What Puccini would have looked for (Philippa, an opera - blog 13)

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

Philippa Duke Schuyler, 1959. Photo: Fred Palumbo, World Telegram staff photographer. Public Domain.

Giacomo Puccini could judge the operatic suitability of a play even if he saw it in another language. The Italian speaker saw Sardou's La Tosca in French, and Belasco’s Madam Butterfly and Girl of the Golden West in English. The operatic potential of these plays he divined from broad stage action. How might Philippa portray its dramatic concerns in stage pictures?

Act I

Requiem Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, 18 May 1967. A mostly-segregated congregation, but George the African-American father and Jody the white Texan mother sit together. Words of praise from Sammy Davis Jr, Ella Fitzgerald, President Johnson, and others. Cardinal Spellman says they have met to celebrate the life of Philippa Duke Schuyler, pianist, composer, first US woman war correspondent to die in Vietnam. Pianism dominates the liturgical music; “Little girls everywhere who were inspired by Philippa’s example” play the music for her requiem on grand pianos. (They are mostly, however, African-American girls.) Jody wants to know how Philippa can “rest in peace when her potential lies unfulfilled”. She rejects George's attempts at consolation.

Vietnam, September 1966. 35 year-old Philippa arrives in war-torn Vietnam. She is confronted by signs of war – machine-gun emplacements, barbed wire entanglements. She is briefed on the restrictions on her movements and shown where she will play – on a broken-down upright piano in a ramshackle hall. She bristles at the ‘control’ the embassy is trying to exercise – it reminds her of her mother, Jody – and she tries to disguise her disappointment at how far she has fallen “from Carnegie Hall”. Three black servicemen invite her to play with them. She begins with Bach, but they begin to swing it. She should feel comfortable but does not. Once again she feels neither white nor black, even though she was supposed to be "the Answer [to America's racial problem]".

In a Saigon marketplace, Philippa meets a Vietnamese necromancer who says she will “spend some time in the dragon’s mouth, but then find a way out of it”. She tries on an áo dài and is taken for Vietnamese. She realises she can give her embassy chaperone the slip.

The three servicemen take her north and after they have left, she stays overnight in a Vietnamese hamlet controlled by the Viet Cong. Yes she can blend in but she doesn’t belong; this does not pacify her and is not the ‘dragon’s den’ the necromancer was referring to.

Before heading back south she meets a priest who is disturbed by her frantic seeking – (necromancy, Tarot, a new-found catholic faith!) He introduces her to the ‘orphans’, the abandoned children of US servicemen and Vietnamese women. She immediately feels a kinship with these children who are between cultures like her and she wants to stay and help. But the embassy chaperone finds her, and presents her with Jody’s demand to return home to New York.

Act II

Back in Harlem, Jody is plotting Philippa’s future - guaranteeing “continuity” by finding her a Mr Right and mapping out a showcase career. It is as if she is talking to Young Philippa (who is in fact present). But adult Philippa knows she will never play those major venues again – no longer “safely cute”, she is a problem for well-heeled audiences who don't know how to categorize her. In fact she is bitter. She is angry with George who books her concerts with the John Birch Society and believes she must succeed regardless of colour but fails to acknowledge that “colour is held against us”. (She recounts something she experienced with the three black servicemen).

Unwilling to rake over the family argument about Felipa Monterra y Schuyler (Philippa’s proposed new identity from a few years back), Jody buries herself in memories of uncomplicated Young Philippa and Young Philippa plays. In a brief moment of happy reminiscence, adult Philippa joins in. But she stops short when Jody reminds her of the scrapbooks, the books that plotted and predicted her every move. “I was merely a puppet.” concludes adult Philippa “and never stood where I could place myself”. Things are said that would have been better left unsaid, Philippa concluding that Jody controlled her every move.

Vengefully, Philippa has bedded the latest ‘Mr Right’ and he is bemused when the first thing she puts back on when dressing is a large crucifix. He mocks her beliefs and she attempts to defend herself, but a chorus of all her past men come back to 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

For a brief moment, George rekindles in Jody the tenderness which lay at the heart of their little family experiment to prove ‘the American genius of hybridization’. They relive the optimism of their marriage (Downtown in 1928) and their high hopes that Philippa’s birth would undo the hatred between American blacks and whites after hundreds of years of “lynchings and lashings”. But Jody feels Philippa’s mission will stall if she stays in Vietnam.

In Vietnam, Philippa gets to know the orphans (among other things, she teaches them music). 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 had thought she would leave her mark in music, but she has left behind her music and notebooks and finally silenced the voices in her head of 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. Out of the dragon's mouth? She is singing of fulfilment. (Epilogue) Back at St. Patrick's Jody threatens to commit suicide, but the Choir bursts into song (Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi...?)

Hmm, is it gaining a shape?

Other blogs in this series

1. - 16 Sep 2012 - an account of my initial thoughts on Philippa, when I was attempting to convey a more comprehensive trajectory of her life
2. - 18 Sep 2012 - containing Act I of a revised scenario, beginning the action in Vietnam
3. - 25 Sep 2012 - containing my revised scenario
4. - 7 Oct 2012 - one-page synopsis, to make sure such a story can fit into "two hours' traffic on the stage"
5. - Becoming a Harlemite, Vietnamese and Catholic 10 Oct, 2012 - detailing some of the research I'll be doing
6. - A Harlem Tradition? 20 Oct 2012 - detailing Harlem interest in white culture
7. - Sacrifice? 21 Oct 2012 - considering the nature of Philippa's death and whether it was self-sacrifice
8. - Classical aspirations 30 Oct 2012 - looking at Harlem's attitude to classical music in the age of Philippa
9. - Montagnards and Lowlanders 1 Nov 2012 - looking at some of Philippa's writing from Vietnam
10. - A sobering thought, 13 Nov 2012 - recognising the prevalence of lynching in the US until well into the 20th century
11 -  Words, words, words, 11 Dec 2012 - considering whether Latin should be one of the Philippa's languages given services even late into the 1960s would not have been in the vernacular.
12 - End of the rebirth, 20 Dec 2012 - some thoughts on the end of the Harlem Renaissance around the time of Philippa's birth.

For more on Puccini, see:

"Beautiful...sad", Puccini's La boheme, 29 July 2012

Carving up the pie

I'm often fascinated by the 'taxonomical' categories that take us beyond the rational divisions of life.

I thought of this again when we visited the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Sunday.

http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/francis-bacon/

You saw Bacon returning time and again to similar themes - Crucifixion, nailing, meat, carcasses, flesh, crumpling (as in crumpled paper)...

In Singing the Land, Signing the Land, a book brought out some years ago by Helen Chambers with the Yolngu community at Yirrkala and David Wade Chambers, the authors pointed out the way varying divisions of life prove the fictional 'constructedness' of our worlds.

 http://singing.indigenousknowledge.org

The Dyirbal people of Queensland, they mentioned, have a category that includes men, kangaroos, most snakes, storms, rainbows and boomerangs, and another which includes women, fire and dangerous things. There are aboriginal people who would disparage our categorization of emus as birds; emus don't fly. How can we even think of dividing up the world this way?

I wonder what the categories of my blogs might say about me - Central Australia, Sydney scenery, Aranda culture, AFL football, Washington, Jefferson, Wagner opera, Philippa Duke Schuyler, Inner West vignettes...

The closest I have to a photo of Gap Road. This is actually Stott Terrace, which crosses. Gap Road runs perpendicularly to this towards the gap in the ranges on the left of the picture.

And what creates these fusions. For example, I have a strong memory dating from 1983 of sitting in my friends the Christians' house in Gap Road Alice Springs; we all ate Toblerone, drank Earl Gray and listened to Side 4 of Solti's recording of Mahler's Eighth Symphony (the bit beginning with René Kollo singing, 'Blicket auf zum Retterblick (Look up to the redeeming sight...)'

love the use of the fish-eye lens to capture the whole cast of Mahler's 'Symphony of a Thousand'

Mahler's Eighth, with its texts of Veni creator Spiritus and the last scene from Goethe's Faust has nothing to do with quickly-melting chocolate, steaming tea and Alice Springs on sweaty summer nights, but its last half hour is forever wedded to these memories of mine.


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

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
Virginia in the Desert, 10 Sep 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

A sobering thought (Philippa, an opera - blog 10)

Continuing my series of blogs on the development of the opera Philippa, based on the life of Harlem-born concert pianist Philippa Duke Schuyler, the daughter of African-American journalist George S. Schuyler and white Texan Josephine Cogdell, who thought that if they combined their superior genes they could produce a genius. Philippa was, indeed, a prodigy who played her own compositions with the New York Philharmonic when barely in her teens. She died in Vietnam in 1967 rescuing 'the orphans', the children of US servicemen and Vietnamese women...

Lest we forget. George and Jody married in 1928. Even in New York it was a daring match for the times, as can be gathered from the following quote from David Levering Lewis's When Harlem Was in Vogue: 'At the close of the year[1927], the Atlanta Constitution congratulated the state of Georgia for getting through the year without a single lynching.'

A Ku Klux Klan meeting in Gainesville, Florida, Dec. 31, 1922.

Other blogs in this series

1. - 16 Sep 2012 - an account of my initial thoughts on Philippa, when I was attempting to convey a more comprehensive trajectory of her life
2. - 18 Sep 2012 - containing Act I of a revised scenario, beginning the action in Vietnam
3. - 25 Sep 2012 - containing my revised scenario
4. - 7 Oct 2012 - containing a one-page synopsis, to make sure such a story can fit into "two hours' traffic on the stage"
5. - Becoming a Harlemite, Vietnamese and Catholic 10 Oct, 2012 - detailing some of the research I'll be doing
6. - A Harlem Tradition? 20 Oct 2012 - detailing Harlem interest in white culture
7. - Sacrifice? 21 Oct 2012 - considering the nature of Philippa's death and whether it was self-sacrifice
8. - Classical aspirations 30 Oct 2012 - looking at Harlem's attitude to classical music in the age of Philippa
9. - Montagnards and Lowlanders 1 Nov 2012 - looking at some of Philippa's writing from Vietnam

Montagnards and Lowlanders (Philippa, an opera - blog 9)

Another in my series of blogs on the development of the opera Philippa, based on the life of Philippa Duke Schuyler. Philippa, the Harlem-born daughter of African-American journalist George S. Schuyler and white Texan Josephine Cogdell, toured Vietnam as a concert pianist in 1967 and died rescuing some 'orphans', the children of US servicemen and Vietnamese women, during a North Vietnamese attack on Hué. It is interesting to reflect on the feeling she developed for these children. I think she sensed that they, like her, were perilously 'between cultures'.

But it is even more interesting to read some of the articles or essays that Philippa filed from Vietnam and see some of the other attitudes she brought to her observations.The articles I'm reading were originally written for newspapers like The Manchester Union Leader (based in New Hampshire) and were collected in a book called Good Men Die.

I'm particularly struck by one called 'Montagnards and Lowlanders', an account of the hill people of the Vietnam highlands. I tend to assume that someone who has suffered racial prejudice will be tolerant of others who are different. Philippa had a lustrous career while she was young and cute - played with the New York Philharmonic; had a day named after her at the 1940 World's Fair - but as soon as she was no longer young and cute and politically safe, her opportunities dried up. The white world didn't want to know her. She ended up playing in out-of-the-way places (at least as far as a classical music career is concerned). Hey, she was in Vietnam, not Vienna, when she died.  

But what strikes me in this article on Montagnards is the tone of distaste underneath the summaries of mountain tribes' characteristics: "The Bahnar believe in 'tiger-men', half-human, half-animal creatures, and in an appalling heirarchy of vindictive spirits....The Sedang people are hardly more attractive [italics added]....Ancestors' souls hover everywhere, as in animist African regions. These ancestors are malicious and vindictive and behave with the greatest possible mischievousness and discontent.

"The Christian notion that 'God is Love' is sometimes difficult to convey here. One missionary told Bernard Newman, author of Background toViet Nam, that translating the New Testament into some Montagnard languages had been difficult. Using Montagnard terms, 'The Great Spirit Is Not Angry' became the only possible translation of 'God is Love'. The Montagnards did not have a word for love."

A Bahnar rong (communal house) in the village of Kon Kotu, Central Highlands, Vietnam. Photo: Doron, sourced from Wikipedia

A few pages later she says, "...the Viet Cong, who promise autonomy to the Montagnards, can play on the genuine resentment the Montagnards feel toward the Vietnamese Lowlanders, who have a superior culture [italics added] and are a different ethnic sub-group. The Lowlanders, whose contempt for the backward, primitive Montagnards is vast and implacable, have not always given the Montagnards what the latter consider fair treatment."

Philippa herself seems to see little that is appealing in these people. Does she reckon the treatment is fair or what? I wonder if it's because she's playing to the prejudices of the readers of right-wing papers; had her own harshnesses; or if it has something to do with the fact that Harlem was not immune from snobbery of its own kind?




Other blogs in this series

1. - 16 Sep 2012 - an account of my initial thoughts on Philippa, when I was attempting to convey a more comprehensive trajectory of her life
2. - 18 Sep 2012 - containing Act I of a revised scenario, beginning the action in Vietnam
3. - 25 Sep 2012 - containing my revised scenario
4. - 7 Oct 2012 - containing a one-page synopsis, to make sure such a story can fit into "two hours' traffic on the stage"
5. - Becoming a Harlemite, Vietnamese and Catholic 10 Oct, 2012 - detailing some of the research I'll be doing
6. - A Harlem Tradition? 20 Oct 2012 - detailing Harlem interest in white culture
7. - Sacrifice? 21 Oct 2012 - considering the nature of Philippa's death and whether it was self-sacrifice
8. - Classical aspirations 30 Oct 2012 - looking at Harlem's attitude to classical music in the age of Philippa

Classical aspirations (Philippa - an opera, blog 8)

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 'the orphans', the children of US servicemen and Vietnamese women...

So much of Philippa's angst was due to a feeling of being between cultures. The child of an African-American journalist and wealthy white Texan, she had difficulty working out where she belonged. It tormented her. I have long felt that the music she played might have dramatised her split. Here she was growing up in Harlem, the daughter of a prominent African-American, devoted to playing European classics - Schubert, Mussorgsky, not jazz, nothing more syncopated than Rhapsody in Blue.

Yet now I read in When Harlem Was in Vogue, the study of Harlem in the 1920s, that, "Afro-American music had always been a source of embarrassment to the Afro-American elite....upper-crust Afro-Americans still mostly recoiled in disgust from music as vulgarly explosive as the outlaw speakeasies and cathouses that spawned it."

David Levering Lewis, the author of this book, speaks of how "Fletcher Henderson's Rainbow Orchestra symbolized...the debut of jazz as a product for national consumption....the national jazz sound was the swinging syncopation of Henderson's orchestra...with the Cotton Club orchestra of Duke Ellington (even smoother and 'whiter') placing a close second."

Duke Ellington playing at the Hurricane Club, New York May 1943. Photograph: Gordon Parks, Farm Security Administration

And yet, despite the smoothing out and blanching of Henderson's and Ellington's sounds, Lewis says, 'No doubt [NAACP president] Du Bois, who was an occasional celebrant at the Savoy [ballroom], would have preferred that Henderson devote all his talents to the Harlem Symphony (Henderson was an active member)."

Excelling in classical music must have been a widespread aim. Lewis mentions also how Black Swan records - "The Only Genuine Colored Record - Others Are Only Passing for Colored" brought out some "corking good Blues songs" in its 1922 catalogue, but an ad in a May issue of The Crisis gave pride of place to two operatic numbers it had recorded by Antoinette Garnes, "The Only Colored Member of the Chicago Grand Opera Company".

Clearly a drama cannot go into all the footnotes but this issue is more nuanced than I started out thinking.

This is the eighth in my series of blogs charting the development of this opera. For ease of reference the others have been:

1. - 16 Sep 2012 - an account of my initial thoughts on Philippa, when I was attempting to convey a more comprehensive trajectory of her life

2. - 18 Sep 2012 - containing Act I of a revised scenario, beginning the action in Vietnam
3. - 25 Sep 2012 - containing my revised scenario
4. - 7 Oct 2012 - containing a one-page synopsis, to make sure such a story can fit into "two hours' traffic on the stage"
5. - Becoming a Harlemite, Vietnamese and Catholic 10 Oct, 2012 - detailing some of the research I'll be doing
6. - A Harlem Tradition? 20 Oct 2012 - detailing Harlem interest in white culture
7. - Sacrifice? 21 Oct 2012 - considering the nature of Philippa's death and whether it was self-sacrifice

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.

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

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