LEON KIRCHNER, EXACTLY AS HE WANTS IT

THE COMPOSER CREATES A PASSIONATE CHORAL WORK OUT OF AMERICAN POETRY

Author: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

Date: FRIDAY, September 26, 1997

Page: D13

Section: Arts and Film

``I'd never written for chorus since,'' Kirchner says, ``except for parts of my opera `Lily.' I don't even know whether I still have a copy of `Dawn' -- I can't find it.''

Nevertheless, Kirchner has been a serious reader all his life and has set poetry for solo singers. Now, after long delays, and Kirchner's major illness, his work for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, ``Of things exactly as they are,'' reaches performance at this weekend's Boston Symphony concerts. Seiji Ozawa conducts, and soprano Roberta Alexander and baritone William Stone are the soloists.

Kirchner began the project by compiling a libretto. ``I was looking for texts that could express things I had felt far better than I ever could in words,'' the composer says. ``It was quite a long process, and my publisher would not let me set down a single note of music until I had secured all the necessary permissions from poets or their estates. At one point, I wanted to include a passage from T.S. Eliot, but his estate must have thought I was Andrew Lloyd Webber. They wanted the kind of royalties they could expect from `Cats'!''

Kirchner finally assembled a sizable sheaf of poems that he showed to his friend, critic Helen Vendler, who remarked that a musical setting of all those lines would take a full week to perform. As he read the poems over and over, he felt some of them beginning to interact, to coalesce, to create the kind of friction and drama he was looking for. Finally he settled on passages from Robinson Jeffers, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell -- all of them American poets, although that was not part of his original design. ``I was sorry to give up Eliot, Hart Crane and Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, e.e. cummings, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, and A. R. Ammons,'' Kirchner says with a wry grin.

Kirchner had completed the short score and the choral parts in time for last season's scheduled premiere when he was felled by an aortal aneurysm. ``For the first couple of months I was out of the hospital, I was so exhausted that I couldn't work on the orchestration for more than a couple of minutes at a time, but now it's all done except for the corrections I'd like to make!'' Kirchner has dedicated the work to his wife, ``my dearest Gert.''

As he began work, Kirchner felt ``Of things exactly as they are'' developing into a kind of operatic ``duo-drama'' -- characters and conflicts began to emerge from the music and text, and Kirchner found himself thinking of ``Erwartung,'' the great operatic monodrama for soprano and orchestra by his teacher Arnold Schoenberg. The baritone and soprano solos suggested a passionate relationship; the chorus took on the role of context and commentary, like the chorus in Greek tragedy.

The work opens with lines from Jeffers about the timeless immensity of the ocean that sees and dissolves all human experience and conflict. ``I remember what it was like as a child to swim through the breakers to the place beyond the waves, and so I tried to put that into the music, my own version of Debussy's `La Mer.' I was also thinking of the beginning of Hardy's novel `The Return of the Native' -- I wanted to compose something vast and brooding like that, or like the way Bruckner opens a symphony.''

The passionate Emily Dickinson poems that follow also invoke the sea and bring on the soprano and baritone soloists, who become figures at once actual and symbolic. ``The sexual implications did not escape me,'' Kirchner says, ``the really wild physical involvement suggested in the poems.'' The lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay ``humanize the immensity of the Jeffers, and become personal and touching. Then something strange happens with the arrival of lines from the Wallace Stevens poem `The Man With the Blue Guitar.' There is something going on here that the lovers want to be a part of, yet also fear. Here I did not want to use a real guitar, although I explored the possibilities; finally I decided to use piano, harp, glockenspiel, and celeste to evoke the guitar.''

Then comes an ``immense'' poem by Robert Lowell about day and night in Central Park that Kirchner loves so much that he carried a copy around in his pocket for years. But this dark vision of lovers ``occupying every inch of earth and sky'' is not the end. Instead, Kirchner has composed an epilogue, in which each poem in the cycle comes back with a line or two and its associated musical ideas, and this brings about a kind of resolution. This too had a literary model in the futuristic fiction of Doris Lessing.

Last week Kirchner was full of worries and hopes about tonight's premiere. ``Sometimes I think of how Ulysses lashed himself to the mast so that he would not respond to the sirens' call. That's how I feel about hearing my own music.'' Nevertheless he was looking forward to meetings with Seiji Ozawa and the soloists, and quite pleased with chorus master John Oliver's work with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. ``The chorus already makes the music sound like my piece; John has been absolutely wonderful throughout this entire process.''

As usual, Kirchner's conversation cast a wide net to catch personal reminiscence, philosophical reflection, uncompromising but not unfair views of the recent works of some of his younger contemporaries, and splenetic outrage at the state of the music business. ``In our culture, a composer merely exercises his craft,'' he says angrily. ``It's the performer who's the genius.'' At the same time, Kircher admits he feels stirrings toward further new work to do. ``For years,'' he admits, ``I have thought about that first chord in the Stravinsky Violin Concerto, and how he sent it to the violinist Samuel Dushkin to ask if it were playable. I would construct an opening chord for a violin concerto in my head and then I would wonder just who I could send it to. Now Young Uk Kim wants me to write him a violin concerto; I told him I would, and I've been thinking about it ever since.'' Kirchner has written three of the finest string quartets ever composed by an American -- the second won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 -- and he has promised a fourth to the Aldeburgh Festival in England.

And his thoughts invariably return to ``Of things exactly as they are.'' ``Some days I'm very satisfied with it, and some days I'm not and wonder if there's a piece there at all. But then people tell me I've always been like that. . . .''

DYER ;09/23 NKELLY;09/26,07:36 KIRCHN26