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Epic Lessons in Operatic Verse
Douglas Cuomo brings the Bhagavad Gita to BAM
Tony Boutté as Arjuna (photo: Stephanie Berger)
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Composer Douglas Cuomo is best known for television’s catchy Sex and the City theme song, but those salsa-tinged seconds hardly nick the surface of his cumulative musical output. November 5–8, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presents his chamber opera Arjuna’s Dilemma as part of their 2008 Next Wave Festival. Cuomo took a moment to chat about the show, inspiration and the lessons an ancient text can still teach us today.
You’ve written music for everything from a saxophone quartet to Broadway shows, and your own career has spanned all manner of performance situations. What has this diversity of experience taught you as a composer?
The work that I do is, of course, influenced by everything that I’ve done and lived through. That includes studying ethnomusicology, touring the country playing in jazz and funk bands, and writing music for television shows, theatre, contemporary classical players’ pieces, works for chorus. It’s not always possible to pinpoint what comes from where, but it’s all in there somewhere.
Operas historically have rather complex plotlines, and Arjuna’s Dilemma, drawn from text in the Bhagavad Gita, is clearly no exception.
My opera is based on the Bhagavad Gita, sung in English and Sanskrit with Western and Indian singers and musicians. It’s a story of a mighty warrior prince, Arjuna, and the deity Krishna on the evening of the biggest battle of Arjuna’s life, but underneath it’s about duty and what it means to live.
What attracted you to this story?
I wanted to write a piece that would include an improvising Indian singer and a chorus with Western instruments. I had read the Bhagavad Gita before and, when I revisited it with this in mind, I was immediately struck by its incredible characters, spiritual message and emotional depth—I just knew I wanted to work with it.
Did the process of writing the piece change or deepen your understanding of the text?
It certainly did. As I was deciding how to set each line (what the melody should be, how the accompaniment should sound: should it be fast or slow, loud or soft, etc.) I had to really dig in and think about the text. Not only what it meant on the surface, but all of the nuance and subtext as well.
Working in commercial situations, you don’t generally have the luxury of time, but you began work on this 70-minute chamber opera eight years ago. The piece has received workshop and preview performances, in addition to being recorded and released on the Innova label this summer. How has it evolved and changed as it moved from your head and pen out into the world?
The music itself hasn’t changed much since I finished writing the piece in 2002, but since then the producers, Music-Theatre Group, have been actively and invaluably developing the piece. Two years ago opera director Robin Guarino signed on, and she has been honing in on the specific elements that will be put on stage at BAM in November—the visual style, set and projection elements, movement (with the help of performance artist John Kelly, who is in the piece and choreographing it as well).
A host of great musicians are attached to this production, including tenor Tony Boutté, who comes to this work with experience singing Philip Glass’s Satyagraha. What role have they had in shaping the piece we’ll see on stage at BAM in November?
Tony’s part, that of Arjuna, was composed and set before he came to the project back in 2002, though he has brought the role to life in a deeply artistic way with his ability to handle the technical demands of singing in Sanskrit and the emotional demands of this challenging role. Some of the other roles involve a good deal of improvisation, particularly that of the vocalist Humayun Khan, who plays the voice of Krishna, and the tabla and saxophone players (Badal Roy and Bob Franceschini, respectively). In these cases, I left room in the writing of the piece so that the specific musical personalities of the performers could be showcased; their individual styles have a lot to do with how their parts sound.
The opera’s exploration of war and existential crisis seems particularly potent right now. Was it your intention to comment on current world events through this piece?
It wasn’t, any more than the philosophical issues the Bhagavad Gita deals with really are timeless. Though the surface story is about a decision to fight a battle, to go to war, the deeper meaning of the Gita, and I hope my piece, is about making a decision to fight the internal fight to live a good and just life.