Imagine the challenges and insights offered by Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway” which is set in London in the early 1920s, right after the World War, and just after the Influenza Pandemic. The story takes place within one London day and skips from consciousness to consciousness of its major and minor characters in a kind of playing tag with stream of consciousness story telling. Now imagine an opera inspired by that novel. A new opera, The Hours, by Pulitzer prize winning composer and Fieldston parent Kevin Puts first took the stage in Philadelphia in March 2022 and will open at the Metropolitan Opera this fall. The opera, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham and the 2002 film directed by Stephen Daldry (which starred Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore), is unique in its simultaneity across time periods, and has already been a huge success after a tireless creative process.
Puts has been composing for decades. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 201 2 for his debut opera, Silent Night, which follows soldiers in World War I. I had the opportunity to interview Puts, during which he described the differences between the process of writing Silent Night as compared to The Hours.
“Silent Night was my first opera so I was really learning on the job. When I wrote Silent Night I could write for orchestra because I had done a lot of that but I hadn’t written a lot for voice. I feel like the process is very different because I know how I want to write lyrically for the singers and I know how I want their voices to project and hopefully write more effectively for them,” he said.
The Hours will feature several operatic powerhouses including Renée Fleming and Kelli O’Hara, to name a few. According to Puts, “The opera was Renée Fleming’s idea. I had been working with Renée, who is a major soprano opera star, on a project about Georgia O’Keeffe, which was just a piece with orchestra, using O’Keeffe’s letters.”
Puts suggested working on an opera to continue their work together. “I brought up a couple of ideas and then she brought up The Hours because she had just had lunch with Julianne Moore, who she had worked with on a film, and who was in the film adaptation of The Hours.”
Given the nature of the story and the flexibility of music as a medium for storytelling, Puts became infatuated with the idea. “She said it would be really interesting to do something that takes place in different time periods all at the same time, like The Hours. So I said, “What about The Hours.” the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was a fascinating idea because you can do things with music that you can’t do in a book or a film. For example, you can’t really deal with simultaneity successfully in a book or a film, but in an opera you can conceivably have characters from these different time periods: Virginia Woolf in the 1920s, Laura Brown in the 1950s, and a more contemporary character Clarissa Vaughn who is living in the 1990s in New York. They can sing simultaneously and appear simultaneously on the stage and they can work together in music and harmony. It was interesting to blur the lines between these characters that are separated by years.”
The process of writing this opera was very labor intensive because, as Puts put it, “This opera is sort of as big as you can get. It has a big cast, a big orchestra, and also a very big chorus which plays a major role in opera storytelling and is on the stage a lot. “We actually have actors, who will be costumed similarly to the chorus, whose job is mainly to move set pieces around as the scenes change, making the piece more visually dynamic.” It has also taken a lot of time. “We are still revising things and it has been about three years since the libretto was started. The libretto is basically the screenplay: it has the words and the stage directions. It represents the structure of the opera with no music.”
The libretto for The Hours was written by Greg Pierce. “The libretto has to be complete, and then we talk about it, and I think about what I might do with this musically, and that takes about half a year. Music is a much longer process,” Puts noted.
Once the libretto was drafted, it changed frequently as Puts worked on the music. For this opera, Puts wrote each part for each singer. “The opera was cast, in other words the Metropolitan Opera decided who they wanted each character to be sung by, early on, so I knew exactly who I was writing for. I wrote for Renée’s voice, which I have gotten to know quite well. I am still learning new things about how her voice operates in opera which is different from what I had worked with previously.”
Operatic singing techniques, Puts noted, are extremely unique in that “the voice does sound very different. The kind of singing is very different from what most people are used to hearing in pop music because the singer needs to be heard with no amplification in a huge space, so they have to sing in a different way.” This plays a role in the writing process. “You can write for clarinet, for example, and you can expect the same thing from each person who plays the part. The human voice is so variable and unpredictable so you have to get to know the quality of each singer’s voice in every part of their range.”
Writing this opera has been a particularly unique experience because it was written through the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’ve had some workshops to try things out (without orchestra but with piano) but with COVID it’s been a real challenge. We have had cancellations, we have done workshops in massive ballrooms where the singers are 12 feet apart or have masks on or are in plexiglass.”
Despite these challenges, the premiere in Philadelphia received beaming reviews. As New York Times Classical Music Editor Zachary Woolfe put it, “Puts’s work is attractive and skillful.”
This opera is opening in the context of many new phenomena in the classical music field. Puts described some recent innovations in contemporary opera. “There is so much going on in contemporary opera. There is no real definition. Opera can be anything these days. As long as it’s staged and there is some storytelling there can be some speaking and some singing. Sometimes it’s amplified and it sounds more like a musical.”
His advice to anyone looking to learn more about opera is to find one that interests you, contemporary or not, and start listening to some of its music. Anyone at any age can learn about it and listen to it, regardless of musical experience. “I wasn’t a huge opera fan before I started writing opera, and I didn’t know a lot of opera,” Puts described.
As fall 2022 looms closer, Puts will continue to edit and revise. “I’m still at work on this opera. It’s almost finished but we have a workshop in July where we’re going to, for two weeks, work on how the singers get on and off stage and how we deal with the chorus, which is about 55 people, and how the choreography is going to work. So the process is still going on and will continue until we open at the MET in November.” Given the care and hard work that has gone into the preparation, the opera community is enthusiastic about the next Puts opera and ready to see The Hours take the New York City stage.
