Stein’s Way

At first blush, Gertrude Stein’s 925-page doorstop of a novel, The Making of Americans, doesn’t seem like the most promising material upon which to base an opera. But after talking with composer Anthony Gatto, it’s easy to see why the Walker Art Center went ahead and commissioned him to write one based on Stein’s masterwork.

Like a young academic, Gatto can speak thoughtfully and fluidly about the experimental novel’s “multidimensionality” and how he has tried to recreate that quality for the stage.

But more important, he combines a love for challenging literature with deep affection for opera as an art form. “I’m a huge lover of opera. I’m Italian–American. All my grandparents were from Italy,” he says. “My initial music experience was live opera in Prospect Park [in Brooklyn].”

New York–based Gatto lived in the Twin Cities for a while a few years ago and had works performed by forces as diverse as the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet and the Minnesota Orchestra. He’s had an ongoing relationship with the new music ensemble Zeitgeist, which has performed his Lucky Dreams more than fifty times. This month, The Making of Americans has its world premiere at the Walker and Zeitgeist will be in the pit, along with the JACK string quartet and six singers.

The project got its start when Gatto came across the novel at an artist colony in upstate New York. He was immediately taken with it. “I was amazed at its ambition. It takes a two-dimensional medium and tries to show temporality,” he explains. “There is a naturalistic core, the story of a mythical Midwest family over three generations, but we see all sides—past, present, and future—coursing through individual chapters. We jokingly call it a cubist Little House on the Prairie.”

Zeitgeist has been a part of the process from the very beginning, but Gatto’s first idea was much more modest. “There were no actors or singers initially. I thought of talking heads reading from the work on video screens around the room. I would write music cued to the video.”

“It was a piece of chamber music,” says Heather Barringer of Zeitgeist. “But it was always about Stein, about exploring family, Americans, and the making of everyday people.”

It was collaborator Jay Scheib, director of the Walker performance, who convinced Gatto to have greater ambition for the project. According to Gatto, “[Jay] prepared an adaptation and then we hammered out a libretto, defining the language of each character and figuring out how to hue the adaptation to the dramatic structure of the novel.”

Gatto describes himself as a modernist who still believes in the lyrical operatic voice. “I am very traditional in wanting the voice to sound beautiful,” he says. “I am trying to find a unique language and use every technique available to me: Baroque opera techniques, bel canto, all the treasures of our civilization. I chose styles for their immediate emotional connection.”

“I was amazed at how wonderfully singable it is, and how successfully he is able to exploit the voice,” Zeitgeist’s Barringer says. “That is something I’ve never seen him do before.”

Gatto insists that he is not interested in creating a pastiche. In fact, the work of jazz composer Ornette Coleman, with whom he once studied, served as his model. “In any [Coleman] solo, you hear all the traditions—gut bucket, honky-tonk, blues—all the elemental forces of American music coursing through.” In the same way, Gatto uses all the techniques at his disposal to serve the complex dramatic structure of Stein’s novel.

For those who might be intimidated by this strange fusion of disciplines, Gatto assures that people who attend don’t have to love opera to enjoy his work. That’s because, from its conception, he says, The Making of Americans was a performance piece.

“I want to engage the operatic canon directly, then take it into the world of theater and video,” says Gatto confidently. “We rely on whatever is necessary to tell the story.”

Dec. 12–13. Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Ave., Mpls., 612-375-7600