Jackie O - 1997 Opera Production 

An opera by composer Michael Daugherty and librettist Wayne Koestenbaum

• Notes from the Wayne Koestenbaum, librettist of Jackie O.
• Notes from the Michael Daugherty, composer of Jackie O.

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Wayne Koestenbaum, librettist

When friends ask: 'What's the plot of your opera?' I usually answer in two words: 'Jackie Sings'. Isn't that enough? If asked to elaborate, I say 'Jackie sings in Texas'. If invited to continue, I say: 'Jackie thinks about democracy'. If implored to clarify, I add: 'Jackie marries Ari, meets Maria, conquers the paparazzo, forgives Jack, embraces her fate -- which is to be an icon'. If asked once more to explain, I say: 'Jackie gives up her widowed sanctity, goes to a party, marries Ari, sleepwalks onto an imaginary island, and faces the fact that she incarnates the shards of JFK's shattered “new frontier” idealism'.

The opera's genesis: Houston Grand Opera commissioned Michael Daugherty to write an opera. Michael asked me to write the libretto. I proposed Jackie, for I was writing the book Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon and I felt that her story merited operatic treatment.

For the libretto -- a collage -- I sewed bits of Jackie lore together into symbolist crypto cartoonish (think Roy Lichtenstein) 'woman's picture', melodramatic yet oblique, in the style of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater. I aimed to compose a quilt of allusion and metaphor that would, without actually retelling the story of Jackie's life, remain faithful to its mysteriously resonant ephemera. For example: in the first act, Jackie meets Ari, who invites her to escape the happening and see a new art-house movie, I am Curious (Yellow). In real life, Jackie and Ari saw this film and outside the theatre (Jackie left ten minutes before the movie was over, without Ari), she allegedly judo-flipped a paparazzo, Mel Finkelstein. Or so Life magazine insinuated, alongside an alluring photo of Mrs. Onassis wearing a leather mini-skirt and walking away from prone Mel.

The stylistic model I kept in mind, while writing, was Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts, a bold earnest, and ethereal epitome of the anti-naturalistic performance text.

Our opera, not a summary of Jackie's life, captures two opposed moods: festivity and grief. Jackie's music has gravity and seriousness, but she finds herself incongruously place against 'pop' (up tempo) backgrounds. Michael's smart, catchy rhythms and melodies provide ironic annotation to a story that we think we already know.

Before I wrote the libretto, Michael composed 'Jackie’s Song', which set the tone for my conceptions: in this overture, a keening cello line (an emblem of Jackie’s melancholy reverie) gets interrupted by a bullet-simulating snare drum.

Act One's 'Happening' is modelled on Jackie's re-entry into society after her years of mourning: in real life, she held a supper at New York's 'Sign of the Dove'. Andy Warhol was among the guests: he brought Edie Sedgwick. Imagine Jackie hobnobbing with downtown artists: although she was an uptown aristocratic, she was also fond of decadent culture (Oscar Wilde, Baudelarie).

One guest at our fictional Happening is Liz Taylor, who, during the Kennedy administration, was America's other queen, the adulterous, voluptuous antithesis to the First Lady: (In Cleopatra, Liz played the Queen of the Nile as Jackie gone wild, a house-proud divinity.) Another guest is Andy Warhol, who was the first to transform Jackie's image into art. In real life, Jackie met Andy, and rode in a car with him to the Brooklyn Museum. On the way, the two of them discussed aesthetics. I always wonder whether Jackie secretly appreciated his silkscreen, 'Sixteen Jackies'.

The Happening takes place in a disco inferno: Jackie's descent, down the staircase, into the crowd, repeat Eurydice's journey into the underworld. The photographer is her unsolicited Orpheus, whose camera arrests her in Hades.

Maria Callas is Jackie's main link to opera: the former First Lady even attended one of Maria's New York Metropolitan Toscas, and the two women met backstage. We chose to make Callas a mezzo -- in part because (some fans argue) a movement to that repertoire might have saved her voice.

Tabloids hypothesised rendezvous between Mrs. Onassis and Callas. Maria once called Jackie 'the other side'. In our opera, Jackie sleepwalks to the other side -- an island as lonely as Ariadne's -- where she and Maria effect a transgressive reconciliation. (Maria's sister's name was Jackie.) Behind Ari's back, the rivals dream of eternal flames -- Norma's pyre; Arlington.

Every opera revives Orpheus, the art form's genesis. The crux of our opera is Jackie's backward glance (to 1963, to JFK): she, too, is an Orpheus. Obsessive recollection immobilises her. 'Look back' and 'don’t look back': Jackie is caught between these two contrary commands. If she looks back, she will be stuck in tragic repetitions. If she doesn't look back, she will remain amnesiac, cold and mute.

Throughout the opera, Jackie, utters fragments of the late President's speeches; when, after Maria smashes the camera, Jackie finds the magical power to communicate with the other side -- the afterworld -- and speak to Jack, she experiences transfiguration, for she is able to forgive him for his infidelities, much as the radiant Countess in The Marriage of Figaro forgave the Count. Our JFK is a plaintive revenant, an offstage voice incorporeal as Manrico in his tower in Il trovatore.

When Jackie, at the end of the opera, sings (optimistically, wistfully, delusionally), 'The new frontier is here', she remains in limbo between epochs. Was Jackie ever really 'here'? Is the new frontier here? Did it ever arrive? Might it still, like Elijah, come? What year is it? Are we living in 1968 or in 1986, or in a year marked by some other chance recombination of forms? Like Jackie, we want to overcome the vertigo of not knowing how to step forward - a limbo akin to delirium, an aesthetic thrill to be pursued, not avoided. An aesthete and dandy, Jackie wishes to retreat to Lotus-Eater's island, a dream yacht safe from the surge.

That island is performance. May operatic vocalism illuminate the underseam of American Fantasy.

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Michael Daugherty, Composer

Jackie O is a celebration of musical life in the late sixties, a pop opera that explores the interplay of musical idioms associated with ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture in America. To compose these various idioms into my own musical language, I draw on my background as a musician who came of age during the sixties, playing in a rock and jazz ensembles, performing in avant-garde improvisation groups, and paying my dues as a cocktail pianist in nightclubs, while also being trained as a composer of concert music in the symphonic tradition.

Over the past decade, I have composed music inspired by American popular icons, I am fascinated by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who draws us closer yet always eludes us. To capture the mystery, the tragedy, and the glamour of Jackie, the opera plays out the contradictions of a private Jackie in the public sphere and a public Jackie in the private sphere. Just as Jackie moves between different worlds, the music I composed for Jackie O mediates between the worlds of opera and American musical theatre. In the continual juxtaposition and intersection of different styles, rhythms, and melodies, I create a musical counterpoint that reflects the many facets - the many faces - of Jackie.

The overture, entitled ‘Jackie’s Song’, introduces Jackie as a melancholy figure. An elegiac theme is performed on solo cello, but interrupted by a riveting snare drum rim-shot. This leitmotiv, comprised of a tritone and a perfect fifth interval, is the compositional core for many of the melodies and harmonies heard throughout the opera. As the iconic image of Jackie is given voice, her theme is repeated and transformed with increasingly, elaborate orchestration. By the end of the opera, the song of Jackie has resonated in many registers, like a ricocheting bullet.

While the opera is composed in an arch form, beginning and ending with ‘Jackie’s Song’, interruption also forms an important part of the compositional structure. The telephone, interrupting the action at critical moments, is represented by the repetition of staccato cluster chords in the brass. I also use sudden shifts in timbre, abrupt tempo changes, and contrasts in consonance and dissonance to create a complex, multi-layered music that amplifies the multiple meanings in Wayne Koestenbaum’s libretto. At times the percussion also serves to disrupt the flow of song, with a ratchet for the ringing telephone, the sound of a siren, or the clicking camera and clicking heels of the tap-dancing paparazzo. All the musical numbers are rigorously structured, with a central motif or ‘hook’ that I transform through polyrhythmic counterpoint and unusual orchestrations.

Most important is the human voice, and each character in the opera has a unique sound world. Jackie’s arias, such as ‘Egyptian Time’, ‘Jackie’s Credo’, and ‘All His Bright Light’, are exotic, mournful and highly expressive. By contrast, the songs performed by Ari have a Vegas sound: ‘I am Curious (Yellow)’ and ‘Stiff Drink’ are reminiscent of Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr., members of the Sixties ‘Rat Pack’.

Maria gets the operatic treatment in arias such as ‘Addio del passato’ and ‘The Flame Duet’. Since Maria was losing her voice in the sixties, she sings melodramatically in the low range, and even speaks on occasion. Liz Taylor sings bluesy, cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof riffs, while Princess Grace croons á la Doris Day. Andy Warhol’s aria, like his are, is a series of inflected repetitions.

The chorus plays an important role throughout the opera. They comment on the action like a Greek chorus or the cast of a sixties television variety show such as Laugh In. In ‘1968’ and ‘Jackie’s Coming!’ the chorus performs whirlwind, snappy musical numbers punctuated by pulsating brassy rock rhythms. ‘Don’t Look Back’ features contrapuntal layering of voices, and in ‘1968’ (reprise)’ the chorus sings one last time in a minor key, as if drugged.

In Act Two, the chorus turns into a gaggle of playboys, singing an updated version of the traditional operatic drinking song: ‘Stiff Drink’ is a catalogue of cocktails from A to Z. They perform to a grooving bass line, crotale, funky guitar, Hammond organ, and flutter-tongued brass. In ‘All His Bright Light’, the playboys provide a contrast to Jackie’s lyrical meditations, as they chant like robots: ‘The essence of tragedy is repetition’.

The operatic plot further evolves through a series of dramatic duets, such as the exchange of credos between Jackie and Andy Warhol in the first act. here the soprano and high baritone sing melodies that are mirror images of each other, introduced separately and then combined. In the second act, ‘The Flame Duet’ features Jackie and Maria in a vocal tour de force for two sopranos, framed by the dissonant cluster chords previously associated with the ominously ringing telephone.

Finally, in ‘Jack’s Song’, Jackie sings a duet with the ghostly voice of JFK. This is the dramatic climax of the opera; Jack asks for forgiveness, as fragments of ‘Jackie’s Song’ are repeated in an ostinato bass line.

The opera concludes with a folk guitar strumming chords that are familiar yet foreboding, while Jackie and the chorus sing ‘The New Frontier is Here’. Bus is it really here? A downward glissando breaks the spell, and the solo cello returns one last time, plaintively and prophetically, in anticipation of another rim-shot which may, or may not, happen.

Jackie is a complex figure, continually reflecting on her conversion into an American icon. So also Jackie O reflects on the medium of opera itself, as a living form rediscovered and revived within an American context.

I composed the music for Jackie O from September 1995 to February 1997 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The work is scored for piccolo/flute, oboe/English horn, clarinet/bass clarinet, tenor/alto/soprano saxophone, bassoon/contrabassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone/euphonium, tuba, harp, acoustic guitar, synthesizer/piano, percussion and strings.

I would like to thank members of the Opera Studios at the Houston Grand Opera and the University of Michigan School of Music, and also sopranos Lisa Bielawa, Elizabeth Eshleman, Dora Ohrenstein, and Joan Morris. I also thank Yopie Prins, and composers William Bolcom and John Harbison for their encouragement, and am grateful for support from the Guggenheim Foundation and the University of Michigan for the completion of this project.

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