Weep, Shudder, Die: The Secret of Opera Revealed (with Dana Gioia)
Jan 20 2025

zzz.jpg How can opera, with words we rarely understand, make us cry? Why does opera, filled with melodrama, move us? Listen as poet and librettist Dana Gioia explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts why words matter more than we think, in both opera and on Broadway.

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Explore audio transcript, further reading that will help you delve deeper into this week’s episode, and vigorous conversations in the form of our comments section below.

READER COMMENTS

Shalom Freedman
Jan 20 2025 at 8:26am

An especially enjoyable and informative conversation.  The focusing on collaboration and the examples given of those outstanding composers who could only work one librettist is one central part of this. But as a non-opera maven I enjoyed learning about just what it is that makes opera fans, opera fans.

This I believe the third conversation Russ has had with Dana Giola and each one of them a great listening and learning experience.

Steve Bacharach
Jan 20 2025 at 10:16am

Your story of the class you surreptitously took about opera and the song that a fellow student performed reminded me of the Prog Rock band Rush.  The late Neil Peart, one of the greatest drummers who over lived, wrote most of the band’s lyrics, and he fancied himself as a Randian.  You may want to listen to the song “Anthem” (album: Fly By Night) to hear his “libretto”.

There is also their extended song “2112” (album of the same name) which is a sort of libertarian sci-fi exploration.  There was a graphic novel created that was based on the song, but maybe that would be of more interest to Bryan Caplan since he loves that format.

Peter
Jan 21 2025 at 5:57pm

Good podcast like always.  I rarely comment on these but I just wanted to give a slightly contrarian view on value of understanding the words as it depends what sort of person you are; it reminds me to a blog posting once where Scott Sumner pointed out he doesn’t care about movie plots at all and that spoilers don’t bother him because he enjoys the move for it’s visuals, i.e. the plot/story is irrelevant and he was surprised to find out in his younger years the some people enjoyed movies differently.

I personally hate musicals though I’m not going to say I’ve never enjoyed one, for example I thoroughly enjoyed Bjork’s Dancer in the Dark, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and I’m not adverse to a Disney movie or two though I get they aren’t true musicals in that there is spoken dialogue as well nor were they on stage but I just can get into showtunes and pop, I hate them as music styles and watching people dance to them doesn’t improve them.  On the other hand, while I’m not a lover of opera, I can occasionally gladly suffer through them and it helps that I don’t understand a single word because that way I can focus on the sounds and visuals treating it more along the lines of a modern dance performance.  Knowing the words turns these from opera to just bad musicals and then I can’t even suffer through them.

This is similar to certain musical songs which I loved but were destroyed for me to the point I can’t listen anymore once someone translated the lyrics for me.  And it’s something Lisa Gerrard (formerly of Dead Can Dance) observed and commented on as well as for years (pre-Internet) people were always trying to figure out which language she sang in and she said “None, I just made language sounding sounds because it was the sound, not the words, that mattered”.  A stereotypical example here would be something like her song “The Host Of Seraphim” for those unfamiliar with her work.

That is a different sort of appreciation of opera but I don’t think it’s any less valid nor “am I missing something” anymore than Scott misses something not caring about the plot; if anything you can appreciate it more in different ways as you aren’t concern with things that bother others such as plot holes, cheesy dialogue trope, etc hence can appreciate a broader dearth of operas in the same way Scott can enjoy movies with atrocious acting that would turn others off because the visuals were impressive.

joe
Jan 23 2025 at 5:15pm

I made a Spotify playlist for the aria recommendations in case that’s useful to anyone else. I did my best to be faithful to the Youtube versions, but it wasn’t always possible.

 

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5M5DVH1qNDXuYRHqxcicfq?si=97cc441f6bf043c0

Tom Gregorich
Jan 24 2025 at 10:54am

Fantastic episode. I am someone who has always loved music, at least since I was a teenager (in the 90s). I started out with rock, then gained an appreciation for blues, then jazz when I was in college. Just recently I’ve tried to get into classical music. Two years ago I went to a performance of Beethoven’s 9th symphony and it was just awesome. The slow parts, the build up, the chorus at the end (which I loved, even though I know it’s not cool to do so). I’ve been meaning to try and understand opera because of the exact reasons that Dana Gioia talks about on this episode. In addition, I like Mozart, and Tyler Cowen has said on his blog that the operas are the best of his work.

But try as I might, I have just never been able to get into it. For me, it’s the fact that I can’t connect the singing with the plot or characters. One work that I have been trying to appreciate for years is Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. I’ve been told this is basically an opera in all but name. I’m a believing Christian, and the gospel narratives mean so much to me, but even with that I haven’t been able to connect to what’s happening in the piece. Dana Gioia mentions this in the interview: “the singers know what they’re singing. The words allow the singers to know exactly what Don Juan or Falstaff, or whatever, is thinking and saying and feeling every moment.”  That makes perfect sense, but if me, the listener, doesn’t understand what these words mean, how can I connect with the music?

Is the only way forward to listen to an opera with the libretto in hand, translated into English, reading along? I just can’t see myself doing that and enjoying it. Too much work! Not a critique of opera, but it sums up what for me is the frustration with the genre.

I’ve heard individual arias, and they are very beautiful, but again it’s just hard for me to connect without knowing what they’re singing about. At my wedding, I chose Adele’s version of Make you Feel My Love for the slow dance with my mom. Such a beautiful song, lyrics and singing combined. It’s the two together that do it for me, and I feel that as long as I don’t understand the words beings said I’ll never be able to enjoy opera.

I will keep on trying! Thank you for having episodes like this: lengthy discussions on cultural matters. Even if I don’t enjoy opera music (at least yet), I loved hearing Russ and Dana talk about it for an hour.

David Guaspari
Jan 28 2025 at 10:25am

Two followup questions for Mr. Gioia:

Agree or not?

Recitative is almost always a bore. A great advantage of (most) musicals is doing away with it.

Stephen Sondheim says somewhere that it’s very difficult to set a great poem to music, that a poem supplies its own music and leaves less for the music to do. (Putting my own interpretation into Sondheim’s mouth.)

Charles B Gross
Feb 3 2025 at 8:50am

Your discussion with Dana is a fractal of the collaboration between composer and librettist. Illustrates how a good conversation can bring out the best in both participants – and perhaps via the mysteries of quantum emotions, achieve the same in your audience.

Logan West
Feb 3 2025 at 11:29am

I very much appreciated Dana in the episode on poetry and this one was likewise stellar. I’ve never been able to appreciate either and this has started me on my journey.

Part of me thinks that there is an unfortunate trend in various arts of anything that is popular must be low-brow and unsophisticated. Therefore high poetry and high opera are things that only an elite few can understand.

What Russ and Dana discussed is that genius can be instantly enjoyed and popular. They can evoke emotions without me needing to study them for years. I love that take. I’m going to listen to the ones recommended in the notes here.

Eric Chevlen
Feb 5 2025 at 11:14am

This podcast led me to read Gioia’s book. I’m glad it did. Bravo!

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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
TimePodcast Episode Highlights
0:37

Intro. [Recording date: December 19, 2024.]

Russ Roberts: Today is December 19th, 2024, and my guest is poet and author, Dana Gioia. This is Dana's third appearance on EconTalk. He was last year in April of 2023 talking about poetry and death. Our topic for today is his latest book, Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry. Dana, welcome back to EconTalk.

Dana Gioia: It's good to be seeing you again.

Russ Roberts: It's great to see you as well.

1:06

Russ Roberts: This book is about two of my favorite things--and a few more--opera and poetry. But, we have to be honest: opera and poetry are not the most popular things among most Americans and many other people around the world. Why opera? What's your love of opera, which comes through on most every page of this book?

Dana Gioia: Well, opera is one of the two or three arts in the world I most love. I mean, opera and poetry would be my top two, probably followed by novels or movies. But, I've loved opera in a curious and changing way ever since I was a kid. And, now that I'm an older man, I wanted to explore the ways in which I think opera is both loved and distrusted in culture. That it's not merely appealing, but intoxicating to the people who love it; and it's dismissed in really very curious ways.

And then, finally, I wanted to discuss the love-hate relationship that people who are opera aficionados feel where they somehow feel embarrassed by the words, the plots, the characters of these works, which make them weep and laugh.

Russ Roberts: I think a lot of people find opera a closed door. It's usually sung in a foreign language--for, say, Americans, or depending where you are, somebody else. And as you say, it is melodramatic--would be the obvious single word that you would use to describe it. And, one of the beautiful things about your book is to explain why that is a feature and not a bug.

And especially the words. A lot of people will say, 'Oh, the words don't matter. It's all about the singing and the music; and the words are just, like, a necessary nuisance.' And you make an extraordinary case for the importance of the libretto. Explain what the libretto is and how the author of the libretto comes to collaborate with the composer of the music.

Dana Gioia: Well, I have written five opera libretti. And, in the process of seeing these operas produced, I have been interviewed by reporters with no training in the field, and it's very interesting. The two questions they always ask me: 'Is your opera in Italian?' And, the other is, 'What comes first, the words or the music?'

Now you can say that these are imbecilic questions--which indeed they are in one sense--but you can also say that they are illuminating questions and that I wanted to explain in this book the relationship between the words and the music. And, a libretto in Italian means a little book. And, when operas were produced in Italy in the 18th and 19th century, they would be brought to an opera house, and they would essentially be run long as the people liked them, and it would be the same people seeing it night after night because you bought a subscription to the opera house. You went to the opera house, and you were there every night.

And, people say, 'Well, how could they watch the same opera again and again?' And, I ask them, 'Did you ever have a record that you bought that you played again and again?' 'Oh, that happens all the time,' they tell me. Well, it's the same thing. There are certain arts that are based on repetition, and the two most obvious ones are poetry and song. People like to hear the same poem again. That's why Shakespeare's plays, you can see them many more times than you can see a prose play; and why songs are kind of inexhaustible. In fact, people, they treasure the repetition.

So, opera is a form of poetic drama. I would say it is the most intense form of poetic drama. And, you say, 'Well, it's melodramatic.' And, I would say, 'Well, what does the word melodramatic mean?' It means drama to melody. So, it is by its nature melodramatic. If you went to an opera and there was no melodrama there, it'd be rather dull listening.

So, I go back to the two things in this. One of my main messages is: Opera is not sophisticated. It's very, very primitive. I mean, what could be more primitive than a person coming into a vast, dark theater and without amplification filling the whole hall with a trained human voice intoning a ritual text in a foreign language and enacting symbolic drama?

I mean, you're going back to the beginnings of human culture of--and if you go back to Greek tragedy, I mean, we think of Greek tragedy as this poetic tragedy we study in college, but in performance, Greek tragedy was a song and dance show. The chorus sang and they danced, and the characters basically intoned. And, in fact, they had masks that allowed them to amplify their sound across the audience because they weren't as well-trained as Italian singers. People had to develop a whole athletic routine to create opera singers.

And so, what we're seeing in one sense is a highly sophisticated and cultured art form, but it's also a very primal, primitive form of art that goes back to the origins of humanity.

7:18

Russ Roberts: I have to tell a story about--my daughter was, I don't know, four or five, and somebody was producing Cinderella on TV [television]. And there's different operatic versions of Cinderella. I think this was in Italian; maybe it was Rossini. I'm not sure. And, I said, 'How do you like it?' And, after five or 10 minutes, she said, 'I like it a lot.' She said, 'But, why are they singing in Chinese?' She knew it was a foreign language. For her, Chinese was, I guess was the quintessential foreign language.

But the other question which I want you to return to is: Okay, it's melodramatic. It's primitive, it's primal. It gets into your guts in surprising ways. And, one of the great representations of this on screen is Pretty Woman when Richard Gere takes Julia Roberts to the opera and she weeps unexpectedly. She doesn't know what she's gotten herself into, and she's overwhelmed. And of course, she doesn't know what the words--I think they go to La Bohème--she doesn't know what the words mean.

What's the point of the words, Dana? What do we need them for? Let's just have people bellow out, emotionally, songs, incredible music that captures the longing and yearning that makes opera so powerful, and the pathos?

Dana Gioia: Well, let me answer one of the imbecilic questions--not your question--but where they say, 'What comes first, the music or the words?' And, I said, 'Well, it would be hard for a composer to write three hours of vocal music if he didn't know what the characters were doing, what they were saying, what their relationships were.' The words always come first.

And so, the first purpose of these--you [?] say, 'Well, what is the purpose of this poetic text?' The first purpose is to give the composer a dramatic play: to create poetry which evokes in the composer the ability to create melodies and dramatic situations and characters. So, that's the first thing: so, no libretto, no opera.

And, in fact, one of the things that I noticed--I think this is the most original observation I make in the book--is that if you take the 100 most widely performed operas in the world--now this is from all the last 400 plus years across basically all of Western Europe and part of Asia--over half of those operas were written by seven creative teams. Now, what are the odds of that?

When it says--it's something that we know from pop music; we know from Broadway; we know from Hollywood--certain creative teams produce better work than others. You get the right poet and the right composer together, and they have a catalytic effect on each other's creativity.

The composers knew this. Bellini didn't want to work with anybody but Romani. Romani hated him; and so he would pay Romani twice as much as Romani got from anybody else, because he said, 'Romani's verse creates melodies in me.' My title is from Vincenzo Bellini, the one great Sicilian opera composer, who said, 'The purpose of opera was to make the listener weep, shudder, and die through singing.'

Now, what's a song? A song are words raised to the level of music. And so, the first purpose of the libretto is to inspire the composer to create a work. And it could be a five-hour opera, indeed, as some operas have been.

The second thing--this is not inconsiderable--the singers know what they're singing. The words allow the singers to know exactly what Don Juan or Falstaff, or whatever, is thinking and saying and feeling every moment.

So, when Julia Roberts goes to the opera--now, I should point out one of the important messages of all of these opera films is that if you take a girl to the opera, you'll end up in bed. And so, I think of Moonstruck and things like this. It's the ultimate kind of emotional date. But see, the composer knows what the words mean. The composer knows what the plot and characters mean. The singers know what the words mean, what they are; and they can communicate a fantastic amount of the meaning in that way. Even if somebody doesn't know a word of Russian--Russian is the hardest one for me. I love Russian operas, but I, except for about a dozen words, I don't really know any Russian.

Now, the third thing is that the original audiences knew what the words meant. In fact, they liked the word so much they would buy a libretto so they could follow along. But, dare I say that nowadays everyone in the audience knows what the words mean? Why? The surtitles, the projected titles. This is perhaps Canada's greatest contribution to world culture, is they created the surtitle--because they have a bilingual country. And so, now I think almost anybody who can read--I guess you have to be literate--can go to an opera and can follow it moment by moment and experience it as a literary drama.

But, I would maintain that even if you didn't know what the words meant, because of the nature of words and the impact of the composer and the singers, you will feel the meaning of each scene.

13:45

Russ Roberts: So, I just want to tell a brief story. I'm sure there are many listeners--and some of them have maybe stopped listening already so I hope they'll come back. But for those who are still with us and thinking, 'Well, I've never really heard an opera I liked, and it doesn't speak to me. The singing is very formal and shrieky and inaccessible.' And, I felt that way through much of my life.

When I was about 25 years old, my dad, in desperation, disappointed that I had never really caught the bug, sent me a cassette of Madame Butterfly with Leontyne Price. And, he said, 'Look, just listen to it for 20 minutes. Just give this 20 minutes.'

And, I would say the same thing to listeners who are thinking, 'What's all this fuss? I don't like opera. It's not for me.' Put on Madame Butterfly--we'll maybe make some other suggestions over the course of our conversation--but, first listen to it in the dark. Just close your eyes. This is very hard in 2024. We don't do many things for 20 minutes without interruption.

But, I used to listen in the dark; and then I used to listen with the libretto. I would follow along. I was in my twenties, and I would listen to Faust by Gounod, La Bohème by Puccini, Madame Butterfly by Puccini, and I would follow along in the Italian/English libretto, which would be a parallel translation with the original so you could hear the singers with the words they were singing in Italian and then the words.

Watch Bergman's movie, The Magic Flute. Try to listen to Don Giovanni by Mozart. Try La Traviata. And it's--for the right person in the right point in their life, it is magical.

The thing that was shocking to me is--and one of the things that was shocking to me about your book which you've already mentioned--is this power of collaboration. And, the example that I think really brings it home is that Adler and Ross were a songwriting team on Broadway: They write The Pajama Game, which is a big hit. I don't know it very well, but it's a big hit. Then they write Damn Yankees, a musical I adore and has phenomenal songs--

Dana Gioia: A great musical--

Russ Roberts: Incredible songs, very powerful emotionally. It's funny. It's moving.

And, they never write another musical again. I never thought about why they didn't. Well, the reason is that Jerry Ross died. It's Jerry Ross who died, right?

Dana Gioia: Yeah--

Russ Roberts: Dies young.

Dana Gioia: And, he's still in his twenties.

Russ Roberts: He's 29. And he dies, I think, of leukemia. And, his partner, Adler--his songwriting partner--is a tremendous talent, obviously. But he never succeeds in finding a partner who can inspire him again, and at that level.

That's unbelievable, and it illustrates the importance of collaboration. But it's not a one-off. You give many examples of--you list the five most popular composers of operas. Many people will know these names: Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, Richard Strauss, and Richard Wagner. But, there are five equally prominent librettists--or seven--who also, they're not famous, but they should be because many of the greatest operas, many of the greatest composers wrote one opera that was successful with one of these librettists and never wrote another successful one because they never worked with that person again.

Dana Gioia: See people--

Russ Roberts: That is just an incredible insight into the importance of collaboration in this art. And, put to the side the point that the composer gets all the glory and the librettist gets almost none: What your book points out is that the librettist should get a lot, and intellectually it changes the way you should think about what an opera is. It's not just this beautiful music that somebody happened to put words to. It's the other way around. Some poet inspired a composer to write the most beautiful music ever written.

Dana Gioia: Yeah. And the opera is not just lyrics. As Verdi said, 'It's situations.' I mean, let's go to, Damn Yankees--because people that don't like opera won't know this--"You've Got to Have Heart," the situation of a team that's always losing, that is basically advertising what they have, which is they got a lot of heart or, "Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets." So, they create characters. They create situations. They create the words for those situations. And some people have a kind of genius for that.

Richard Strauss, who is really the last truly great operatic composer--maybe Benjamin Britten is--but when Strauss' partner, Hugo von Hoffmannstahl dies--and he dies in his fifties, a terrible, terrible story. Von Hoffmannstahl--people in America don't know him, but he created the Salzburg Festival, and he's one of the great literary minds of Habsburg Vienna. His son commits suicide. As he's going to the funeral, he has a heart attack and dies. So, it's a terrible, terrible ending. And, Strauss did a whole bunch of operas, but he never wrote an opera that stuck since then.

But, I think it's just--see, creativity is like athletics. It's the person who is in the top 1% of the top 1% who is the great star. I mean, being in baseball and track or whatever, people win by a thousandth of a second in these competitions. And, there are some people who have the ability to bring out each other's best performance.

And, there's another thing, too, which is there are certain composers, certain creative teams that performers respond to, but I think that's one of the great things about it. Let's go back to Damn Yankees. What actress does not want to play Lola and sing, "Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets"?

People--I used to teach--financial desperation brought me to teach at USC [University of Southern California] each fall semester for nine years. Now, USC could not have been nicer to me. They created a Chair for me; but I tried to stay as far away from the English Department as I could, even though I'm a poet. But I taught singers in a class--I taught singers that were performing these things. And, you have all these sopranos, and they're spending their lifetime so that they can be Mimi in La Bohème or Violetta in La Traviata. These are roles that they aspire to because when Violetta comes on the stage in La Traviata, she holds the audience in her hand from the moment she walks on to the moment she dies, and that's the sort of--

Russ Roberts: The kind of [?mesmerizing?]--

Dana Gioia: Well yeah: the bad news here--

Russ Roberts: I'm laughing because they always die.

Dana Gioia: Yeah, in almost every tragic opera the heroine dies. But that's why you pay the big bucks.

I mean, I'm interested that your dad got you into opera. And, I would make an even more radical claim. You and I, and probably most of the people listening to this, are university-trained. We probably have graduate degrees and we've been taught to do things right. But opera actually allows you to do things wrong. You can take a little three-minute aria or a five-minute aria from an opera--and you don't even know the plot--you listen to it--without knowing the language--and it will have a stunning emotional impact on you. The beauty of it will overwhelm you. And, if it's a sad song or a joyful song or a furious song, it will communicate it to you in this extraordinary way.

And, I think it's because opera--and classical composers have forgotten this--the music departments, the conservatories of the world, don't want to hear this next sentence: Opera is song. It's elaborate song with all kinds of other things, but the heart of opera is song, and song is the oldest human art. Song is a universal art. You'll not find any culture that doesn't have song. In every culture, it has a sacred activity. In every culture, it has a magic activity. What a love song is, is something that woos your beloved: it creates love in them. And, if they don't fall in love with you, they'll at least feel sorry for you, so you get some impact. Magic are words that you change reality with.

Now, think of the word that the Romans used for 'song.' 'Song' in Latin, it has actually become a woman's name: Carmen. So, in Latin, carmen means song. It also means a magic spell. It means a prophecy, and it means an enchantment. So, 'carmen' becomes--comes all the way into English, and it's the root of our word 'enchantment'. How do you enchant people? You chant a spell.

So, we have in our culture--and you find this literally in the language and in the history of every culture--a connection between song and magic and poetry because 'carmen' is also the word that Romans use for poetry.

And so, what opera does is to go back to the very roots of what song is, which is related to enchantment, to sacred activities that are done by combining the power of poetry with the power of song.

And, it's interesting how that has been lost with people.

And, see, part of it is that they say, 'Well,'--it's funny. They say, 'Well, the words don't matter.' Now, why do they say the words don't matter? It's generally because they don't know the words. They don't know the language. They haven't taken the trouble of reading the words. And, the words are actually, I mean, they may not be equal to Goethe or Dante or Shakespeare; but the words of operas are generally pretty well-written. I mean, they're sort of like the words to musicals: You don't require the lyrics of a musical song, or a love song especially, to be at the level of Shakespeare's sonnets. It's just enough to incite the imagination of the composer so that the combination of the words and music are magical.

25:38

Russ Roberts: So, I'm going to think on the webpage for this conversation at econtalk.org and I will put four or five of my favorite arias from YouTube so that listeners who don't know opera can check them out. These will be things like "Nessun Dorma," "Au Fond du Temple Saint" from The Pearl Fishers, something from Madame Butterfly, a couple from La Bohème. And, listeners can just try this, a three- to five-minute moment we would hope of enchantment. I'll encourage you to do the same, Dana. We'll list those.

But, I want to talk about--we spoke about collaboration. You talk about how the words inspire the composer. And, in a minute, I want us to talk about musicals--because they're quite similar, if not the same. And, Broadway is very similar to opera--in my view. And I want to hear your thoughts on that, and you talk about it in some of the book. But I wonder, before we get there: I want to talk about the non-collaborative writers of opera and of musicals.

So, I did not realize this: Wagner wrote his own words. He might be the only truly long-time ongoing successful composer who was able to do that. In American popular song, there's really two. There's Cole Porter and Irving Berlin--both extraordinary talents, but everyone else is a collaborator. George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart/ Rodgers and Hammerstein, Adler and Ross: many, many, many others are teams.

Dana Gioia: But, eventually Sondheim--

Russ Roberts: Well, so then I was going to get to: on Broadway--those are the popular song, meaning the classical American Songbook. On Broadway, as far as I know, I only can think of three. You have Sondheim who writes his words and music--and I would argue he often was better as a collaborator than as a--it's a very controversial view--than as a solo act. I say that because, other than, "Send in the Clowns," as you point out, he does not have great memorable melodies. Interesting. Meredith Wilson wrote The Music Man, somehow. I don't think he ever did it again, but it's a fabulous musical.

Dana Gioia: It is. It's one of the greatest musicals ever written. And, his subsequent ones were not very good, but--

Russ Roberts: He did it on his own.

Dana Gioia: every number is great.

Russ Roberts: It's phenomenal. And then, you have Lionel Bart who wrote Oliver!, which is also an extraordinary score. But, those are really the exceptions that prove the rule that this is a collaborative effort, for two reasons probably. Most people aren't talented enough to be phenomenal at two things at that level. But also, there's something else going on there that I'd like you to talk about, which is the power of having a teammate. That, when you're not in the mood, they push you, or when you're slogging, they push you, or when you're stuck, they unstick you in a way you somehow struggle to do on your own.

Dana Gioia: Well, at this point, I think I've worked with about 30, 35 composers. Some of them just take poems of mine and set them to music. But, in many cases, I write the words for them. And, I've seen some song composers--they write and they love the melody, they love the emotion they're doing, they have a good opening line, and then they just plug the rest of it in. And, they need a collaborator just to say, 'This is crap. This is a good opening line. We can work with the line, but it's got to go somewhere.' And, I think what happens if you're doing both the words and the music, you'll either fall in love with the words too much or the music too much, and you need an advocate. You need a devil's advocate for each side.

And so, you'll see this. You'll see a lot of people that write words and music for individual songs, like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Amy Mann--

Russ Roberts: Yeah, songwriters, we call them.

Dana Gioia: pop things. But, what they're doing is a little three-minute, four-minute, and this is not the minimum, because those are all Mann and Mitchell, at least when she was younger, and Dylan are people I immensely admire. But, the real thing is: can you write different characters, can you do transitions, can you create scenes? And, that's where you see the sheer genius of a Verdi who can summon up all these tremendously complicated human emotions immediately just in a few gestures.

So, I do think that--have you ever noticed, I think there's some people that when you're around, you're funnier?

Russ Roberts: Yeah, sure. You're a better conversationalist.

Dana Gioia: They bring out the comic in you, or they bring out this sincerity in you. And that's a basic human energy. And, I think an artist needs to have a good sense of: what are the collaborators that make them better versus just what are the collaborators that'll help them pay the bills?

Russ Roberts: Yeah, I forgot to mention Stephen Schwartz, stupidly. I just saw the film version of Wicked, and it's really--I'm a huge fan of Wicked, and he is a genius to write the words and music to that show. He is a great composer, but he did, I think, write the line, 'Life is fraughtless when you're thoughtless,' and that's a pretty good rhyme in "Dancing Through Life." I'm going to tell--

Dana Gioia: Poetry has given up the wonderful pleasures of rhyme. Rhyme is something that people delight in. So, I don't see why any poet would want--it doesn't mean you have to write in rhyme all the time, but you're silly as a poet if you don't want to enjoy rhyme.

31:34

Russ Roberts: So, I'm going to tell a crazy story I've never told on the air before. I never told it publicly, hardly to anyone. But, I was an assistant professor at the University of Rochester, and Rochester has a very fine music school, and one of the top music schools in the country, the Eastman School. And, they slummed and offered a course in how to write a musical. And, this was very controversial at Eastman because Eastman was a classical place. And, they brought Charles Strouse, who had just fairly recently written Annie, to come teach a class on taking a musical.

And, I love musicals even more than opera, and so I audited this class secretly because I didn't want my chairman, Walter Oi, to know I was taking it because it was not going to contribute to my refereed publications. So, the first class, they brought in a photographer because they were going to do an article for the magazine [inaudible 00:32:30], and I literally spent the time hunkering down between the--putting my head down under the desks because I didn't want to be in that photograph.

But, anyway: so we're sitting there and everybody's in awe of this man because he's such a giant talent, and these are the most musical-loving students at Eastman. So, he says, 'Okay,' he said, 'You're all writing musicals, right?' And, I'm thinking, 'Well, not exactly,' but I'd written a song or two in my time. And, they all nodded. And, he said, 'I'd like someone to stand up and come perform one of their songs,' and a terrible silence, of course, descended on the room. No one wanted to be the person to go first.

So, finally, some guy stood up and said, 'I'll go.' And, he said, 'Tell me about the musical.' And, he said, 'Well, it's a musical of Ayn Rand's novella, Anthem.' And I thought, 'Well, this is not going to go well. It's going to be a disaster. It's not really much of a musical idea. It's not going to work.' And, I'm feeling bad for this kid, and I'm 26 or 27 or 28, and this kid's 20 or 19, whatever he is. And so, Strouse says, 'Go ahead.'

So, the kid sits down, and he's at the piano, and he pounds out the most exhilarating rock-opera-style song about freedom from oppression. And, by the way, if anyone listening knows who this person is--I've lost track of him. He later won the award as a senior for the best symphony at Eastman, and I never heard from him again. And, he was a brilliant, brilliant person. But, anyway, he's sitting; he's playing this song, and all of us in the crowd are in--our jaws are dropped because the brilliance of the song is so extraordinary. And we're so happy for him because he hasn't made a fool of himself.

But, I'm also looking at Strouse, and I'm thinking, 'Well, if the first song is this good, what's he going to possibly?'--I mean, he can't just say, 'That was wonderful. Who is next?'

So, he finishes and we go nuts. We applaud him tremendously because of his courage and the quality of it. And, Strouse sits there for a few seconds, and he said, 'You know in that section where you were playing the instrumental and not singing?' He says, 'Yeah.' He said, 'What's going to be happening on stage when that's going on?' And, the kid went, 'Oh. Yeah.' And that was the tiny glimpse I saw of that collaborative process of one person holding the other accountable.

There's more humor from that experience, which I'll leave for another time; but that idea that you learn from another and grow together to produce something extraordinary must be an amazing thing for the two of them. It's a marriage that is founded on music rather than romantic love. And, wow, that must be exhilarating.

Dana Gioia: Well, one of the most interesting relationships in opera is between Mozart and Da Ponte [Lorenzo Da Ponte]. And, Mozart is writing Italian operas. He even wrote an opera in Latin for church things. But, what Mozart really likes is kind of stupid jokes and bumptious humor. He's the most sophisticated musician who has ever lived, but there's a lot of truth in the depiction that they have in Amadeus. I mean, they exaggerate it, but Mozart and his father and sister are always making poop jokes in their letters.

And, suddenly he gets this fantastically sophisticated Venetian Jew who has become a priest, but then has run off with women--is one of the best friends of Giacomo Casanova. And, this fellow is extraordinarily sophisticated, and he writes these librettos that are--it's like a person doing action films who suddenly you realize is a great dramatic actor. And, Mozart writes the three greatest operas of his career one after the other: Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte.

And then, he writes a wonderful kind of goofy opera called The Magic Flute, which is basically written by a comedian that runs a theater as a star vehicle for himself--so, he can play the glockenspiel and he can do these various--the shtick that he does. And, Mozart writes La Clemenza di Tito, which is great music and just a total dud. I mean, it's soporific in performance, even though it's clearly by Mozart.

But, there was something about that collaboration with Da Ponte that made the most sophisticated kind of musical comedy that's ever existed in opera. [More to come, 37:59]

And, there's another fellow named Arrigo Boito who was a young composer and he's also a poet, and he loves Verdi. And, Verdi has decided he's going to retire. And so, Boito goes and hangs around Verdi; and he has these little tricks to make Verdi actually want to write an opera about--how, 'Well, I've written this great libretto based on Shakespeare's Othello, and I'm going to give it to this composer.' And Verdi says, 'No, no, that composer is no good.' And he'll come back the next week: 'I'm going to give it to this composer.'

And, he gets Verdi so upset that's Verdi is thinking about it all the time. So Verdi writes this.

He comes out of retirement; and then, you know, Boito goes, 'Well, Verdi, you had a great career, but you had a couple of flops. Simon Boccanegra is a terrible flop.' And Verdi says, 'Well,' so they end up rewriting it--I mean, from top to bottom, adding new scenes, dropping scenes. And then, finally, Verdi's now hitting 80. And, Boito says, 'Well, you had a great career, but you only wrote one comedy at the beginning of your career, and it was a flop. It's a shame that you were not a great comic opera.' And, suddenly, Verdi writes Falstaff because he wants to prove that he's got a comic genius, and he writes another great opera.

So, Boito not only had the power to write great libretti, and he's one of the people that took other composers who never had an opera that lasted; but the one opera that Boito wrote for him--like, Ponchielli wrote La Gioconda--and Boito had a psychological ability to take this temperamental genius, which was Giuseppe Verdi, the greatest Italian composer perhaps ever, and lure him out of retirement by, I think, by frank psychological manipulation. And, I got to believe that Verdi's ghost was, in retrospect, glad to be manipulated.

Russ Roberts: Oh, yeah. Just to make it clear, I said seven. You write in the book, quote, "The majority of the operas still regularly performed have libretti by only five poets: Romani, Piave, Boito, Illica, and Cammarano. Their verse had a"--

Dana Gioia: That's in the Italian repertory, I'm saying. In the world repertory it's seven, seven creators.

Russ Roberts: Okay, so I wasn't totally wrong.

Dana Gioia: I said, if you just go to opera in Italian, which is where opera is invented and opera is still practiced, it's even more extraordinary. It's just these five poets; and this is out of thousands of poets who wrote.

So, it's not surprising that art is related to talent and that collaborative art--see, people don't quite understand collaborative art because we have a notion that art is about lonely geniuses suffering in their solitude. But, I don't think Ira and George Gershwin suffered in their solitude. I think they sat at the piano and they were joking and arguing and it was--they played off each other's energy.

And so, a lot of the arts people like best--movies, dance, musicals, opera, even a lot of songwriting--comes out of teams. And, we don't have the language in traditional criticism to talk about this kind of mysterious human energy that's synergistic in terms of creative collaboration.

41:29

Russ Roberts: I think I'm right about this: We've talked about how when composers lost their librettist, they struggled to write a successful opera, let alone a great one. But, it's also true in the other direction. Ira Gershwin's brother George dies, I think at 36--an incredible tragedy of lost art we'll never have. He writes, I don't know, 25 of the greatest, if not more, greatest songs ever written in the American songbook and some wonderful other music. But, Ira, although he does write--he's a songwriter for the rest of his life--he struggles to create songs, to find a composer who can inspire him the way his brother did. And, he writes some hits--I'm blanking on them now, there's some, but his--

Dana Gioia: Vernon Duke, he works well with Vernon Duke. Yeah, but it's funny. If you took the Ira Gershwin's songs and said, 'What are the best ones?' you'd probably be down to 10 or 11 before the non-George songs come in. Because "Log Cabin in the Sky" was a big hit, but it was--

Russ Roberts: It's not immortal.

Dana Gioia: but we don't really listen to those songs much anymore.

The most interesting case of that is Richard Rodgers.

Russ Roberts: I was thinking the same thing.

Dana Gioia: It was with Rodgers and Hart. He creates a kind of song and he creates a kind of musical with Hart. And then, Hart, who is a terrible drunk and a closeted homosexual and a chain smoker--

Russ Roberts: Depressive--

Dana Gioia: and he's always frail, so he drops dead. And, Rodgers doesn't know what to do, but he's known Oscar Hammerstein who has worked with other composers, too. And the two of them create, I think, some of the three or four of the greatest musicals ever written. And, even the ones that aren't hits are all--but I mean South Pacific--

Russ Roberts: Oklahoma--

Dana Gioia: is to me one of the--Oklahoma--these are--even The Sound of Music, which is I think one of my wife's favorites, these are incredible things. But they're very different than from the songs that he wrote with Rodgers and Hart. And, Hammerstein is just a different sort of sensibility. And, Rodgers says, 'I can't write without the words, and I get good words--,' and so he's always begging for new lyrics and things like this. But, it's--not only did he sustain his career, but he invented a different Richard Rodgers sound.

Russ Roberts: I'm a bit of a snob on this. I love the songs of Rodgers and Hart, "Bewitched and Bewildered," "My Funny Valentine." Both the music and the lyrics I think are at the top. I don't particularly like Rodgers and Hammerstein. I think Hammerstein brought out a side of Rodgers musically that--it's okay, I understand it's popular. I don't love Oklahoma. I don't love Sound of Music. I don't love South Pacific. They're very nice songs. But Rodgers and Hart's songs are extraordinary. And so, that's life; and it's a fascinating example.

Dana Gioia: Well, let me offer a collaborative dissent to your argument.

Russ Roberts: Okay, please.

Dana Gioia: I think that Rodgers and Hart wrote greater songs than musicals. I think Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote greater musicals than excerptable songs. I mean--

Russ Roberts: One hundred percent. That's a great observation.

Dana Gioia: So, if you watch South Pacific--and so, I mean, the theatrical effect of, "I'm Going to Wash that Man Right Out of My Hair" is much greater than it has as an excerptable song. And so, I think that what Hammerstein did--and it comes out of Hammerstein's background--is created popular musical theater at its height.

And, indeed, there's a lot of musicals that you love, that don't have excerptable songs.

And, this is the point I was making about Stephen Sondheim. And I think--because, one of the things that fascinates me in this book, the book is called Weep, Shudder, Die--it has a scene from La Bohème on the cover--and I'm talking about Italian opera and German opera. But, I begin to talk about American opera, because I'm an American poet. I work with American composers, maybe a few British composers. And I'm really fascinated by: how have we created opera in the United States? Because, we've been importing opera from Italy. In the 19th century, opera was as popular as movies were in the 20th century.

And I look at the career of Leonard Bernstein. I talk about the Broadway musical--which is interesting because you take this European operetta, which you have in New York, and you add a kind of combination of Jewish and African-American flavor in it, and you create the Broadway musical.

And I end up--and this surprised me--I think, in terms of saying that what's the greatest recent opera is Sweeney Todd by Sondheim.

Sondheim has a very weird career. I mean, the thing that surprised me--I love lists. You're an economist. You'll appreciate this. I love numbers. I like data points, to see what the data points tell me, because a lot of times the data will tell me things that I don't already know or will tell me that some of the things that I think I know are wrong.

But, the thing that amazed is if you take the 100 most popular Broadway musicals, Sondheim didn't write any of them. I think it's 120s or something before he appears, with--and what does he appear with? A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which is his--

Russ Roberts: From his youth--

Dana Gioia: first musical. It's a conventional musical, which once again has one hit song, "Comedy Tonight." Which is a great theatrical song. It doesn't really survive as a pop song. Because--it's like "No Business Like Show Business."

And so, he writes these--he works with other composers; and you got to say, he does it: he writes the lyrics to West Side Story and Gypsy. I mean, you can't get better lyrics than he wrote Styne [Jule Styne] and Bernstein [Leonard Bernstein].

And then he starts writing his own musicals. And, the real Sondheim people just think all these early musicals are great. I don't think so. I think he's a great lyricist, but he's got a very strange sensibility--very unhappy, skeptical, critical, this capability. People don't go to Broadway to have people talk about why they can't have relationships and they'll never be happy. And that's mother's milk to Stephen Sondheim.

And then, he starts experimenting in the middle of his career. And, you've got to praise capitalism when you look at the careers of Sondheim, because musical after musical, people gave him money and he lost it. But, people believed that--they knew he was a genius and that eventually he'd hit big. And then, about two thirds of the way through his career--because he starts as a kid--I mean, he's in his twenties and he working with Bernstein and Styne--and he writes "A Little Night Music" in which he takes this--I mean an Ingmar Bergman comedy, and he turns it into--I mean, it's really the finest American operetta I think ever written. I mean, it's better than anything Victor Herbert or Sigmund Romberg, people did. And it's sophisticated, and it's funny. Almost all of the songs are in waltz time, although they don't feel that way.

And then, he tries some more; and then he does what I find is a problematic musical. And, people get very angry with me when I say this, is that: Into the Woods--Into the Woods has a great first act and a puzzling second act.

Russ Roberts: It's a lot.

Dana Gioia: And, in fact, a lot of Sondheim's musicals have great first acts, and they're incredibly clever; but he doesn't know how to get out of it in the second act.

So, I mean, the worst one is if you've ever seen--well, Pacific Overtures, which is the history of American intervention in Japan. And, the first act is so inventive--and I mean it's just one brilliant original theatrical conceit after the other. And the second act is an embarrassment. And, the first act really has things that are as beautiful as anything ever written on Broadway.

But, it comes together, finally, in this unexpected way in Sweeney Todd. He's talking about a serial murderer in--I think it's early 19th century London--based on a kind of a real story that is turned into a kind of a popular play. And, he creates--in this weird way, with the conventions of Broadway--continuous music and tells a tragic story, which has a romantic subplot that ends happily. And it's overpowering.

And Sondheim--he didn't want to say he was writing opera because opera doesn't make money. And he wanted to make money. You know, God bless him. I mean, Sondheim, he never wanted a subsidy. He wanted to triumph in commercial theater--because I think Sondheim looked at commercial theater as like the Olympics. You can make it on Broadway, you can make it anywhere. And, he just loved the fact that he was competing with the greatest musical talent in the world--greatest musical theatrical talent in the world.

And then, he creates this opera, this musical, which is now performed in opera houses all over the world. And, is it an opera? Well--and what he's--Sondheim has a wonderful answer. He says, 'Well, if it's performed on Broadway, it's a musical. If it's performed in an opera house, it's opera.' Which I think is a very empirical definition.

The hardcore American composers hate it because it's tuneful. People love it and everything else. And they're writing these thorny, dissonant works which are lucky to get a premiere. They're never produced again.

But, I do think it's interesting: Sondheim Sondheim got to the goal on a completely different course than Aaron Copland or Samuel Barber, or even George Gershwin in some ways did it in this. And so it's an interesting thing.

But, as a poet who writes words for music, I'm really interested in how the game is played. I don't mean the game in the narrow sense. I mean, it's the artistic game. Musical theater is one of the greatest artistic challenges ever invented, and if you get it right, it's wonderful.

53:17

Russ Roberts: I want to talk about musical theater. Before I do, I want to mention a fairly obscure musical which I happened to see near its opening, called Curtains. It was a Kander and Ebb musical. Kander and Ebb wrote--their most famous musical is Cabaret. Curtains is utterly delightful, but there's an especially delightful song in it called, "It's a Business," and it's echoing your point about capitalism. And, musical theater, unlike opera, is not heavily subsidized. It has to carry its own weight with the customers.

And, at one point--this is a musical about making a musical. And, the mother in the show is the manager of the company, and her daughter is an artiste: she wants to do great works of artistic brilliance that no one wants to watch. And her mother lectures her with the song, "It's a Business." And, it's a moment of self-reflective reality, I think, for Kander and Ebb. They had a good time with it. But I want to come back--

Dana Gioia: They also wrote, "Money Makes the World Go Round."

Russ Roberts: Yep. There you go.

Dana Gioia: You know the--

Russ Roberts: But, I want to make a different point about Sondheim and about musicals, which is: American opera has not been the success that other cultures and countries have produced. British opera, there's some, quote, "hits." There's some: as you say, Benjamin Britten--you mentioned him earlier. But, I think in 100 years or 200 years, there won't be very many American operas that are performed from our lifetime, or British operas. Whereas I think the Italian canon and Mozart and others, a handful of others, will still be going.

And, I want to suggest the obvious answer as to why, which is that the great talents of this moment, today, go into musical theater rather than opera.

So, Sondheim is a bridge--sometimes straddles both worlds. Now, you can debate how effectively--and I apologize to my friends who are not here in Israel who are listening who love the man and everything he ever did. I just don't like it as much as they do.

But, you know, Andrew Lloyd Webber; the people who wrote Les Mis [Les Misérables]; Stephen Schwartz; you could even say Lerner and Loewe--when I think about the great musicals of our lifetime, it's Les Mis, Wicked, Man of La Mancha, My Fair Lady. I have my own personal weird--Hamilton--my own weird favorites beyond that; but these folks are geniuses. They are musical geniuses. They are often lyrical geniuses. We should have mentioned Lin-Manuel Miranda as somebody who writes his own words and music--extraordinarily--in that other list. And, if there weren't musical theater, they'd have been writing opera.

And, when musical theater came along, they said, 'Well, this is more popular, makes more money.' It has different norms and conventions, but they're not that different. I mean Les Mis is--I don't think there's a word of dialogue. It's all--

Dana Gioia: Well, let me offer--I don't think you're wrong, but I would put it in a different context. Opera has always been slightly subsidized. But, if you go to the great operatic composers--Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini--these guys were box office magic. They all became--Verdi became a national figure. He was a lifetime senator. Verdi represented the Republic of Italy--the Unified Republic of Italy. He was a national hero. Rossini was--I don't know what you'd compare him to: like, the Beatles at their prime. I mean, Stendhal said he was the most famous person in Europe. Puccini, I mean, was just box office magic everywhere he went.

And so, it's your economics--which is to say: This is a place where a talented person can have fame, can have the pleasures of artistic expression and reap the rewards of wealth.

But, in America, we had a considerable amount of talent. I mean, I think Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland--these were tremendously talented composers.

Russ Roberts: Fair enough.

Dana Gioia: Yet they didn't quite succeed in opera. I mean, Vanessa by Samuel Barber is at the very margins of this.

And, I think part of the raw problem is modernism. As American music was coming into its maturity, and all of these Austrians were coming here--and Arnold Schoenberg being the most persuasive of them and convincing them that tonality was dead. We have this twelve-tone system of music, or you have the Krenek [Ernst Krenek] and these other people saying, 'Well, it has to be dissonant.' And, if you wanted to be respectable and up-to-date and maintain your academic job, which a lot of these people had, you had to compose in this way that was self-consciously elitist. They took pride that people couldn't understand the music without studying it.

And, so I think you had tremendous talents that were--even if they succeeded in creating interesting symphonic music, chamber music in this, could not create a compelling drama that a paying audience wanted to see again and again. Because, if you ask somebody who loves opera how many times that they've seen Madame Butterfly or La Bohème or Tosca or La Traviata, they can't even count how many times they've seen it, because they'll see it every time they get a chance, is the answer. But, I don't think people feel this way about Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, which maybe is a hit in Israel--I don't know.

Russ Roberts: No, I don't think so.

Dana Gioia: Yeah. You know. And so, there are times when talent and culture and history and the marketplace move together; and that was 19th-century Paris and 19th-century Italy. I mean, the Italians would go to Paris because that was the Hollywood, and they had bigger budgets. They had three or four opera houses running at any one time. And, they were all dominated by the Italians because the same way that Hollywood in certain periods has been run by British and German and Austrian talents--because they're masters of the medium. So, Fritz Lang can make it in Berlin, or he can make it in Hollywood; Greta Garbo can make it in Hollywood.

And so, that was Paris and London and places like this in the 19th century. I mean, there were Italians in St. Petersburg. When the Tsar heard music, he preferred it to be in Italian.

1:00:45

Russ Roberts: I want to say something about melody, which we haven't spoken about. I don't know if you know this book or essay by Bernstein. Bernstein is a very interesting case--and he's back a little bit into American consciousness because of the movie Maestro that came out, whenever that was, a year or two ago. He had a collection of essays called, "The Joy of Music." And in that--and I don't see it on my shelf here, and I haven't read it in ages--but there's an unforgettable essay in there, for me, where he talks about the success of Candide, which is his musical/opera, in between-ish thing.

And, he picks on himself. He has a dialogue with himself in there, and he basically says something like, 'There aren't that many hummable songs.' And, Bernstein says, 'Yeah, but that's because,' he's sophisticated, he's a modernist. He doesn't want to have some easily hummable song that people come out of the theater singing. And then he asks the question, 'Well, maybe I just can't write one.' And he mentions Gershwin. Gershwin could write a great melody in 10 minutes and then do it again half an hour later.

And, this comes back to Sondheim, this challenge of writing an unforgettable melody. Les Mis is filled--has 10 of them. Wicked has six. And it's a real art and it's rare. A great meloy is rare, and Verdi could do it all day long. Puccini could do it all day long. I think it's rare.

Dana Gioia: When Verdi was writing Rigoletto, he would not let the tenor rehearse "La Donna è Mobile"--the most famous aria--because he didn't want anybody to steal it before the premiere. And so, they only did it in private. And, as Verdi is coming into the theater on opening night, the organ grinder in the theater has already somehow picked it up and is playing it. It's a hit even before its premiere.

If you look at Il Trovatore or Rigoletto--Il Trovatore, I have a young man here who is a son of a friend of mine who is helping me do my archives, and I said, 'You've got to listen to Il Trovatore,' and it's just one great tune after the other. And, he's a singer, so he's singing along with it even though he doesn't know it. By the time he hears the first refrain, he's got it in his head. And that's a genius.

See, Leonard Bernstein, who is beloved in America because he represents a certain cultural ideal, is a perfect example of how modernism, I think, spoiled some composers because he felt in order to be important he had to write in this--

Russ Roberts: He had to be sophisticated.

Dana Gioia: dramatic late romanticism or in a kind of dissonant modernism. He even did a little bit of serial music, twelve-tone music.

But, if you look at his first opera, which is, was it--Trouble in Tahiti, it's a great opera. It's a one-act opera, but it's very depressing in terms of it. But, it's fantastic melodies.

And, he does West Side Story--fantastic melodies, fantastic dance music. The dance music allows him to be modernist. And, he's got Jerry Robbins--once again, you've got collaborative genius there.

But then, when he writes these symphonies, and then when he finally decides he's going to take Trouble in Tahiti and expand it into this great multi-generational family tragedy, it's unlistenable. It's just these colossal duds because he's locked in modernism.

Now, let me say, it's not that I dislike modernism. I love a lot of modernist music. But it's not a easy vehicle for musical theater unless you're taking an extreme story of suffering like Woyzeck, or something like that, where you want to be anguished or you want to be dissonant. Those operas, for the most part, have not survived. And there's been a great many of them.

Now, for over half a century, twelve-tone music was the academic orthodoxy of American universities. All of these operas were written in twelve-tone. Not one of them has even a marginal place in the repertory, because people, they just don't respond to them.

Russ Roberts: They don't like them.

Dana Gioia: They're too cerebral.

Russ Roberts: I forgot about--

Dana Gioia: But, Bernstein is interesting. I think he's a great talent who I think was maybe perhaps born 20 or 30 years too late.

Russ Roberts: I forgot about West Side Story. Obviously, there are many, many hummable and unforgettable tunes. "There's a Place for Us" is really a [inaudible 01:06:05] song.

Dana Gioia: "Maria"--

Russ Roberts: Yeah, "Maria." And, I can't remember if he writes about that in the book. I'll have to go back and find it, but it's a confession of sorts that it's harder than it looks and it's not just a question of sophistication.

Dana Gioia: Well, Candide is an interesting story because--we'll do it in about three sentences. They wrote this very political adaptation of Voltaire's novel so that it would be about the McCarthy hearings and everything and that. It was a failure. But everybody felt there was some good stuff. And so, they did it again: it was still a failure. They ended up doing 11 different versions. They went through over half a dozen different lyricists. People came and went and died. They eventually took out every word Lillian Hellman wrote and had another book put in. And, every time they did it, they kept adding more music. And finally, by the last version, it's fundamentally an opera; and then it succeeded. But, as Stephen Sondheim said, 'Operas are not written. They are assembled.'

1:07:20

Russ Roberts: I want to just mention in passing that, in addition to containing observations about opera and being a librettist and the whole canon, positive and negative that you reflect on in the book: There's some lovely autobiography about yourself and your life and how you came to love opera and came to love poetry; about your mom and her love of poetry. It really is a lovely book.

Dana Gioia: Can I tell you just a little bit about the book?

Russ Roberts: Yeah, sure.

Dana Gioia: It's a short book--

Russ Roberts: Yes, it is--

Dana Gioia: And, what it really is, is a long--you know, one of the early reviewers said that he read it in one sitting. One intense sitting. And, that made me very happy, because it's this long essay, but you don't realize it's an essay because I break it up into these 24 little sections; and so you think, 'Oh, it's about just five or six pages.' But it's a continuous line of argument.

And, as I was working on the book, I said, 'How can one not say that one's own work is genius? I have written this brilliant book.' But I said, 'It's a little too damn brilliant.' About halfway through, people are going to say, 'What an asshole this Gioia is. He thinks he knows everything.'

So, I decided at the last minute to do two things. I'd broken up the sections, but I gave each section a title, which means that I had to reassemble things: like, 'Bernstein's Broken Promise,' or something like this.

And then, at three different intervals, I put a personal memoir--because, in a sense that they would understand that I'm a working-class kid from LA [Los Angeles]. I came into opera kind of through the back door in a way. And about this, but then about how I wanted to be a composer and I go to Vienna to study music, and I end up stop writing music, and I start writing poetry. So, I wrote these little things so that this long argument is punctured by these sort of personal reflections in a way about how I came to opera, why I love it.

And my wife--when I first did it, she said, 'Oh, you can't do that. You're changing--,' I said, 'No, that's exactly what I want to do.' I said, 'We're going on here, I want them to stop and not think, but to feel, and then give it some more thought. Then I want them to feel--I want to feel like what happens when you go to a foreign country in pursuit of a girl who breaks up with you.' I mean, these stories of young aspirations and suffering. But I wanted to humanize the book.

So, I'm very proud of the book. I've written a lot, but I think this is by far the best-written book in a sense of just getting the reader involved and sweeping them along.

Russ Roberts: I loved it, but I also loved your book on studying with Elizabeth Bishop, too.

1:10:23

Russ Roberts: I want to close with Tolstoy, who I've mentioned before on the program: his theory of art [What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy], which I stumbled on in the last couple of years. And, I realized in preparing for our conversation that Tolstoy in the middle of this book has this incredibly entertaining and damning set of observations about an opera performance.

He likens the director of the opera to a tyrant who is bossing around these huge courses of singers, and then of dancers--groups of dancers--and, what's the point? It just a lot of shrieking. I can't remember all the details of what he hates about it, but he absolutely hates it.

And, the reason he hates it is that--and I think he has totally misunderstood the point of opera so I want to get your reaction--the book for Tolstoy has a very, very narrow definition of art. As a result of that, he calls many things that are revered as art, not art. I think Shakespeare, Beethoven. I can't remember the list now, but it doesn't matter.

But, his theory is very simple. His theory is: Art is when the artist feels something extraordinary and creates a song, poem, musical, opera, novel that allows the viewer, reader, listener to feel the same thing. So, it's about the fact--and it's a beautiful definition. Let's not talk about what it ignores. But the idea that art is a way a human being, locked in his or her own brain and selfhood, connects across space, and often time--after death--and allows another human being to have an emotion that the artist had. And, that's a crazy insight, I think, and a beautiful insight.

What--it's ironic for me to think about Tolstoy's definition in light of what you've written about opera--and I'll say this, I'll lay this out and let you close with your response. What you've said in this book for--you've said many, many things and it's all interesting--but at the heart of the book is this idea of 'weep, shudder, and die': that these people on stage, in often a foreign language, in words I may not fully or even at all understand, are evoking an emotion that somehow I mirror. I have--the singers weep, shudder, and die; and I do, too. And in that sense, opera is the ultimate art in how Tolstoy defines it. And yet, for whatever reason in this production that he's writing about--and I don't know if it's a parody or real--he hates it.

But, do you feel that opera is that phenomenon and do your feel that your poetry is that? Are you doing that with your poetry? You're making me--

Dana Gioia: I think--well, let me say something about Tolstoy, and then I'll answer the second half of your question--is that I think Tolstoy is perhaps the greatest fiction writer who ever lived. Certainly Anna Karenina--having read novels for over 60 years--Anna Karenina is the best novel I've ever read. And, War and Peace is the most ambitious, successful novel. Even the parts of it I think are failed, but it's fantastic to tell the national story in a novel.

But he had a very simplistic view of art, which he himself didn't practice. I mean, he would talk about how--and he mirrors, I think, the later Soviet notion of art: the expression of the people that do their freedom and things like this. And so, he talks about how he likes all the peasant things, the melodies, the simple rhythms. But, when he's by himself, he's playing Beethoven and he's having all the kids play Beethoven, and he just loves it. He's going to the opera. He likes Glinka. He likes Meyerbeer. He's borrowing things from operas to put in his novels.

So, it's exactly like Tolstoy announcing that he's celibate and then getting his wife pregnant. And, you know, he has an immense imagination, and he has these contradictory things occupying his brain at the same time.

My sense of opera is Tolstoyan in a way. Opera is a multi-sensory art form. You see it. You hear it. It registers as language, as music, as movement, as acting. And so it wraps around you. And, what opera does is have this--when it's well-performed, has this transference that for a period of time you are sucked into the internal life of that character in that situation, in that dramatic moment, in their imaginary lives; and you feel overwhelming joy, overwhelming sorrow, or whatever.

The second half of the first act of La Bohème, where Rodolfo meets Mimi and they fall in love instantly, never ceases to sweep me up. I mean, it reminds me of every time I've felt love and desire and romance. And it's irresistible. In something like Norma, or whatever--these tragic operas by Bellini--where he brings you into a woman who is about to commit murder or suicide, or whatever--it's just stunning.

And, I've seen it again and again. You'll have a great moment like this--maybe a soprano or a tenor or whatever; it will take you 20 minutes--and then the scene is over. And you look and the audience is coming out of a trance. They literally gasp, and then they go nuts because that's what they're paying for. They're paying for--you can call it aesthetic bliss, but it's also emotional catharsis.

Catharsis basically means to empty your bowels. And, Aristotle uses this term because he says what tragedy does--which is opera, singing and dancing and poetry--when it gets you, it makes you void all of your dark emotions. Through pity and terror, it allows you to achieve a kind of emotional balance.

And, I think that's what the Italians are--and I say this as an Italian-American--the Italians are simultaneously the craziest and the sanest people in the world, and I think they have opera instead of psychoanalysis.

Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Dana Gioia. Dana, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

Dana Gioia: It's always fun to talk to you.