Insiders speculated that he would never finish. It's complicated and candid - incestuous fantasies and all, that are hard to hear but that were even harder to write.ĭuring the composition, Bernstein took to bed for days at a time, sometimes seeming to wrest the opera from his psyche. The funeral brings together the gay, mentally ill son and his caretaker sister, who has married her brother's boyfriend. The sequel begins with the 1950s mom, some 30 years later, driving drunk and off a bridge. Initially conceived as a sequel to the 1952 jazz-inflected chamber opera Trouble in Tahiti, A Quiet Place revisits the suburban couple whose lives look perfect but feel desperate. The question this new version poses is whether the opera is better off without chunkiness. Dramatically, the opera explores emotional territory similar to A Long Day's Journey into Night and The Glass Menagerie, says the production's stage director, Daniel Fish, who assigned his Curtis cast to revisit the film Ordinary People.īernstein challenged himself right up to his death in 1990 at 72, but never on the scale of A Quiet Place, one of the chunkiest of his works. Certainly, no opera has a leading lady who sings, "I think I'm gonna pee!"Īlways eclectic, Bernstein cast his compositional net even wider than usual for A Quite Place, with modernistic tone rows, intentionally vulgar burlesque, an extended quote from the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, and an orchestration using electric guitar and synthesizer. "Not even now."Ĭharacters seem plucked straight from their front lawns without any literary laundering. "None of us can talk to anyone," says one character. The effervescent tunes of Candide and idealistic lyricism of West Side Story are long gone in this turbulent portrayal of corroded American suburbia and its story of a family separated by chasms of anguish. Yet Bernstein also rebelled against everything he knew. "It's such a brilliant work, the culmination of what he accomplished and the culmination of his gifts as a composer," said Garth Edwin Sunderland, vice president of project development and senior music editor at the Leonard Bernstein Office. Curtis Opera Theatre presents the staged premiere of a new chamber-size version Wednesday at the Kimmel Center. Now, 35 years after its Houston Grand Opera premiere drew disastrous reviews, his 1983 opera A Quiet Place is being fitfully rehabilitated by opera companies and orchestras around the country and the world as one of the composer's most ambitious works. "Better that than only being known for A Quiet Place," commented one wag.
Late in life, Leonard Bernstein reportedly lamented among friends that he was known only as the composer of West Side Story.
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