the short life of Philippa Duke Schuyler, “a polymath”, pianist, composer, the second American [check] journalist to be killed in Vietnam when her helicopter plunged into the sea off Ðà Nãng”. JODY flares up in grief asking, “How can she rest in peace when her potential lies unfulfilled?” Her husband tries to comfort her but is rebuffed. “What are we celebrating?” she demands to know. The CONGREGATION raises its collective voice in affirmation of Philippa’s life, but is drowned out by the rotation noise of helicopter blades, and the tape of a Mayday call.

Act I Vietnam, 2 Sep -14 Oct, 1966

(i)

35 year-old PHILIPPA arrives in Saigon; there are gun emplacements and other signs of war. She is fascinated by a place which does not require of her “a centre of gravity”. THE CHAPERONE from the Embassy briefs her (a personal explanation of the war and some rules of behaviour). Oblivious to danger, PHILIPPA resents her chaperone’s restrictions because they remind her of Jody’s constant instructions at home. At home in New York she can’t act freely because ultimately she was always meant to be ‘America’s bi-racial genius’, a ‘beacon of hope’ in black and white worlds, to neither of which, however, she feels she fully belongs. SHE knows that while she is away in Vietnam, Jody will be back in New York reliving the odyssey of baby Philippa with the scrapbooks and reminiscences Jody has kept since Philippa was a baby; the scrapbooks PHILIPPA resents because they were meant to prescribe her life’s journey in minute detail. “They tell me what to do, but not what I must be; they tell me what to achieve, but not what I must become.”

(ii)

Checking out the Saigon performance venue: a scene with AFRICAN-AMERICAN SERVICE MUSICIANS (SERVICEMEN). But PHILIPPA can only play classical music even here with these servicemen who assume she can ‘swing’. THEY inhabit a world that it is alien to her, even though she doesn’t relate to the whites. Frustrated, SHE reflects that she has looked everywhere for the perfect place for her, and she thirsts for knowledge of the servicemen’s world like a parched outsider. SHE relates how her parents met in Harlem in the 1920s and got married, hoping to make the world a less-divisive place. What THE SERVICEMEN tell her indicates how little has changed since then; they regard the white US servicemen as enemy [‘Charlie’] and the white servicemen hold them in the same contempt. THEY are amazed by her voracious thirst for knowledge, little suspecting the extent to which it diverts her deep-seated tensions. THEY offer to give her a lift up-country to see some action.

(iii)

While sightseeing PHILIPPA gives her CHAPERONE the slip and discovers freedom (she can put on an aí daò and blend into the crowd, escaping physically (“No-one sees me”), if not psychically). THE SERVICEMEN pick her up for her trip.

(iv)

In a hamlet in the countryside SHE stays the night after the SERVICEMEN have left. The VIET CONG come through. She overhears the COMMANDER speaking (after the fractured English and even fracturedVietnamese, the first fluent Vietnamese she has heard since arriving): “Chúng ta sẽ đánh đuõỉ bọn giạc ngoại xâm ra khoỉ đát nủởc” [which Philippa translates in Act II as ‘we will kick the foreigners out of our country’] and realises she has been taken for Vietnamese and left alone: “I can blend in here.” But identity has always been a torment. Her palpable relief at being able to “blend in” reveals that she has never felt at home anywhere else before, not when feted by Carnegie Hall audiences; not when regarded as an example to little American girls everywhere, nor hailed as the pride of Harlem...

(v)

PHILIPPA expresses her new-found freedom in new composition [cadenza I]. She can incorporate Vietnamese music, but the CHAPERONE, venting resentment of Philippa’s “disobedience”, tells her the embassy wants her to play classics in her concerts – even here she cannot escape branding. And she concedes that her “absorption” of Vietnamese culture may only be play-acting – “play-acting: the irritating habit of a lifetime!” SHE gives a “well-behaved” performance.

(vi)

A priest she met at the concert has invited her to his orphanage in Hué, “a short helicopter ride from Ðà Nãng”. HE admired her book Jungle Saints about priests in Africa risking their lives to alleviate suffering in leprosariums, war-zones, slave labour camps... And wants to know if she has grasped at this as a personal mission. Then HE introduces PHILIPPA to the ‘orphans’, the CHILDREN of US servicemen and Vietnamese women. SHE is entranced: who are they? Are they wanted? Whose history are they being taught? What do they need?

(vii)

Back in Saigon, the CHAPERONE brings PHILIPPA a telegram from Jody [are Jody and The Chaperone the same singer or just same voice type?]. Jody wants Philippa home. She is meant to be a professional musician (and, as it is always understood, an advertisement for the promise of mixed marriage). PHILIPPA doesn’t want to leave – she has discovered children who are between cultures just like she was, but aircraft engines (or the call of the piano?) start up. She goes.

Act II New York, 1966-7

(i)

The war is merely a report back in New York, but Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s complaints (on the radio?) about the war detracting from Civil Rights start GEORGE on one of his hobbyhorses; how the African-American does not need special pleading, ie. Civil Rights. [To George, the “Negro Art Hokum” was always appropriated by the ‘sympathetic whites’ who nevertheless “still wanted us to beat tom-toms and wave rabbits’ feet. It’s got to become unremarkable when we write a book or compose a concerto.”]

Meanwhile JODY is again mapping out Philippa’s future. This includes settling her down with a boyfriend after all the rejects who had less than “perfect qualifications” and playing the major venues, but PHILIPPA flares up: Jody’s dreams are unrealistic. She will not play those major halls again – the white audiences know she’s black (and no longer young, no longer cute and no longer politically safe). It’s all very well for George to think we should not segregate ourselves, claims PHILIPPA, but the whites do it for us – unless she passes herself off as someone else (and she has passed herself off as southern European!) The concerts George organises for her with the John Birch Society are galling to her. They ignore her as they unselfconsciously make racist remarks. And though George (the John Birchers’ token black) may deny it, the way she saw black GIs (the Servicemen) treated in Vietnam awakened her to discrimination, an added frustration for her now because she sees clearly why mainstream America fell away from her (although JODY is at pains to believe that America has not!)

As often happens in times of stress, JODY’s reminiscences ‘conjure’ the YOUNG PHILIPPA of the past, as she was in the 1940s, the little star, proving the greatness that can result from a ‘mixed-race’ marriage. SHE and GEORGE relive some of the excitement of the Harlem Renaissance when it seemed that African-Americans would break into the American mainstream via the arts, when George still had some fight. YOUNG PHILIPPA plays the piano while JODY re-reads the scrapbooks that plotted Philippa’s every step of progress. When JODY remembers, however, the way Philippa was struck dumb when presented with the books on her 13^th birthday the playing stops. YOUNG PHILIPPA is presented with them: “Am I merely a project?” she says.

JODY is furious that Philippa now wants to devote her energies to “writing a book about the Amerasian orphans”. JODY: “Our daughter and her morbid attraction for war zones and conflict.” But she knows that right now Philippa would rather be at war, the perfect environment for her tempestuous urges.

(ii)

PHILIPPA has met the man with “perfect qualifications” and bedded him. MR PERFECT QUALIFICATIONS discovers her new-found Catholicism and is bemused given her sexual aggressiveness. His scepticism offends her; she is in earnest. Her search for faith, for mysticism, for peace results in a composition, another cadenza. But what is her musical personality? YOUNG PHILIPPA joins her in the cadenza and, in her unspoiled simplicity, we sense the innocence Young Philippa enjoyed when in the cocoon of the Schuyler household, before white audiences woke up to the fact that she is “no longer young, no longer cute, and no longer politically safe”.

VARIOUS MEN IN PHILIPPA’S PAST (CHORUS) back up the doubts of Mr Perfect Qualifications. Acknowledging her fame, THEY never want to hear of her again, have tired of her strident demands, deplored this ‘mess’ of a human being who presented herself as different things to each of them. One of them in particular (JACQUES) mourns the child Philippa aborted (“our child”) because he might have proven her to be “black”. Another, the SOLDIER she recently met in Vietnam is disconcerted by the bitterness that is being expressed. “You’ll see,” say the others. “We will drive out the alien” – PHILIPPA remembers the words of the Viet Cong soldier who sat on her bed in a Vietnam hamlet. She’s got to get out of New York.

Act III, Mar- May 1967

(i)

New York:

For a moment GEORGE rekindles in JODY the tenderness that once lay at the heart of their little family project; how it came from a convention-defying love for each other, and their desire to create a “hybrid genius”. Bells peal when they recall their marriage and the prospects it held for America: “Jim’s whip scars will be healed”, sings JODY of the dream she had. “A thousand countrymen and neighbours will take the nooses from around their necks and come down from their hangman’s trees.” We know that she is speaking from experience of the immediate environs of her early life in rural Texas. SHE AND GEORGE reminisce about the young girl who was the favourite of magazine editors, and who had a Day named after her at the New York World’s Fair. Perhaps she will still fulfil their dream. “Not in Vietnam, she won’t,” mutters JODY.

(ii)

Vietnam

In Hué, the MILITARY LIAISON person briefs the orphanage PRIEST on Viet Cong movements around the city.

(iii)

PHILIPPA gets to know the orphans and their stories and problems; their ‘between worlds’ predicament resonates with her. What will Anh do with baseball gloves and a bat sent from an absent father? What use is the postcard foldout of Cleveland to Phứớng? And these are the lucky ones who have some communication with their fathers. What are their futures if the Communists win, if the South wins? We sense she is starting to empathise with the children but she is soon diverted, asking, “What is my future – as white, as black?” The PRIEST suggests she could teach, and PHILIPPA imagines what her mother would say to her staying on in Vietnam; SHE bitterly tells him Jody’s reaction to her proposed book. The PRIEST is disappointed by her harking back to her own issues. She doesn’t seem to live by the premise of her own book, Jungle Saints.

(iv)

Cadenza before attack, PHILIPPA extemporizes a piece called The Racial Conflict at Home, a piece attempting to blend the various styles of music in her background, which begins with one of YOUNG PHILIPPA’s childish pieces forming a core. But does ‘home’ mean the USA or 270 Convent Avenue? The cadenza builds however into a big ensemble number reflecting conflicting points of view: CHORUS OF WHITES: “Don’t expect anything to be better when you get back home, ‘Charlie’”; BLACKS: “We will have equality by any means necessary”; VIET CONG: “We will drive the alien out.” PHILIPPA grieves that she is still no closer to resolving her own competing demons.        

The MILITARY LIAISON person tells the orphanage staff to get out of Hué. For some reason, PHILIPPA does not leave, but says she will pull strings with her chaperone to persuade the military to supply helicopters to ferry the children to safety. SHE dismisses messages from Jody who is panicking that she has travelled so far up country and has booked concerts trying to force her home.

(v)
9 May 1967, Sounds of gunfire. The Viet Cong are close. The PRIEST hustles children to waiting helicopters. PHILIPPA comes to ask if she can help; she has rounded up some of the children; she has thrown away her music and her notebooks. The PRIEST says “get out of here”. HE realizes one of the children is missing. HE asks Philippa to take his place on the helicopter about to leave, but PHILIPPA rushes off instead. A SOLDIER says, “Father, we have to get that chopper off.” The PRIEST decides to leave, but says, “Make sure the lady journalist gets on the last one out.” HE leaves. PHILIPPA comes back with the missing orphan. There is only one seat left. The SOLDIER straps her in. HE AND PHILIPPA lock eyes; it is clear she had a liaison with him. The CHILD is placed on her lap. (The CHORUS back at St. Patrick’s bursts into song.) As the rotor blades start with a blast, drowning out everything, PHILIPPA begins to sing. At first she cannot be heard, but then - as the rotor blade sound dies down, SHE is soaring aloft in her own world, stroking the head of the child in a spirit of selflessness, singing of long-eluded fulfillment.

Epilogue

The congregation back at St. Patrick’s have now reached the Agnus Dei (“qui tollis peccata mundi...”)

Jody says, “I will kill myself. What have I left to live for?”

Dona nobis pacem

NOTES: still a need for more obvious musical design; less reminiscence and back-announcing

A Sunday arvo drive - Australian iconography 5

Recalling that D.H. Lawrence wrote Kangaroo down at Thirroul, we decided to take a drive south of Sydney to the Illawarra coast.

Looking down the Illawarra coast. This is from Bald Hill above Stanwell Park, just after you come out of the Royal National Park.

There are still buildings that would have stood in Lawrence's day.

and streetscapes he may have known (such as this in Austinmer):

But I'm reminded that the Illawarra escarpment is another of those iconic images of Australia I carry with me wherever I go.

Of course, the Lawrences (D.H. and Frieda) went from this part of Australia to the US in September 1922, settling mostly in Taos, New Mexico.

Which first - music or words? (thoughts stemming from Rodgers & Hammerstein)

In Ethan Mordden's book, Rodgers and Hammerstein, I just read the phrase, '...all the lovely and characterful music in the world can do nothing till it has something honest to work with.' He's praising Hammerstein's words of course (books and lyrics for Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I). But I kind of agree with it, because I think he's lit on one of the most powerful tools of a librettist - context. The context in which the music is played can affect its impact.

In our symphonic cantata Journey to Horseshoe Bend I had the lines:

But God cannot be known
Nor made to answer men.
No use in us demanding
The meaning of our pain.

At one stage this was in the words of the pastor, Carl. It's his opinion. It was later placed in the mouths of the chorus. There it suddenly became editorial, as befitted what I thought of as part of the core meaning of the work.

This may not exactly be context. But changing location or time of night or day can alter the effect of a scene as effectively as this.

I have two much-treasured instances of music that hooked me at least as much because of the context in which I heard them.

In Alice Springs at Easter in 1981, I happened to pick up on one of the Melbourne radio stations 2,258 kms (1,403 miles) away that year's Bayreuth Festival production of Wagner's Parsifal. I wasn't listening to it on the best of equipment but it sure was a moving experience in my little flat in the backyard in Willshire Street. I don't know if I would have found it more moving if I'd actually been sitting in the Festpielhaus in Germany.

Also, when I was a kid, Radio 3DB in Melbourne used to broadcast a concert at 11 o'clock Sunday nights. I was supposed to be asleep in bed, but I would sneak a small transistor under the blankets and tune in, with the volume down low. One night I forgot to put the radio on until about 11.50. When I located the station I was knocked out; it was spectacular - like Catherine Wheels going off in my head, plumes of flame spinning from revolving wheels. It was the climax to Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy.

Alexander Scriabin who thought he would write a piece that would end the world, but died instead from an insect bite

I've loved the piece ever since. It may not be a flawless masterpiece (although close), it may not have enough intellectual content for the real aficionados, and I was listening to it on a crappy tranny. But it's one of the best musical experiences of my life. And I think a great deal of the overwhelming experience lay in the fact that I heard this gigantic outpouring in an unexpected context, listening 'illegally' in the cocoon of my bed.

I sometimes wonder if contemporary opera suffers from the fact that we've gotten used to thinking that the effect of the piece comes down almost solely to the music, and not the music and action and words working in tandem to be more than the sum of their parts. The music provides the emotional content perhaps - it's the verb - but it doesn't guarantee the whole effect.

And in fact, I question whether words cannot sometimes match music's emotional impact. Let me move on to another tangent. Could any music match the majesty of Abraham Lincoln's words to Mrs Bixby (which I quote as well I can from memory to prove how they ring):

'Dear Madam

I have been a paper in the files of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts to the effect that you are the mother of five sons who have died on the glorious field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless are any words of mine that could seek to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming, but I cannot refrain from tendering to you the humble thanks of the republic they died to save,' etc...

Lincoln, whose prose could be more majestic than music. Alexander Gardner's 1863 portrait

Who gets close to Lincoln? Bach? but not in an exact setting of these words.

Nah, opera is meant to be an ensemble effort, truly a gesamtkunstwerk. Musical theater is.

Philippa - an opera [blog 2]

As mentioned in my previous blog on this subject [Philippa blog I, 16 September 2012], I have been talking to people about this opera for some years now. But now I've decided to work on the piece in the open, via my blog, until such time as someone commissions it or the libretto (or opera) is finished. Below I've started fleshing out Act I from a revised synopsis which has placed the action mostly within the years 1966-67, in a tighter time-frame in order to increase the urgency of Philippa's need to find a solution to her life's dilemma.

Philippa

Prelude

A Requiem Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, May 1967. We hear messages of condolence from luminaries of American public life – Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., President Johnson…

The bereaved parents GEORGE, the African-American journalist (bass), and JODY, the wealthy white Texan (mezzo), sit together. CARDINAL SPELLMAN (tenor) mounts the pulpit. HE says they have come to commemorate the short life of Philippa Duke Schuyler, pianist, composer – the second [check] journalist to be killed in Vietnam. JODY, the bereaved mother, flares up in grief, asking: “How can she rest in peace when her potential lies unfulfilled?” Her husband tries to comfort her but is rebuffed. The CONGREGATION raises its voice in affirmation, drowned out by the rotation noise of helicopter blades, and the tape of a Mayday call.

Act I Vietnam, Sep 1966

To the best of my recollection, this is the Conservatorium in Saigon, one of Philippa's performance venues

PHILIPPA (soprano) arrives in Saigon; gun emplacements and other signs of war. The chaperone (mezzo) from the Embassy briefs her (a personal explanation of the war and some rules of behaviour). Oblivious to danger, PHILIPPA resents her chaperone’s restrictions because they remind her of Jody’s instructions at home. There she can’t act freely because ultimately because she was always meant to be ‘America’s bi-racial genius’. SHE knows that while she is away in Vietnam, Jody will be back in New York reliving  the odyssey of baby Philippa with the scrapbooks and reminiscences Jody has kept since Philippa was a baby; the scrapbooks PHILIPPA resents that were meant to map out her life’s journey in minute detail. [Where does Young Philippa fit here - obbligato playing?]

A scene with AFRICAN-AMERICAN SERVICE MUSICIANS: but PHILIPPA plays classical music. SHE has looked everywhere for the perfect place for her. SHE relates how her parents met in Harlem in the 1920s and got married, a risky undertaking in those days (Jody's family's milieux was lynching Texas), except that Harlem was a little bit of a sanctuary. What THEY tell her indicates that no divide has been bridged since then; THEY call the white US servicemen ‘Charlie’ and vice versa. THEY offer to give her a lift up-country. [This is clumsy – gotta get over this better. Why go up-country?]

PHILIPPA gives Mrs D the slip and discovers freedom (she can put on an aí daò and blend into the crowd, escaping physically (“No-one sees me”) but not psychically.’ [But what exactly happens? Gotta sort it out.]

In a hamlet in the countryside SHE stays the night after the GIs have left (had to leave; not safe). The Viet Cong come through. She overhears the COMMANDER say, ‘Chúng ta sẽ đánh đuõỉ bọn giạc ngoại xâm ra khoỉ đát nủởc’ [which Philippa translates in Act II as ‘We will kick the foreigners out.’] and realises she has been taken for Vietnamese and left alone: “I can blend in here. But identity has always been a torment” [danger: this is flat – telling, not revealing. Real torment is needed to set up the Act I ‘meeting-with-her-destiny’ ending; how does all the torment of the past come forward? the desperation with which she grabs at immersion is one clue?].

Cadenza: PHILIPPA expresses her new-found freedom in new composition. She incorporates Vietnamese styles; But the embassy staff want her to play classics in her concerts – even here she cannot escape branding.

A priest (bass) she met at the concert has invited her to his orphanage. He admired her book about priests in Africa risking martyrdom, Jungle Saints. And wants to understand better what she was grasping at. Then he introduces Philippa to the ‘orphans’, the children of US servicemen and Vietnamese women. She is entranced; she softens: who are they? Are they unwanted? Whose history is theirs? What do they need? "Support", says the priest.

Mrs D brings Philippa a telegram from Jody [are Jody and Mrs D the same singer or just same voice type?]. Jody wants her home. She is meant to be a professional musician.

Philippa doesn’t want to leave – she has discovered children who are between cultures just like she was, but aircraft engines (or the call of the piano?) start up. She goes.

End Act I 

How much of the cultural hinterland needs to be present? Does 1930s Harlem enter this Act? 

Philippa - an opera [blog 1]

For some years now, I've been developing an idea for an opera on the life of the Harlem-born concert pianist, Philippa Duke Schuyler. She was the daughter of the black journalist, George Schuyler, and wealthy white Texan, Josephine Cogdell, who thought that if they combined their superior genes they would produce a genius and show America a way out of the racial divide. And Philippa was a genius, playing her own compositions with the New York Philharmonic when she was barely into her teens.

I first came across Philippa's name when I was writing a concert booklet note on Clara Schumann and going through The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. I noticed an entry for Philippa Duke Schuyler and my eye immediately fell on the following facts - born Harlem, USA 1931; died Ðà Nãng, Vietnam 1967. What music that conjured up (classical musician born just after the Harlem Renaissance dies in Vietnam)! But also: during the Vietnam War? I've always been intrigued by musicians who live an active life. What was Philippa doing there then?

Playing, partly. Opportunities had dried up for her back home once she was no longer cute and unproblematic for white audiences and she had taken to playing in more out-of-way places (for classical music, that is.) But she was a tormented soul, never quite figuring out who she was (at one stage she even changed her name to Felipa Monterra y Schuyler, wanting to be southern European) and in Vietnam she had ultimately come across 'the orphans', the unwanted children of US servicemen and Vietnamese women. They focussed her attention. Between cultures like her, they aroused her deepest sympathy and she had started helping them. It was during a North Vietnamese attack on Hué that she lost her life ferrying schoolchildren to safety on a chopper which ditched into the sea off Ðà Nãng. Only she and one of the orphans and another serviceman failed to survive. She received a service at St. Patrick's Cathedral and President Johnson, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr extolled her life. I found in the States last year, though, that few people even in classical music had heard of her.

My question is: was this a wasted life? She didn't fulfil her musical potential, but...miserable, tormented, never knowing 'what I am', had she finally put herself aside? Is it possible to see her life like that?

I have been talking to people about this opera for some years now - nutted out some scenarios and a very rough first draft. David Hirschfelder and I even wrote a 'trailer' (a short scene) some years back. But now I've decided to work on the piece in the open, via my blog, until such time as someone commissions it or the libretto (or opera) is finished. Why not? It may be one way to engender support in the absence of any formal structure.

My initial ideas for this opera covered a large span of her life - flashbacks from the funeral covering her early life in Harlem, her journalistic career in The Congo just as independence turned into a bloodbath (and made her want to disavow any African heritage), to her combined roles as musician and journalist and doer of good works in Vietnam in 1967. I produced the following synopsis:

Philippa – operatic synopsis:

In English, French, Vietnamese and Kituba

This is the story of the agony of confused identity, transcended ultimately in a spirit of self-sacrifice. May 18, 1967: the Requiem for Philippa Duke Schuyler; and words of praise from Sammy Davis Jr, Ella Fitzgerald, President Johnson and others. But this famous musician died in a helicopter crash off Ðà Nãng. Was her life wasted? Philippa’s parents GEORGE and JODY return to their Harlem apartment and JODY, the white Texan heiress, turns to GEORGE, her African-American journalist husband, and says, “You are to blame.” 

GEORGE and JODY’s argument conjures the YOUNG PHILIPPA of the 1940s, unquenchably curious, who learns music and composition before our very eyes and becomes an inspiration to “little girls everywhere”. JODY believes GEORGE is responsible for wasting Philippa’s unique blend of talents. She had thought the idea behind mixing their genes was to create a musical genius, but George had not pushed Philippa hard enough. Yet (FINALE), after years of early study, “classical music’s mulatto Shirley Temple”, happily plays her own compositions with the New York Philharmonic.

Returning to the day of the funeral, GEORGE hits back, accusing JODY of pushing Phillipa too hard. But JODY unleashes a long-held resentment: “It was your Africa that ruined our genius girl.”

In 1960, no longer cute, PHILIPPA has begun to bear the full brunt of racial discrimination and resorted to playing in out-of-the-way places. Invited to play at the independence celebrations of a former African colony, she pushes on with her recital despite the sound of approaching gunfire. In a street after a massacre, she befriends a priest risking his life to deliver last rites. Both wonder how the other can push on with what they have to do. Though Philippa hears the music of an ideal Africa of the past, she decides to change her name to Felipa Monterra y Schuyler, and pose as a Southern European, to improve her chances of engagement. GEORGE is upset, though he himself aspires to membership of white establishment (and has even joined the far-Right John Birch Society). But JODY is relieved. It is a cold logical decision Philippa has made in the spirit of “sacrifice for one’s career”.

But PHILIPPA is furious when JODY ends Philippa’s relationship with her lover, Rivère “because it was distracting me from my destiny”. The sad fact is PHILIPPA searches desperately for love in the arms of even the most inappropriate men. When she meets the Englishman, RAY, she anticipates that he will re-open career doors that had been closed to her. But he flees her desperate love-starved advances.

Still torn by the question of her identity, PHILIPPA discovers that she is pregnant – to an African politician. Rather than face the prospect of her child being “more black”, she decides to have an abortion. As she prepares (FINALE) for a return to the concert platform in London with the Philharmonia, all the lovers in her life wish never to hear ‘the name of that narcissist’ again. 

May 18, 1967: For a moment GEORGE rekindles in JODY the tenderness which lay at the heart of their little family experiment to prove ‘the American genius of hybridization’, but JODY panics: affection might distract her from her need to mourn. George was “ineffectual”; he couldn’t even instil in Philippa a ‘professional skepticism’. “The influence she might have had on little girls everywhere,” mourns JODY.

As JODY and GEORGE’s spat flares up again, a PRIEST, one of the guests from the funeral, arrives. He recounts how he knew Philippa in Vietnam, where she had gone to play her last concerts. Philippa struck him as a child, lost, not quite knowing who she was, though unflinching in her “journalistic” curiosity to see the war. She had ventured north to Hué – JODY doesn’t wish to hear.  FINALE: Philippa had “discovered the ‘orphans’, the children of Vietnamese women and US servicemen. It was almost as if she’d found herself.” JODY blocks her ears as the ‘orphans’ sing and play instruments. But GEORGE is listening. The PRIEST continues: it was 9 May 1967; we had received intelligence of North Vietnamese movements in the city… JODY threatens to kill herself if the PRIEST continues. She comforts herself with Sammy and Ella’s ‘words of praise’. The PRIEST recounts the events leading up to the evacuation; the approach of the NVA; the early sounds of rifle fire: Only one helicopter remains. PHILIPPA has run off to find one unaccounted-for orphan. Time presses. The PRIEST is getting anxious. The sounds of gunfire get louder. PHILIPPA returns. Placing the orphan in her lap, they strap her in; the rotors start… Then she sings of fulfilment.  

I did a scene breakdown with the following cast:

Philippa – opera: Cast

JODY – mezzo

GEORGE – bass

CARDINAL SPELLMAN – tenor

YOUNG PHILIPPA – child soprano

PHILIPPA – soprano

'JACQUES' (AFRICAN POLITICIAN) – bass

PRIEST – tenor

DENNIS – tenor

PRIEST II – bass

SOLDIER – tenor

VIETNAMESE CHILD - child soprano

CHORUS, CHILDREN’S CHORUS

But I won't lumber you with the whole of that for now. After writing that proposal I came up with another idea: of writing a chamber opera version which could do double duty as a piano concerto, to acknowledge Philippa's virtuosity. The three acts therefore become three movements, each with cadenzas. Clearly, it is envisaged that the woman playing Philippa is not only a singer but a pianist - a tall casting order? But it was also envisaged that Young Philippa would play the piano too.

The major criticism of the above proposal however is that its epic sweep vitiates dramatic pressure. 'Start as late as possible' I was reminded recently. Meaning: where the deciding crisis arises.

My most recent thoughts, therefore have been to begin the story in Vietnam, Fall 1966 (Act I), during Philippa's first trip to Vietnam where her frustrations come to a head, where the fact she is finally fed-up can drive the plot, but where she finally discovers the orphans. Jody is the protagonist in the background constantly pushing her to fulfil her destiny and calling her home - she has concerts to give. Act II therefore takes place in New York over the winter where nothing has improved, no prior solution has worked, where George and Jody's ambitious dream has failed and Philippa is no longer accepting of the verities of her upbringing. She escapes in Act III back to Vietnam, fuller immersion in the lives of the orphans, and then - death. The piece is still book-ended by the Mass at St. Patrick's.

page 1 of ideas for a new synopsis, included really for illustrative purposes. Pink highlighting shows the title and Prologue and Act I. You probably can't read this, but I'll write it up and post this synopsis once I feel it's presentable.

Act II ideas

Act III. You might notice that it comes back to the cathedral (Act III): 'Agnus Dei...' I don't want to lay it on with a trowel, but I find it interesting that Philippa grasped at Tarot and fortune-telling and eventually converted to catholicism - and laid down her life in the service of others.

I'll talk about this latest version in a forthcoming blog, but even today (after reading about the vibrant artistic activity around the Harlem Renaissance and realising that George and Jody's idea of producing a wunderkind was kind of a last blast of the renaissance's artistic idealism), I wonder if beginning with a Mass is too flat. Does a Mass have to be flat? I also realise that I need to do more work to work out what would appeal to an audience, as opposed to me, in this story.

Virginia in the desert

I've often tried to account for my intense interest in the USA. As a kid in Australia in the 1960s, I grew up with American TV - Combat (with Vic Morrow), Lee Marvin in M-Squad, The Three Stooges, Get Smart...It was that time in Australia's history when Great Britain was losing its cultural dominance.

But Australia was a long way away from the US then - so far away that in the 1956 Stanley Kramer movie, On the Beach, the crew of an US submarine could survive (for the time being) the nuclear cloud that had descended over the northern hemisphere because they were in Melbourne, far far away, at the time. There were no daily flights to LA or San Francisco when I was a kid, much less Qantas's recently-launched direct flights to Dallas. America was almost exotic.

My interest in the US could have gotten a good kick-along I realise though from having lived in Alice Springs in Central Australia, in the early 1980s.

Looking south down the Todd River (Lhere Mparntwe) towards Mt Sadadeen on the left and Mt John, behind. Photo from Wikipedia, uploaded by Shiftchange. It is Mt John that I first noticed glowing at night (see blog Location, Location, 23 August) while crossing the causeway (foreground) at night in 2006

Alice Springs, frozen in time around 1981-2, would make an interesting sociological study. You had your 'foreign legions', the teachers from Queensland and Adelaide doing their couple of years up north to 'repay' a Commonwealth Scholarship, or the clique of Melbourne barristers and QCs who were doing a stint working in the newly brought-in aboriginal Land Rights (some of them later Victorian Supreme Court judges; Land Rights was their rite of passage).

Alice Springs then was a country town that had to be a city. There were no traffic lights, but all the capital city daily newspapers were flown in from the various coastal cities every morning and you could buy The Age or The  Courier-Mail or The West Australian by ten and catch up with the day's news over a coffee in Todd Street at the same time as people in Melbourne and Brisbane and Perth did.

There was the aboriginal 'tapestry' too, of course - women sitting cross-legged under street trees collecting seed; people conversing in sign language across either side of Stuart Highway (the upward rotation of a loosely-held right thumb and forefinger to denote enquiry and so on...); the various reminders of a network of tracks, the paths of legendary creator caterpillars and dogs and 'uninitiated boys' who had passed this way in the Beginning, pre-dating streets and roads and bitumen; the metamorphosed body of the dog creator, the boulder Akngwelye thirrewe, which then stood chained off in the railway yards, but, with the widening of the Stuart Highway, is now outside a fast food outlet...

But the other element that made Alice unique then was the presence of Americans who worked 18 kilometres (11 miles) away at Pine Gap Defence Base and lived in town. Back then, strolling around Alice, you could often feel that you were walking around in the DC suburbs of Virginia or Maryland, in a little bit of Virginia or Maryland flung out into the desert.

I remember having a conversation at a cocktail party at the home of the chief of Pine Gap. There beyond the balcony was Spencer Hill and everything it reminded me of about Spencer and Gillen and their books, their description of the great engwura ceremony staged at the Telegraph Station in 1896; but my conversation this particular afternoon was about environmental pressures on Chesapeake Bay. I also remember Sallie K coming up to me in the street to exclaim, 'The president's been shot'. This was 1981. The president was Ronald Reagan. But citizens of other Australian towns would not have put the news like this. No-one would have said 'the president'; he wasn't ours. And I remember going to the home of another American one afternoon and seeing a video of last weekend's Washington Redskins-Miami Dolphins game, flown in on Monday by Starlifter (which brought in lots of other stuff as well, of course).

But the Americans also meant American music. Alice Springs had homegrown bands like Bloodwood, say, or Ted Egan accompanying himself on his cardboard beer carton. I'm conscious of the fact that there was once another ancient repertoire for the local hills and gaps and soaks and waterholes. But back in the early 80s, Alice Springs had a Big Band, squeal trumpets and all, full of American personnel. I remember playing old favourites from the Great American Songbook - Tuxedo Junction, arrangements by Sammy Nestico or Nelson Riddle, You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To...The band was in great demand. It even played once at a debutantes' ball up the road in the mining town of Tennant Creek, six hours away.

It's funny to think of the disjunctions that existed in Alice Springs in the early 1980s - videos of American Football games brought in by Starlifter, Left Hand Drives, the people who in casual conversation could share my references to Melbourne restaurants, other people living by campfire in the dry creekbed...

It really was a unique time, but convinced me in a sense that I'd already lived in America - and that if it's so nice to come home to someone, there are several places I can come home to.


If you liked this blog, others of mine on Central Australia are:

Carving up the pie, 17 December 20912
Life-changing statements, 16 December 2012
Ah, Nathanael, 29 November 2012
Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow's The Tale of Frieda Keysser), 5 Nov 2012
Drowned Man in a Dry Creekbed - Happy New Year 1993, 6 August 2012
Opera in a land of Song, 29 July 2012
Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira, 20 May 2012

Iconography 4

I wrote recently (Prelapsarian Sydney) of the squat brown blocks of Commission flats that had `been demolished recently in Glebe...[revealing] for the first time in however many years...the sandstone terraces that once stood at the head of Blackwattle Bay...' And in a blog on Sydney's iconography I pointed out the prevalence of honey-coloured sandstone as building material in Sydney's Victorian-era public buildings.

It's not just public buildings either. Every so often you'll come across a 19th century cottage built out of sandstone.

Little cottages like this are so typical of the inner suburbs of Sydney, this being only 3 or 4 kms from the CBD. At the head of Glebe Point Road to the east of here, closer into the city, there is a plaque marking the western boundary of the town of Sydney in the time of Governor Bourke (1831-37). I wonder who lived 'way out here' then?