Pre-Appomattox Interview: Christopher Hampton,

Since we're ignorant about the Civil War (hey, we're French, ok?) we asked for some pointers. "There's a very good short book, April, 1865, by Jay Winik" (here he spells Winik for us, how nice!), "then there is the Shelby Foote trilogy about the civil war, and another trilogy" which we did not catch. Hampton mentioned that in his study, he was interested in the personalities, especially those of the women protagonist, Julia Grant, Mary Lee, or Mary Lincoln. He insisted he was as faithful to history as he could and "took no creative freedom, I did not invent anything, I just tried to portray them."

But "Philip and I did not want to leave the impression that they sat down and solved everything. They solved everything to the best they could. One of the things in the second half of the opera we tried to do, is to start showing things in the future, the wounds that linger on, in terms of racism. The end of the war is the end of slavery, but at that point, forces began to institutionalize racism." Brrr!

He did not bring up the Jena 6, but we got his point. How is it different to write a libretto as opposed to a screen play? "Oh, it's very much more concentrated. When I first worked with Philip on our first opera, he told me to write no more than 40 pages, that's a lot of music he said. The libretto for this one is 37 pages. It's a study in compression, you put as much story per line as you can." Also, "Philip likes to write from the libretto, so I did not hear the music. He composes very fast, so I was always only a couple days ahead of him."

Eventually, Christopher heard the music, right? "It is very varied, and it reflects the story. It has military music, Civil war music, arias, which are quite useful fro the women. It has influences from hymns, religious music of the time, Bob Dylan-like ballad, it's a very rich tapestry of sounds." We had to ask him to repeat to make sure we got that right. Bob Dylan! Will Abraham Lincoln play the harmonica?

How about opera vs. Hollywood? "It's a very different kind of collaboration. Here, I only try to serve the composer. He's at the center of everything. In Hollywood, you try to serve the director. But at the same time, you have to prevent the studio from turning everything into a cliché." Dang, we thought the difference was that in LA, everyone is coked up to the gills. But there is a production team here too, wasn't David Gockley involved? Yeah, but in a good way! "He was very involved and very helpful, he make good suggestions."

We only had fifteen minutes, but you can catch Christopher Hampton AND Philip Glass talking about their work on Monday at 6pm at Herbst Theater in a forum organized by the SF Opera Guild (free to Guild members; $5 non-members. (415) 565-6433) or at a lecture at the Common Wealth Club on Thursday at noon (call 415-597-6705 for reservation). Or you can just attend the opera, Appomattox starts on Friday.