Sacrifice? (Philippa - an opera [blog 7])

Continuing my series of blogs on the development of the opera Philippa, based on the life of Philippa Duke Schuyler, the Harlem-born concert pianist (daughter of African-American journalist George S. Schuyler and white Texan Josephine Cogdell), who died in Vietnam in 1967 rescuing schoolchildren...

I muse on the possibility of self-sacrifice, an aspect of emotional research I feel I will have to undertake.

At the end of the opera, during the attack on Hué, Philippa and one of the 'orphans' are strapped into a rescue helicopter which will plunge into the sea off Ðà Nãng.

somewhere over there (looking south)

Was this self-sacrifice? And still so considering the orphan who was sitting on her knee also didn't survive? It is clearly bravery, and is that enough for an ending?

Assuming that it was self-sacrifice because Philippa had the image of self-sacrifice before her in her new-found beliefs, I wonder what it takes to actually act like this. It is an adult behaviour; 'childishness' would equate to the survival mode. But how does Philippa, whom I have so far depicted as so enmeshed with her childish concerns, get to this stage?

On the other hand, a psychoanalytic reading of the story, might say that Philippa felt she had to rescue the 'orphans', the children of US servicemen and Vietnamese women because in Vietnam for the first time she saw herself (the child caught between cultures) reflected in others and just couldn't let these reflections die.

I don't mind if an audience comes out arguing about these things. But it's the idea of self-sacrifice that most moves me at the moment.

A Harlem tradition? (Philippa [blog 6])

Continuing my series of blogs on the development of the opera Philippa, based on the life of Philippa Duke Schuyler, the Harlem-born concert pianist who died in Vietnam in 1967 rescuing schoolchildren...

As mentioned in my previous blog, I need to come to grips with quite a few background issues in writing the libretto for this work - the atmosphere in Harlem and New York as Philippa was growing up in 1930s and '40s; the wartime scene in Saigon and Hué in 1966 and '67; what it's like to be torn between identities and also what it's like to be a Catholic convert, and of course more...


Even now, the research is fascinating and influential. I have previously written that Philippa was the daughter of African-American journalist, George S. Schuyler, and wealthy white Texan, Josephine (Jody) Cogdell, who thought that if they pooled their superior genes they could create a genius who would show America a way out of the racial divide.

George S. Schuyler, photographed by Carl van Vechten 1941

I had previously considered George and Jody's 'experiment' in isolation, but in fact as I've been reading When Harlem Was in Vogue, David Levering Lewis's study, I've been thinking that George and Jody's idea was an outgrowth of the premise underlying much of the Harlem Renaissance; that African-Americans would find their way up in American society by the arts and literature, the only way open to them at the time.

Of course, parenting a child like Philippa is a big step up from Park Ave dowager Charlotte Osgood Mason sponsoring a novelist like Claude McKay or a poet like Langston Hughes, but I've been surprised in recent days to discover how many African-Americans of the 1920s aspired to better the white man in his culture (italics added).

I had a line for George in my Philippa scenario to the effect of: "...it needs to become unremarkable when a Negro writes a novel or composes a concerto." ['Negro?' - I'm using the language of the time]. Only yesterday I was reading about James Weldon Johnson who became executive secretary, and right hand man of W.E.B. DuBois, at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1920.

James Weldon Johnson, photographed by Carl van Vechten in 1932

He'd had quite a distinguished career and was quite active in Republican Party politics in the early years of the 20th century. (Republican sympathies among African-Americans were not so unusual 40 years after the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, had gone into bat for freedom). Teddy Roosevelt made Johnson consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela in the spring of 1906 and, as Levering Lewis says, "...Consul Johnson [fluent in Spanish and almost so in French] found his social acceptance in Venezuela so complete that he worried about his failure to make an impact 'as a Negro,' for Johnson was a racial chauvinist of a special kind. He wanted his complete and natural assimilation of European culture to make such an impression that whites enjoying his cosmopolitan company would inevitably draw positive generalizations about Afro-Americans."

He and George were not the only ones in Harlem to think like this. Levering Lewis says, on page 148, of his book: "This was the fundamental credo of his Talented Tenth brothers and sisters - of [Jessie] Fauset, and Charles Johnson, and [Walter] White, and others - that the assimilated, cultured Afro-Saxon was every whit the equal of his 'Nordic' counterpart. To fall away from orthodox religion, to mine the black folk tradition for its barely known riches, and to cheer the marines in the Caribbean [putting down revolutions] and the capitalists at home were not aberrations but the reasonable reflections of genuine convictions of upper middle-class status. Yet the class was part of the race, and the generality of the race was not yet, they conceded, Civic Club material. Hence, the violent tensions in psychology and logic of Johnson and his class as they protested that if they matched the best whites, given the distance travelled and the roadblocks surmounted, it was because they were, in truth, superior human material." And there's even a lineage for George's extreme conservatism (I've noted before that he was a member of the John Birch Society in later life). Johnson and Charles Johnson and Walter White "chose", says Lewis, "to ignore the economic impotence of Afro-Americans, arguing, as Charles Johnson had and Walter White did, that 'the status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions'." Pull yourself up, don't balkanise yourself, etc., etc....
 
By the way, among Johnson's achievements may be "first Floridian ever to compose an opera" and translation of Granados' Goyescas for The Metropolitan Opera. There also seems to be a modern-day incarnation of these sentiments in some of the information you might glean about Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's Secretary of State. Without ascribing the same motives (she may just like the music), Secretary Rice would meet with musicians once a week at her apartment in the Watergate building and play Brahms, her favourite composer. And I have a favourite story about Rice...once when she'd had a gutful of the racism of one of her professors she said to him (I paraphrase): "Look, I play Bach and I've read War and Peace twice - in Russian. I'm better in your culture than you are." [italics added]

There are certainly nuances I didn't expect that I am going to have to get if this libretto is to have any authenticity.

"Shall we have an editor?" (with apologies to John Jay, who originally wrote "a king")

Apparently, Thomas Jefferson used to send people copies of his draft of the Declaration of Independence. He didn't like Congress's edited version. Bill Bryson once observed that Jefferson, like most writers, thought his version was better than the edit; and that like most writers...he was wrong.

I was discussing editing with a former newspaper editor only yesterday. We both agreed that we could cut a piece to any length, maintain the tone and weight, and convey the same depth of research that had gone into the original longer draft. But editing is more than that.

Some of America's greatest politicians have been great editors (is there something in that?). There is a book called Ask Not by Thurston Clarke which examines the editorial work John Kennedy did on his first inaugural address (of course the title of the book comes from the speech's famous phrase - 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.') And one of the highlights of Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg is the side-by-side comparison of Secretary of State William Seward's draft of Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address and Lincoln's touch up.

Seward, for example, wrote: "The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battle-fields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angels of this nation."

And Lincoln lifted it to: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

I guess what I'm getting at is that an edit can ratchet up the meaning. The example I can think of with real punkt is again from the Declaration of Independence. In the great clause about all men being created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among them Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, Jefferson originally wrote: "We hold these truths to be Sacred and Undeniable..." In a hand that looks like Benjamin Franklin's, "Sacred and Undeniable" is crossed and above the line someone has written (a word that is perfect and unarguable): "self-evident".

Becoming a Harlemite, Vietnamese, and a Catholic (Philippa [blog 5])

As mentioned in my previous blogs on this subject [Philippa blog I, 16 September 2012; blog 2, 18 September; blog 3, 25 September; and blog 4, October 7], 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. 

In Melbourne last week I read my new synopsis and scenario [blogs 3 & 4] for Philippa to a friend who thought that the amount of depth required could only be done justice to by a novel. I wasn't so sure. I believe a performance piece can conceal great depth in the exact, particular skew of its surface. Novelistic depth is revealed in a performance piece by subsequent performance and interpretation over many years (if you're lucky enough to get repeat performances). You don't have to have everything in there, but everything in the hinterland of the characters dictates their exact responses.

But I admit Philippa will require a good deal of novelistic research. Philippa Duke Schuyler was born in Harlem in 1931 just after or towards the end of the Harlem Renaissance.

Scenes from Harlem (and Sugar Hill) on a hot summer's day last year.

I am enjoying reading David Levering Lewis's book about that great flowering when African-American leaders, along with their white 'sponsors', decided that the one avenue open for African-American advancement lay in art and literature. When Harlem was in vogue gives me a whole cast of characters to get to know - Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Philippa's father George... - and lists an impressive roster of achievement in that period (which Levering Lewis dates as beginning on 21 March 1924): 26 novels, ten volumes of poetry, five Broadway plays, innumerable essays and short stories, two or three performed ballets and concerti, 'and [a] large output of canvas and sculpture...'

There is also Vietnamese language and culture to come to terms with, because I believe the opera should be performed in the three (or more) languages that are pertinent to the story - English, French and Tiếng Việt. I believe that operas should be performed in foreign languages. I acknowledge Wagner's desire to have the words understood and sung in the language of the country the opera is being performed in (stated in a letter he wrote to a correspondent in Melbourne Australia in 1877 and covered in a previous blog), but we have surtitles now. And requiring audiences to understand foreign languages is actually one of the ethical virtues of opera. But Vietnamese is a tonal language (you don't ask a question through an upward inflection; you use a word - 'không' - at the end of a sentence) and this raises interesting questions about word-setting and rhyme schemes (Vietnamese poets tend to create patterns out of the pitches).

Then there is the emotional research - what did it feel like to be Philippa, torn between worlds, driven, thirsty, voracious, abandoned, and, of course, what is it like to be a Catholic convert?

The back of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Saigon, which Philippa would have known.

Because this, I think, is the key to finding some sort of resolution in the ending of the story, Philippa's tragic death in a helicopter crash into the sea off  Ðà Nãng while rescuing schoolchildren. I don't want to lay the religion on thick; but rather make it Graham Greene-ish. In other words: wrestle with the question as to whether there is a way to find this ending meaningful. Note that in my scenario I leave Jody with the final thoughts: 'I will kill myself' whispered or hissed under the Agnus Dei - something for the sceptics or realists (whatever they prefer to call themselves).

But I, personally, don't have any 'energy' on Catholicism. I don't have the angst or bitterness of the 'lapsee'. I was brought up as an atheist. If anything, I am a 'lapsed atheist'.

It was amusing when Andrew and I were researching Journey to Horseshoe Bend and we went out to a Lutheran service at Ntaria, the old Hermannsburg Mission in Central Australia. The service was in Arrernte and I could only orient myself by latching onto the odd word I understood. I hadn't a clue about the service. But Andrew, the son of a Lutheran pastor, kept pointing to the order of service sheet for me. I was more at sea in my own culture than anyone else in the 'sanctuary' (is that the correct word? because, the other day was the first time I'd heard of terms like Liturgy of the Word of God and Liturgy of the Eucharist).

Atheism is, I would say, a three-generation thing in my family. My great-grandfather (on my father's side) was a shepherd in the south of England or Wales who got us thrown out of the Catholic Church when he gave the local priest the 'bum's rush' when he came around to remonstrate with my forebear for marrying in a Protestant church. 'And never darken our doorway again,' I understand the priest said, brandishing his fist as he stormed away. And my family didn't. 'But', said my mother in one of her wisest bits of advice when she told me this story, 'just remember this if you ever want to sling off at someone else for their beliefs. You didn't know we'd been Catholics did you? You never know what's in your past.' And of course, it cut fine with her. Her own mother grew up in old sectarian Australia where the Labor Party tore itself apart when the catholics walked out on the socialists in the 1950s. 'She's a Catholic, but she's an awfully nice person,' is something my grandmother would say.

As for atheism, my father used to say 'Nothing can exist outside of time or space'. I would say things to him like, 'How come you can be in a strange city walking down a side street and run into a bloke you haven't seen for 20 years and was only thinking about that morning?' My father would say, 'Coincidence', without realising that coincidence has a lower statistical probability than design. 'Nothing can exist outside of time or space', he'd repeat. I'd ask, 'What is "thought"? How can a piece of meat [the brain] think?' Again, he'd have no answer. He was entrenched in his decided position.

And I don't know why people have huge heated arguments about whether there is a God or afterlife or not ("You cause wars"; "No, you cause wars.") I'm reconciled to the fact that I'm not going to know until just after the moment of death. And if I'm not conscious then, well...I'm still not going to bloody well know!!

You see, I think it is easy to entertain the possibility that there is something. 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy'.  And I admit I'm moved by passages such as the following in a book I'm reading called Now That You Are a Catholic (by John J. Kenny) (yes, I'm starting that basic!):

"The consecrated bread is usually called the host. This comes from the Latin hostia meaning victim. The Christ present in this bread is the one who offered himself as a sacrificial victim for us on Calvary." [italics added] I find it quite moving, regardless of truth or not, to be offered this example of self-sacrifice.

But my task will be to understand why Philippa chose these beliefs; what they released her from; how big a role they played in her decisions. In a sense, I will have to understand what it means to become a catholic.

Philippa - an opera [blog 4]

As mentioned in my previous blogs on this subject [Philippa blog I, 16 September 2012, blog 2, 18 September, and blog 3, 25 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 one-page synopsis to check if the story can fit into a digestible "two hours' traffic on the stage". Can it?

Philippa - Synopsis

This is a story of the agony of confused identity, transcended ultimately in a spirit of self-sacrifice. Prologue: May 18, 1967: the Requiem Mass at New York’s St.Patrick’s Cathedral for Philippa Duke Schuyler; and words of praise from Sammy Davis Jr, Ella Fitzgerald, President Johnson, and others. But this famous concert pianist, daughter of African-American journalist George S. Schuyler and wealthy white Texan Josephine Cogdell (Jody), died “too young” in a helicopter crash off Ðà Nãng. JODY wants to know how Philippa can “rest in peace when her potential lies unfulfilled” and rejects GEORGE’S attempts at consolation. Philippa’s life, she believes, was wasted.

Act I: In September 1966, 35 year-old PHILIPPA arrives to give concerts in then-South Vietnam at the invitation of US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. She is confronted by signs of war but bridles at the protectiveness of the embassy. Her chaperone’s “stifling rules” remind her of growing up with Jody who mapped out her every move, planning for her to grow into America’s “bi-racial genius, a beacon of hope to black and white worlds”. But Philippa is no longer comfortable in either world. Life has been difficult since she ceased to be “the cute little girl, classical music’s mulatto Shirley Temple”. She has had to perform further and further off the main circuits and has desperately searched for other forms of self-expression. In Vietnam she discovers that she can slip into an aí daò and pass for Vietnamese, moving with perfect freedom through enemy territory, but this is merely “play-acting”; something she has been doing most of her life. Returning to Saigon for concerts, she wonders if she will ever find an answer to her life’s dilemmas. Then, at a convent school, a PRIEST introduces her to the ‘orphans’, offspring of American servicemen and Vietnamese women and SHE is entranced by children who are “between cultures” as she is. SHE decides to devote more time to them, but JODY has booked concerts back in the States.

Act II: In Harlem, New York over the winter, JODY continues to plot out Philippa’s future – guaranteeing “continuity” by finding her a Mr Right (“after all those Mr Wrongs”) and mapping out a showcase career. But PHILIPPA is under no illusions; she will never play the major venues again. And she is angry with George who has arranged concerts for her with the John Birch Society. Having witnessed discrimination against black servicemen doing the work of whites in Vietnam, she has grown weary of her father’s “contrary opinions” on Civil Rights. All the old arguments arise: George and his “we’ve got to not be separate....It’s got to become unremarkable when we write a book or compose a concerto”; Philippa and her “‘closed doors’ of the whites” and her “insulting” (George’s word) desire to pass herself off as southern European... But this time PHILIPPA’s bitterness rises to a higher-than-usual peak and things are said which will be difficult to unsay.

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. JODY and GEORGE relive the excitement of the Harlem Renaissance when it seemed that African-Americans would break into the American mainstream via the arts and YOUNG PHILIPPA, the prodigy, plays the piano while JODY re-reads the scrapbooks that plotted Philippa’s every step of progress. JODY remembers, however, the way Philippa was struck dumb when presented with the books on her 13^th birthday. “Was I a mere project?” the older PHILIPPA asks, and the playing stops.

Almost in defiance of her mother, PHILIPPA meets and beds ‘Mr Right’. Given her sexual aggressiveness, HE is bemused when he discovers her Catholicism (something not shared with her parents). She is offended – she has had to find answers to life’s questions somewhere - but ALL THE OTHER MEN OF HER PAST (CHORUS) back up MR RIGHT’S low opinion of her. One of them, an AFRICAN POLITICIAN, mourns the son she aborted because he might prove to be “too obviously black”. PHILIPPA determines to get out of New York.

Act III: Briefly, in Philippa’s absence, GEORGE rekindles in JODY the tenderness which lay at the heart of their little family experiment to prove ‘the American genius of hybridization’. They hoped that Philippa’s birth would undo the hatred between American blacks and whites after hundreds of years of “lynchings and slayings”. But JODY feels Philippa’s mission will stall if she stays in Vietnam.

While PHILIPPA gets to know the children in a Hué orphanage, a MILITARY LIAISON briefs the PRIEST on North Vietnamese Army movements around the city. PHILIPPA determines that, as a journalist and writer, she is in a unique position to promote the orphans’ case to the world and wonders if she has found the answer to her own torments in burying herself in their needs. But gunfire is already being heard in the streets.

9 May 1967 ... the approach of the NVA; closer sounds of rifle fire: there is a desperate need for evacuation. 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. SHE has left behind her music and notebooks and the voices of the parents, critics and men-friends. Placing the orphan in her lap, THE SOLDIERS strap her in; the rotors start… Then, as the sound of the rotor blades die down, we hear her voice - singing of fulfilment. (Epilogue) The CHOIR back at St. Patrick’s bursts into song.

G.K. Williams, 8 Oct 2012

True blues

Flying out of Sydney I think as usual of how interesting it would be to see this coast from the sea and imagine how it appeared to the first white visitors.

This is Port Hacking, just north of the Royal National Park. North of here, Captain Cook sailed straight past Sydney Harbour in 1770. From the sea, he thought the south, middle and north heads of Port Jackson simply defined the circumference of a short bay, not that Middle Head was the tongue dividing two separate harbours, one quite massive.

In Melbourne I constantly revise my impressions of my birthplace. This time I noticed just how much Sydney and Melbourne are differentiated by their native stone.

Whereas Sydney's is a golden honey colour,

Melbourne's is a dark blue

Blue is the colour of mountains in southeastern Australia. In Box Hill, near where the Australian Impressionist painters (Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts) taught us that the natural colours of southeastern Australia are blue and yellow,

I looked out at the Dandenong Ranges in the distance:

In 1930, the great soprano Dame Nellie Melba retired out near where those distant blue hills rise. When I see them I remember how the Australian (Melbourne) composer Percy Grainger (claimed by Americans) described Melba: "Her voice always made me mindsee Australia's landscapes, her voice having some kind of a peach-fur-like nap on it that made me think of the deep blue that forms on any Australian hill if seen a mile or more off."

Urban green

Our little garden grows and is covered in bottlebrush needles from the overhanging paperbark at this time of the year.

Not bad for less than 4 kms from the Sydney GPO (American-speak: less than 2-and-a-half miles from Downtown)

...I thought the world
Was sugar cake
For so our master said.
But, now I'll teach
My hands to bake
Our loaf of daily bread.

We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...

- Richard Wilbur, lyrics from Bernstein's Candide