Jacques Desjardins, Nicole Paiement and John Harbison, from the left, working on the score reduction for the Great Gatsby.

Who green lighted this, you or Schirmer?

Harbison: It's a combination of both. The publisher was enthusiastic about the idea, because in the present conditions in traditional opera world are much more favorable to smaller orchestration. And this piece was written for standard large orchestra, grand opera orchestra.

Are you concerned about losing some aspects of your music?

Harbison: It's an orchestra of 90, it does a lot of things differently from an orchestra of 30. So of course it's going to sound different. It was possible for Jacques to take over a great many things just straightforwardly across. His most difficult question
was that he retained only four brass players from a section of originally twelve. I think it's more a space constraint and very specifically in terms of the harp and percussion numbers, it was the space constraint.

The brass and the percussion are indispensable in the jazz color you were shooting for, it is going to sound quite different?

Harbison: I guess so. For me, I understand that people will hear this version and have essentially no idea what the other version sounds like. It's a little different for me than it would have been a year or so ago, because there is now a recording of the Met performance, which originally sold as part of a set, but that is now sold separately. Now if people are curious, they can at least hear what the large orchestration sounds like.

How did you pick the Great Gatsby as the basis for your libretto?

Harbison: The subject of the great Gatsby, I began working on it quite a long time ago, in the early 80s. I wrote the overture and almost most of the scenes. Then I was unsuccessful in getting the rights, so I let it go for a while. Then the Met, Mr Levine wrote to me, and asked if I would write an opera for his 25th anniversary at the Met. So I proposed that subject hoping for two things: one was, expiration of some of the theatrical rights and also, help from the Met in getting the rights. They were not entirely enthusiastic about the subject initially, and I had to do quite a bit of convincing: submitting the libretto in various forms. I think that eventually the Met makes it an unusual contract where you have a number of stages in which they get the music and the text and they can drop out at various points. Increasingly they became convinced by it. I must say hearing now the Met broadcast recording of it, generally available, there was very much in my work on the piece a sense of working for the Met orchestra, that's a very high level orchestra, which even at that stage, that performance, they were playing at a real level. It's a project which I had thought of a long time before I got a chance to do it. Some of the music on my first work in the piece is still in the piece.

What convinced you to do it?

Harbison: For me, it seemed to me that the characters don't, they don't have much to say, and what they say is said in quite a concise form in the novel. There is a tremendous of description, and atmosphere, and transitions between places, which seemed to me could be done not necessarily by singing, but by orchestral music, which is essentially the way I approached that.

The interesting to me that would work as an opera, is: the story takes place in a world where the sound of the radio and even the sounds of parties and the atmosphere where people live could be part of the experience of the opera. I knew going in I'd have to write a lot of popular songs that would be acceptable by the ears of the listeners as being in some way of that time, and they could become a thread. It's about, 15, 16 songs that I knew could make a sort a almost like a choral, like the Bach choral or cantatas, a certain way of following the action.

You put a lot of atmosphere in the score, as with the rhythmic patterns from the train ride in the orchestra

Harbison: Yes, and a lot of radio in there. People are listening to the radio and we hear what they hear on the radio. In more public situations, bands are playing. Everything, a huge influence at the time was the advent of radio and people listening to bands on the radio. And the sound of the outdoor rhythm section, we used a tuba, seemed to me to be a very strong color.

You grow up after the time of the Great Gatsby, but did you experience these elements?

I learned to become a jazz player by listening to the radio.

The original Met cast was star studded, with Susan Graham, Dawn Upshaw, Jerry Hadley, did you pick them?

Harbison: The cast was really the decision of the Met, with one exception. I had worked for a number of years as a conductor with a singer named Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson whom the Met had never cast. I was convinced that she could sing there, and I was able to do a lot of convincing about her. It turned out to be Lorraine met debut and she went on to a lot of great roles there.

That was the only casting decision. Of course, Dawn Upshaw and I have a long history, I had written a lot of pieces for her by that time. I suspected, but I never knew for sure at the very early stage of the opera that she might had some sort of role in that.

Do you find that the social aspects of the Great Gatsby have more resonance now?

It's very likely. The history of that book is so strange. The way people read it changes from decade to decade. When the Met performed this opera, I heard from Fitzgerald's secretary after she heard the broadcast. She had been working for him his last five years in Hollywood, she was by then in her 80s. She said she remember that during the years she was working for Fitzgerald, that book was out of print and he did not think anyone would ever pay any attention to it again.

Then of course, Edmund Wilson wrote a very important article in the 40s, right after the second world war, and the book suddenly started appearing in all the colleges and high schools, it changed a lot. The way people have understood and felt it also has changed a lot from time to time.

The behavior of wealthy people, which is certainly one of the themes of the novel, has been received differently in recent years than perhaps ever before in this country. My mother said to me, when I wrote that opera: how can I write an opera without a single sympathetic character? I said, well, that's kinda that book. Unless you feel Gatsby is sympathetic, he's also a crook, but in some ways he's pretty remarkable. One of the things about Fitzgerald's perception of rich people, is that they're fascinating to him, but he does not give them a break. He really lets us see what their motives are, what their temperaments is, that's one of the strength of the whole story, one of the reason it's fascinating. People had been warned when they see this opera, all that romantic idea of Fitzgerald's writing, it isn't that at all, a lot of unpleasant things happen in that story.

We recently heard your 4th Symphony performed by the Boston Symphony here in San Francisco. You seem to have quite a tight relationship with this orchestra.

Harbison: Particularly in recent years. For a long time, many decades, I've had a close relationship with the orchestra. The last couple years, the whole sequence of the six symphonies was a very rare chance for a composer nowadays to have an orchestra play that much of the music that close together. There was a sense that they were really quickly getting to a very strong place with the piece, especially with the new piece, the 6th symphony. I can't imagine an orchestra getting so tuned in to a piece so fast unless they have so much immersion. It's quite a big change in the sense of how an orchestra absorbs music. Some of the pieces they played the last two years, they've played before. We always assume that music is played by orchestra better if they have more levels of familiarity, it's even a bigger difference than we assume.

I experienced that first actually with SF back when Herbert Blomstedt was doing a lot of my pieces there. He put one piece, the 2nd symphony, in two different seasons. I was very startled in the subsequent performance what an advanced point the orchestra sounded. It's a bigger point than most give it attention.

You haven't written an opera since the Great Gatsby over a decade ago. Would you compose another one?

Harbison: I have a lot of great opera projects, I've tried to get people interested in them. The first two operas I wrote, I wrote with no performance prospect at all. I'm not unhappy, I'm glad I did it. But at this point, I would not do that, I have other opportunities. I guess the reason I haven't written another opera, is that nobody has asked me to write an opera. It's a marketplace judgment that composers as veteran as I am have to listen to and do something else.

Winter's tales, which was my first opera, actually began life in SF. It returned a couple years ago, and I was very glad to have it. So I don't mind having started my career as a volunteer opera composer, but it's not something that I'm going to do again.

Are you going to watch the Superbowl?

Harbison: Of course. I got a big problem that night, one of our new music groups is having a concert that day.

Michael Tippett did not go to the premiere of his fourth symphony because he had to stay home and find out who shot JR on Dallas.