By DAVID PRATT

"Art," Macheath famously declares in Brecht's Threepenny Opera, "is not 'nice.'" Eight years after Threepenny's premiere in Berlin, an American novelist, Nathanael West, cast his vote with Brecht. West's 1933 tale of a male advice columnist—known to readers only by his nom de journal, "Miss Lonelyhearts"—is a fractured car crash of irony, surrealism, and alienation. The eponymous hero, convinced that he fails the desperate souls who write seeking his advice, ricochets through the streets of New York, from sex (usually frustrated) to Jesus Christ and back. West's version of Stephen Dedalus is not watched over by any kindly Bloom or even a stately, plump Buck Mulligan. Miss Lonelyhearts' mentor—and tormentor—is his cruelly sarcastic boss, Shrike, a kind of disembodied voice that mocks the hero's sincere, if overheated, religiosity, and tries to set the lad up with his wife. It is not a pretty picture.

At a rehearsal for his opera Miss Lonelyhearts, composer Lowell Liebermann goes over a detail in the score with Juilliard staff pianist and vocal coach Michael Baitzer. (Photo © Dario Acosta 2005)

Enter into that picture the American composer and Juilliard alumnus Lowell Liebermann.

In 2004, to celebrate its upcoming centennial, Juilliard commissioned an opera from Liebermann, who earned all three of his degrees from the School (B.M. '82, M.M. '84, D.M.A. '87). Liebermann had long wanted to adapt Miss Lonelyhearts, but the legal thicket had been impassable, and the composer would not spend time on the project until he knew he had the rights. A lengthy search revealed that those rights belonged not to West's feuding heirs, as had been supposed, but to the author of a 1950s TV adaptation of the story. At last, with rights secured, Liebermann set about transforming West's quintessential 20th-century novella into a 21st-century opera. The arresting result receives its world premiere from the Juilliard Opera Center on Wednesday, April 26, in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, with Andreas Delfs conducting and Ken Cazan directing.

At first Liebermann thought he would write the Lonelyhearts libretto himself, as he had with his first opera, based on Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. He even saw parallels between the stories: "In both, the main character tries to make order of his life—Dorian through aesthetics, Miss Lonelyhearts through religion and love," he said recently in an interview. "And in both you have an evil, sarcastic character, pushing the hero into delusion." In Dorian it is Lord Henry. In Miss Lonelyhearts it is Shrike—named for the only songbird that is also a bird of prey—who capitalizes on the hero's need to find a purpose in life.

Librettist J.D. McClatchy (Photo by James Hamilton)

As it turned out, this time Liebermann would have a collaborator: the Yale-based poet J. D. "Sandy" McClatchy. Already the author of several librettos, including that for Tobias Picker's Emmeline and Ned Rorem's Our Town, which premiered at Indiana University in February, McClatchy knew Liebermann's music, and had approached him about a collaboration. Liebermann, meanwhile, felt his material this time around required a librettist with a great deal of theatrical experience. So McClatchy came on board.

Brian Zeger, Juilliard's artistic director of vocal arts, suggested to Liebermann that opera director Ken Cazan be the one to stage Miss Lonelyhearts. Cazan, as it happened, was also a Dorian fan, and Liebermann, in turn, saw and admired Cazan's updating (to the World War I era) of Massenet's Le Jongleur de Notre Dame at Colorado's Central City Opera in 2004. Liebermann and Cazan chatted intensely at the party afterwards, and in the winter of 2005, the composer asked Cazan to stage Miss Lonelyhearts. Completing the circle, Cazan knew of McClatchy from his other libretti, in addition to which Zeger sent him a copy of McClatchy's 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Hazmat.

Matthew Worth

"I found it stunning," Cazan says, "dry and witty and very, very honest. These non-sentimental qualities carry into the 'noir' feeling of Miss Lonelyhearts, which is so relevant for the America we're living in. West wrote in the heart of the Great Depression, and he hit nerves about the far right wing. Miss Lonelyhearts was a seminary student, so there's a religious overlay conflicting with his natural self. He doesn't have the emotional fiber to handle the problems laid in front of him; neither Sandy nor Lowell shy away from that."

Indeed, the appeal of Miss Lonelyhearts to a contemporary opera composer is more than evident. The lurid, expressionistic language pulls the reader into a vortex of self-reflective angst and queasy black comedy. In the story's first half especially, the pace is unrelenting, as though the reader is stuck on an out-of-control carnival ride. And West may well have been enamored of movies (his best-known work, The Day of the Locust, takes on Hollywood), for his pages are aquiver with jump cuts, montages, and surreal lighting effects.

Yet Miss Lonelyhearts is still a modernist literary event, with plot and character struggling against experimental word-effects. Well before World War II, West anticipated those who would later unmoor language from narrative, or revel in vernacular speech and extreme situation. Miss Lonelyhearts foreshadows, among other post-war figures, William S. Burroughs, R. Crumb (West considered subtitling the episodic Miss Lonelyhearts "a novel in the form of a comic strip"), and David Wojnarowicz. One could even say that West's relentlessly piled-on word-images anticipate hip-hop. Plot and character do hold their own in Miss Lonelyhearts, but West loves language and images for their own sake. His story gets where it's going, but it cannot be said to "develop" in a conventional way.

Brenda Rae

Liebermann both meets and mitigates the exaggerated, episodic nature of West's storytelling with a propulsive, exuberant score, tonal yet unsettling, and constantly in motion. He is the composer-as-carny who loves the big machine and won't let you off it, even in the most lyrical moments. One can feel in each measure Liebermann's excitement in composing the opera, in unfolding the shocking tragic-comedy for us musically. Liebermann cites Shostakovich as "a huge influence," and Miss Lonelyhearts produces much the same reaction as that master's work: Even when the music conveys pain or doubt, perhaps especially when the music conveys pain or doubt, you can't stop listening. Liebermann, like Shostakovich, won't let you stop listening. And having one's brain and heart held like that is a goosebump pleasure.

A part of the hold Liebermann's score has over the listener comes from its freewheeling eclecticism. "What interests me," the composer says, "is how to characterize musically." In Dorian Gray, a 12-note tone row became a metaphor for Wilde's theme of appearance versus reality. In Miss Lonelyhearts, Liebermann is characterizing through "a simultaneity of different, clashing musics, because all the characters are evading reality one way or another. There's a tension in the story between irony and the search for the truth, so each character's music is in great contrast to the others." Shrike's sarcastic rants reference pop music clichés. The scoring for Miss Lonelyhearts himself echoes religious music, and Mary Shrike has become "a crazy coloratura, like Zerbinetta on acid." Audiences can also look forward to jazz inflections, saloon piano, and songs composed by Liebermann in period style to play on a radio during a scene between Miss Lonelyhearts and Mrs. Shrike. This last is Liebermann's favorite scene, and the radio songs were the first music he wrote for the piece.

Jeremy Little

Liebermann gives much credit for his success to his librettist. "Sandy is easy to work with and he gave me a fantastic, very intelligent libretto," he says. The success of the libretto depended on it creating space for Liebermann's "simultanaeity of clashing musics." Says the composer, "Sandy has a clarity of language; the words give room for and give a reason for the music." Or, as McClatchy puts it, "My task as librettist is to erect a scaffold of story and character, speech and image, within which the composer can build music with a thrust and sound of its own."

This process of scaffolding and construction went swimmingly for both Liebermann and McClatchy. "Our collaboration was extraordinary," McClatchy says. "We seemed instinctively to agree on what we wanted to do. I had long admired Lowell's music, and had every confidence that he would make the sizzling score he has indeed written." The librettist adds that "the workshopping [last October] made possible by Juilliard at various stages was valuable," and Liebermann agrees. Citing the workshop's "very strong cast," most of whom will repeat their roles in April, he says, "Juilliard was terrific in involving me in the casting. I could not have better people."

And if the creators love the cast, the cast members love the creators as well, and are relishing the opportunity to do an envelope-pushing, world-premiere American opera. This has been the first exposure to Liebermann's music for baritone Matthew Worth, who plays Shrike. "I dug it immediately," Worth says. "Lowell hit the nail on the head with every phrase. It's really challenging, written for a baritone who can maintain a high tessitura." Jeremy Little, the tenor singing the title role, adds, "Lowell has done an amazing job with this, and Ken [Cazan] is perfect for it. How often do young singers get to pull off a piece that has this dramatic depth to it? We're getting ready to strap on for the ride."

"The ride" to which Little alludes is not just about challenging music. It's also about what the movie-rating people call "thematic elements." Like sex. "This is not about just coming out and singing an aria," says Brenda Rae, who plays Liebermann's wanton "Zerbinetta on acid," Mary Shrike. "It's not about being an opera singer in a fluffy dress. It's very physical. Which my fiancé is not too happy about!" she adds with a twinkle. "Ken asked me how comfortable I was pushing the envelope. He likes an open mind. It makes it more fun and you discover a lot. And the extreme physicality all makes sense; it's very human."

Liebermann: Miss Lonelyhearts Peter Jay Sharp Theater Wednesday-Sunday, April 26-30 For time and ticket information, please see the calendar.

There is also the potentially touchy matter of religion: Shrike's mockery of it, Miss Lonelyhearts' misguided devotion to it. But both Worth, a Catholic who admits he "would like to be more devout," and Little, born and educated in the Bible Belt, embrace their roles—not in spite of how the story questions religion, but because of it. "This story has never seemed sacrilegious to me," says Little. "It is a slice of real life, as dark as that may be, but it is in no way anti-God. My priest from Baton Rouge is an opera fan, and he's probably flying up to see the show!"

And Worth has a very personal identification with the story. "The role the Lord plays with me in my singing—I feel like I have been blessed," Worth says of his career. "But I still ask Him every day if He thinks this is the path I should be taking. I feel like Miss Lonelyhearts is a portrait of a man in a constant struggle. So it humanizes what I go through every day."

David Pratt is a freelance arts writer and development consultant living in New York City. In addition to The Juilliard Journal, he has written for The New York Times, Playbill, and many other publications.