John DeMain Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Conductor John DeMain

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Grammy and Tony Award-winning conductor John DeMain (born January 11, 1944) is noted for his dynamic performances on concert and opera stages throughout the world. American composer Jake Heggie assessed the conductor’s broad appeal, saying, “There’s no one like John DeMain. In my opinion, he’s one of the top conductors in the world.” In January 2023, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Opera Association, the NOA’s highest award.

demain During his three decades in Madison as the music director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra, DeMain has consistently raised the quality of the orchestra by introducing blind auditions and continuously expanding the repertoire to encompass ever more challenging and virtuosic works, including the highly-acclaimed performances of the complete symphonies of Gustav Mahler. DeMain also oversaw the move into the world-class Overture Hall and expanded the subscription season to triple performances.

His active conducting schedule has taken him to the stages of the National Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the symphonies of Seattle, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Columbus, Houston, San Antonio, Long Beach, and Jacksonville, along with the Pacific Symphony, Boston Pops, Aspen Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Orchestra of Seville, the Leipzig MDR Sinfonieorchester, and Mexico’s Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional. [Photo at right shows the young DeMain (right) working with Leonard Bernstein.]

Prior engagements include visiting San Francisco Opera as guest conductor for General Director David Gockley’s farewell gala, Northwestern University to conduct Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, and the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center in D.C. to conduct Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars. In 2019, he conducted the world premiere of Tazewell Thompson’s Blue at the Glimmerglass Festival to critical acclaim. The New York Times wrote that he “drew a vibrant performance from an orchestra of nearly 50 players; the cast was superb.”

DeMain also serves as artistic director for Madison Opera. He has been a regular guest conductor with Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center, and has made appearances at the Teatre Liceu in Barcelona, New York City Opera, Michigan Opera Theatre, Los Angeles Opera, Seattle Opera, San Francisco Opera, Virginia Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Aspen Music Festival, Portland Opera, and Mexico’s National Opera.

During his distinguished 17-year tenure with Houston Grand Opera, DeMain led a history-making production of Porgy and Bess, winning a Grammy Award, Tony Award, and France’s Grand Prix du Disque for the RCA recording. In spring 2014, the San Francisco Opera released an HD DVD of their most recent production of Porgy and Bess, which he conducted.

DeMain began his career as a pianist and conductor in his native Youngstown, Ohio. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at The Juilliard School, and made a highly-acclaimed debut with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. DeMain was the second recipient of the Julius Rudel Award at New York City Opera, and was one of the first six conductors to receive the Exxon/National Endowment for the Arts Conductor Fellowship for his work with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.

DeMain holds honorary degrees from the University of Nebraska and Edgewood College, and he is a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. He resides in Madison and his daughter, Jennifer, is a UW–Madison graduate.

== From the Madison Symphony Orchestra website [slightly edited]
== Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. BD

At the end of 2007. John DeMain was conducting a production of Porgy and Bess with Lyric Opera of Chicago, directed by Francesca Zambello [shown at left]. The cast included Gordon Hawkins & Lester Lynch* (Porgy), Lester Lynch & Terry Cook* (Crown), Jonita Lattimore (Serena), Morenike Fadayomi & Lisa Daltrus* (Bess), and Jermaine Smith (Sportin' Life). There were 13 performances, and we agreed to meet toward the end of the run. He was very enthusiastic about the work, and even sang a few passages to illustrate his ideas.

Here is that conversation . . . . .

Bruce Duffie:   You conduct both symphony and opera. How do you divide your career between those two very different activities?

John DeMain:   That’s a great question. I started out at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in what I thought was going to be a symphonic track. Then this opportunity opened up at Houston Grand Opera, and then Porgy and Bess happened, which led to even more opportunity with Houston. So, my symphonic track that I thought I was on, or going to be on, got sidelined a bit. About 15 or 16 years ago, I really felt that I wanted to explore those symphonic composers. I wanted very much to do Mahler. To me, Mahler is the great opera composer who wrote his operas via the symphonic medium. Since I was then in my mid-40s, I realized that you can’t start at the New York Philharmonic. You have to go someplace where you have something to offer, and they have something to gain. It was a fluke that the Madison Symphony and Madison Opera became available. What helped me be able to do the simultaneous track is that it was one of the few places in the country at the time where they had this thing called Madison Civic Music, which was an umbrella organization that both the symphony and the opera were part of. In this country, we tend to stereo-type. He’s an opera conductor, or he’s a symphony conductor. As an opera conductor, I’ve watched people who have no theater experience try to go into a pit and conduct opera. No matter how fine they are as a symphony conductor, oftentimes it can be a very unhappy experience because they just don’t know the stage, and vice versa. Someone who’s only been working in the theater doesn’t bring the repertoire experience. There is a different way of conducting when one is working with a symphony. It’s subtle, but there are differences.

BD:   What does it take to be a symphony conductor, and what does it take to be an opera conductor?

DeMain:   You have to be more absolute as a symphony conductor. Opera’s more collaborative, because you’re limited or expanded by the abilities of the singers on stage. I always use this example... maybe I would like to do Dove sono [aria from Marriage of Figaro] really slowly, but if the singer doesn’t have the breath to do that, who’s winning? They’re going to be unhappy, and they’re not going to sing well. Then, the audience is going to hear a discrepancy between the pit and the stage, and nobody’s going to win. When you think of the great opera conductors, like Carlos Kleiber, and Solti, and people like that, they actually understood the theater. First of all, you have to be consistent in your interpretation, because people are acting against your choices. Also, you have to be willing to accommodate the stage.

BD:   Are they acting against your choices, or with your choices?

DeMain:   [Laughs] That depends on the stage director. If you take one tempo which a person uses to cross the room, and the next night you go faster, suddenly the person has to leap across the room. That’s not what opera’s all about. It’s theater, and you have to be consistent.

BD:   Is it more than just doing a big concerto every night?

DeMain:   That’s where the things are very similar. Today, if we hire Garrick Ohlsson to come and play the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto, it’s not about how I feel about this work. We have hired him to hear him play it, and I’ve got to be a good accompanist, and be on the same wavelength, because he’s not interested in redoing how he thinks about the work. We’ve hired him because he’s made a worldwide reputation on it, so in that sense, you’re an accompanist. To be specifically technical, let me tell you about something I learned the hard way. Years ago, when I was just starting to do this, and I did my first Emperor Concerto [Beethoven Piano Concerto #5]. You have to go ‘bam’ [bangs his fist on the table], and those chords just come out of the air. Well, I kept missing them with the orchestra. I wasn’t with the pianist. The reason was because I was giving a preparation to come in, and hesitating a split second because singers are always a little late with the orchestra due to the fact that they’re so far away up on that stage. I was conducting like I was doing opera, and I realized you can’t do that with a soloist right there at the keyboard. You’ve just got to go ‘bam’ or it won’t be together. That’s a simple technical lesson, but it’s a real example between putting on your symphony hat and putting on your opera hat. Now I can do that. I’m very aware of it, so I do it automatically, but I’m also very aware that I have to be in the appropriate mode. You don’t ask the first violin section how they feel about a certain moment, but the stage director’s asking the singer, and the singer’s asking if they can take a little time here to emote. You have to tell the string section you want them to take time there. The orchestra expects the symphony conductor to give his vision of the work, period, and in opera it’s more collaborative. What makes a great opera orchestra is that sense of the stage. Years ago, I would go to Aspen every summer to do the opera. Sometimes the orchestra were still teenagers. They were very talented, but it would be their first opera. I remember clearly doing Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts. On the surface it is simple, but it’s not simple. The orchestra could play it, but every time there was accelerando or a ritenuto, they weren’t together. Finally I realized that they didn’t know they were supposed to listen to the stage.

BD:   They were just watching you?

DeMain:   They were just watching me, but that’s a relative situation. Good orchestral playing is listening to each other, because all music is ensemble-making as well as watching the conductor. But in the case of opera, it’s never taking your ear off the stage. When you see a ritard, you know that the singer’s going to slow down, so you will understand what I am doing, because we’re all listening in relationship to what the singer is doing. We’re accompanying them at that moment. When I explained this to the young orchestra, not only did it transform them like a bolt of lightning into an opera orchestra, I was exactly right. They didn’t know they were supposed to listen to the stage. When I do a Puccini opera in Houston, if the tenor isn’t off the high note when I bring my baton down, the symphony won’t go with me! That’s how much they listen to the stage. This orchestra of the Lyric Opera is the same way. Many of the players are actually underneath the stage, but they see my face, and in my gestures they understand the slightest things that are going on. They know the relationship is happening because of what’s going on up there. They have a sixth sense about it. So in Aspen, not only did it change the way those kids played, but some of them came up to me and said that playing opera was really fun. The conductor has to use all of himself. You can’t just get the tempo for the first movement and figure it’s not going to change, and the players can’t put their heads down and just play. One of the singers might go a little ahead, or a little behind, and I have to wait. Also, you’re the psychological underpinnings of the opera. When the orchestra realizes that they are affecting the audience’s emotion because they’re the subtext of what that singer is singing on stage, you start having that relationship between singer and orchestra, and this is a very involving thing for the orchestra. It’s also very fulfilling. People who play opera are passionate about it, because they use themselves in a way that they don’t in a symphony.

BD:   I’m just surprised that anyone who waves the stick would be willing to give up any control. You’re waiting for the singers, of course, but you’re relying on the orchestra to also listen.

DeMain:   [Emphatically] All music is listening! When you conduct a symphony, they have to listen to each other, or it’s not going to be together. In Baltimore we had to put in risers, because no matter how fantastic the conductor was, the orchestra couldn’t hear each other on the stage, so they couldn’t play together. Years ago in Houston, before they built the new theater, they had a narrow pit. There are different kinds of seating for an opera orchestra. There’s the ‘continental seating’, with the winds and brass in the middle and the strings wrapped all around, and then there’s the ‘theater seating’, where you put all the strings on the left and all the winds and brass on the right. We had to basically do that in the old theater in Houston, and invariably what would happen is string players come in late to your beat because of the way the bow goes on the string, and wind players are right on top of the beat. So they wouldn’t be together, and the conductor would have to ask the winds to play just a little later to the beat, and the strings to play just a little earlier to the beat. When they sit symphonically in the pit, where you have the winds in front of you and the strings wrapped around, your flute player, instead of being on one side and your first violinist on the other, they’re within relative proximity to each other. So when they’re playing the same part, that problem begins to disappear entirely. I’m listening, but if none of them are listening, then they’re not going to understand what that ritard is. So it’s not giving up power, it’s increasing power because suddenly they know what you’re doing, and they follow you, as opposed to just thinking that they’re following you.

BD:   Do you also expect the opera orchestra to know a little bit of the story on stage, so they understand when someone’s getting skewered, or when someone is singing about blissful happiness?

DeMain:   Another great question. No, but I do when it’s a young orchestra. I tend to say she’s getting strangled here, but we don’t have the luxury of time, and you’re not supposed to talk with an orchestra. You’re supposed to show with your stick. The words that come out of your mouth should not be wallowing, but succinct, fast, and on with it, but every now and then, I may want to impart something that was very dear to me. I have this big admiration for Carlos Kleiber. [Laughs] Who doesn’t? He’s a very special legend. I was conducting at Chautauqua in upstate New York in the summer, and the principal cellist was Jascha Silberstein from the Met Orchestra. He had a house up there, and so he used to play in the orchestra in the summer. I mentioned that Kleiber had been at the Met that year doing Rosenkavalier. Silberstein told me that when Octavian is singing, Kleiber said they should play differently than when the Marschallin is singing. Octavian as a teenager is rambunctious and unsettled, while the Marschallin is in her later years, more wistful and looking back.

BD:   Of course Kleiber understood this from his father.

DeMain:   Right, and what he was asking for was color. Silberstein said it changed the way they played the piece. It was like saying the sky is blue. Something that simple in the music is obvious, and sometimes it isn’t. But I do think that every now and then, it helps if the orchestra has a psychological awareness of what’s going on. A lot of these orchestras, like those at the level of the Chicago Lyric, do a lot of homework. They get the librettos. They read. They have a sense of the work. I’ve noticed that.

BD:   With something like Traviata or Butterfly that they played over and over again, they would know. But you’ve done quite a number of world premieres and American premieres. Do you try to impart a little bit more of the story, and a little bit more of the psychology with those, or do you even have time when you’re trying to get these new notes into their fingers?

DeMain:   If it’s Nixon in China [by John Adams] with all this minimalist repetition, I don’t think it’s going to make any difference, except in the larger sense. “Nixon just got off the plane,” or, “This is the scene where he is meeting Chairman Mao.” There’s a lot of tension in that scene. But when you’re doing more of the through-composed leitmotif operas, where it’s helpful to know a little bit more about what’s going on so that they have an understanding of what they’re trying to do, you can tell it with the music. Sometimes you don’t even have to tell them the story, but you can just say that there’s an icy tension in the air between the husband and wife over what’s going on between the daughter and her boyfriend. They can just take that and give you a color without having to know everything. So I pick and choose.

BD:   Now, dangerous question. Are there times when you wish you could impart this same kind of idea to the stage director?

DeMain:   Yes, a dangerous question.

BD: You need not mention specific names.

DeMain:   I will say this. Years ago, I was doing a Tosca with a European stage director who was younger. He had been a Ponnelle assistant, and was now getting a chance to do his own stuff. It was a relatively traditional production, and I remember that the music of the Sacristan [sings the phrases] all of a sudden pulls back. Why does it pull back? Because he has a hard time going up the steps of the scaffolding. It’s part of the comedy. [With a wink] I was very evil one day. I was looking at the stage rehearsal with piano, and I asked why Puccini was slowing down there. We’ve been in this odd tempo in two, and all of a sudden the tempo pulls back, and it accents. It’s kind of awkward and jerky. The director asked what I meant, and I said that Puccini didn’t just do that for no reason. He did it because his mind’s eye saw something happening on the stage. The Sacristan is old, and has a hard time going up the steps. It’s just to provoke a little comedy, and I said, “I’m not telling you that you have to do it, but it’d be nice if you did something so that the stage and the pit would be connected.” The newer of directors are getting more ‘Euro-trash’, and more affected by what’s going on in the industry, but most of the directors that I worked with hear the music. This is unlike a lot of what’s going on in Europe where they don’t care as much. The great opera directors hear the music, and know that there’s more than one way to do something.

BD:   Do you sometimes want to shove the score in their face, rather than just the libretto?
blakemore

DeMain:   Oh, yes. But it’s amazing to me. I did Tosca in Australia with one of the great Broadway directors, Michael Blakemore [shown at right]. He did not read a note of music, but he has done some of the great musicals on Broadway. This was one of his very rare forays into doing opera, and he was working exclusively from a literal translation of the Italian. But he heard the psychology in every bar of that score, and it was one of the best Toscas I ever did in my life because he heard it, and he understood it. If you think it’s just an accompaniment, and it doesn’t mean anything, you could tell the story the way you want. That is if you don’t hear the slight changes, the pullbacks, the slowing down, etc. Even in musical comedy, which was like a poor man’s opera, in the ’40s and ’50s, Rodgers and Hammerstein would write a little underscoring, and the actors were supposed to kiss on a certain chord, etc. They were doing the same thing — taking the little themes, and building up to this little emotional thing because they were working on your emotions. It’s a little bit more simplistic than opera, where it does get a little bit more involved, but it was the same thing. If you understand that, you can direct music theater, but if you don’t, you won’t have a success. I don’t like the idea when a director doesn’t use the score. The best opera is when everybody’s on the same page, and knows what the essential scene is about, and what the score is saying underneath. This does not mean you have to follow the stage directions literally, but that you know they’re there for a purpose, and if you don’t do it, do something else that still illustrates that purpose. This Porgy and Bess has very new storytelling in it. It’s very interesting, and I think Francesca has really done a remarkable job. The public has seen one version of Porgy. Way back in 1976, we did it with what they had seen since the 1950s. We did our thing, and Jack O’Brien staged it at Houston Grand Opera. The world saw that for about 25 years, and all the stagings were sort of based on that because it was such a moving and incredible event. I give Francesca a lot of credit that she grew up with that, and she came up with her own vocabulary, which really was very, very different.

BD:   Is this going to be the Porgy for the next 25 years?

DeMain:   Well, part of the problem is that here is a big production that can play in a big house. In this economy, we’re not going to build a big production every five minutes. So this one is going to make the rounds for a while. The production itself has been well received, so if the companies do good business and they want to bring it back, they’re probably going to bring back this production. They’re going to milk it dry. But the difference is now that Porgy is in the opera houses and not relying upon a tour. Don’t forget when we did it in ’76, we toured to the opera houses because we put an African American chorus together in New York. We were auditioning all over the country, but the individual cities couldn’t put together a chorus. Some towns didn’t have that kind of population, and while other towns did, they wouldn’t have as many classically trained singers as we needed. So we toured, but now we’re not touring anymore. The individual companies are mounting Porgy, and they’re putting together their choruses whatever way they can. That also means there are more physical productions out there, so I don’t think we’ll get just this production for the next 25 years.

BD:   Maybe just this idea, or ideas derived from this idea?

DeMain:   This will influence something. In Glyndebourne, Trevor Nunn [shown below] got Porgy off his knees and put him on a crutch. Whether it’s a stick crutch or a real crutch, Porgy’s on a crutch now, and nobody wants to go back on their knees. Donnie Ray Albert, who was my Porgy in ’76, has knee problems to this day, and he wore knee pads. When they got off the goat cart, they crawled on the stage on their knees, and it took a terrible physical toll. It says something different now, because some of these guys doing Porgy today, like Gordon [Hawkins] and Lester [Lynch] (who shared the role in Chicago), are big and strong. They’re crippled, but they get around. It allows for them to have a more interesting reaction between Porgy and Bess. The triumvirate makes that relationship between good and evil that Bess has to struggle with. Here’s Crown, the strapping, carnal, sexual pull over here, and there’s Porgy who’s been cut down to his waist. It’s makes for more of a spiritual image. Therefore, the struggle that Bess has is greater between the corporal and the spiritual with two strapping guys. One doesn’t walk so well, and the other one drinks too much, but the audience in our day and age likes having Porgy not in that cart. They like having him up. I’ve asked people how they feel about it, and everybody I’ve talked to tells me they like that. So Trevor set that in motion.

Sir Trevor Robert Nunn CBE (born 14 January 1940) is an English theatre director. He has been the artistic director for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and, currently, the Theatre Royal Haymarket. He has directed dramas for the stage, like Macbeth, as well as opera and musicals, such as Cats (1981) and Les Misérables (1985).

Nunn has been nominated for the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical, the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director, and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Musical, winning Tonys for Cats, Les Misérables, and Nicholas Nickleby and the Olivier Awards for productions of Summerfolk, The Merchant of Venice, Troilus and Cressida, and Nicholas Nickleby. In 2008 The Telegraph named him among the most influential people in British culture. He has also directed works for film and television.

In 2014, Nunn told The Telegraph that Shakespeare was his religion. "Shakespeare has more wisdom and insight about our lives, about how to live and how not to live, how to forgive and how to understand our fellow creatures, than any religious tract. One hundred times more than the Bible. I'm sorry to say that. But over and over again in the plays there is an understanding of the human condition that doesn't exist in religious books."

BD: Do you think George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward like it?

DeMain: I think they would be so happy that their piece is getting done so much. I know how writers are, and most composers like the idea that a piece has a life of its own. I don’t tamper with the score. I try to come as close to doing what he wanted that I possibly can. I don’t believe there should be improvisation, because you don’t improvise in Rhapsody in Blue, or in American in Paris. You sometimes play with a little bit more of a jazzy style, but you don’t improvise. There is no improvisation in Porgy except for one drum section in A Woman is a Sometime Thing, where he writes ‘ad lib’. I think it’s a kind of classical-jazz. It’s a composed-jazz that should be played stylishly, but it’d be wrong to improvise. When Lenny Bernstein recorded Rhapsody in Blue, there was a section he syncopated on the recording. Gershwin was a man of jazz, and he knew how to write syncopations. He wrote what he wanted. It’s not like he did some kind of shorthand and you were supposed to know what to do. So that was Lenny recomposing, which he always did. He could get away with it because the personality was so big, but I don’t think you should do that with Porgy. I once heard Wynton Marsalis in a jazz club at two o’clock in the morning in Rio de Janeiro. He did the hottest, wildest, most fabulous Summertime I ever heard in my life, but that’s where that belongs. Here we’ve got a beautiful, light lyric soprano singing Clara in a much more classic contour. Every singer on that stage could embellish, and we could do all kinds of things. We’re modern day musicians, but I don’t think that’s what’s required.

* * * * *

BD:   We’re talking about something that premiered in 1935, and yet it’s still almost modern to us today. Is Porgy and Bess a middle ground between opera and musical comedy?

DeMain:   Yes. He was writing a folk opera. He was writing an opera, but he wanted to write it in a way that he thought people would embrace it. Plus, he wanted it to be done in a Broadway house rather than an opera house. That’s where it started, but it is definitely an opera. It’s interesting... we’ve struggled with it because the source materials are actually leitmotifs like any Wagnerian opera. The moment the curtain goes up, there’s not a bar in the piece — except maybe in the pop tunes like I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’ — that does not have leitmotif in it. It’s very sophisticatedly composed from that point of view, but because the principal arias sound so Broadway-ish, it’s created this struggle as to whether it’s a musical or an opera.

[The photo at left shows a curtain call with Gershwin (center), and director Rouben Mamoulian (in glasses).]

BD:   Lately we’ve started to bring musicals into the opera house. Did Porgy have to wait a little bit until we got more used to having musicals and operettas in the opera house?

DeMain:   Part of it is its history. Don’t forget, it was a relative success. Actually, for what it was, it was a success, but it wasn’t something that ran for four years on Broadway.

BD:   It wasn’t a smash.

DeMain:   It wasn’t a smash, but on the other hand, there had never been anything quite like that on Broadway. I’ve been reading recently that we should rethink about the fact that it was not a failure. However, the next time out they took away all the sung recits [recitatives are sung, rather than spoken as dialogue], and they also did that in the movie. So then you just had the principal songs, and they tried to make a musical out of it in that sense. So, the opera houses wouldn’t be attracted to it in that way. I remember that 1950s production that Leontyne Price did. I didn’t see her, but I remember seeing the remnants of that production in the ’60s at the New York City Center, which is where the New York City Opera was before it moved to Lincoln Center, and Porgy already had its reputation as the Great American Opera.

BD:   Is it?

DeMain:   I think there’s some competition now with some of the pieces that have been written recently, but it’s unique in history, and I think it’s a great, great American work. It deserved being called the Great American Opera for a long time. I don’t think anything quite came up to it in terms of what it was trying to do. It’s interesting that when the premiere was done in 1935, the people working on the production were all Russian emigrates. There was Rouben Mamoulian [shown above, and who had previously directed the Broadway productions of Heyward’s play Porgy], and Alexander Smallens.

Alexander Smallens (January 1, 1889 – November 24, 1972) was a Russian-born American conductor and music director.

Smallens was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and emigrated to the United States as a child, becoming an American citizen in 1919. He studied at the New York Institute of Musical Art until 1909, when he traveled to France to study at the Conservatoire de Paris.

Returning to the United States, Smallens was a conductor or music director at several American music organizations including the Boston Opera Company (1911–1914), the Anna Pavlova Ballet Company (1917–1919), the Chicago Opera Company (1919–1923), the Philadelphia Civic Opera Company (1924–1930), the Philadelphia Orchestra (1928–1934) and the Radio City Music Hall (1947–1950).

In addition, Smallens worked briefly on Broadway, conducting the premieres of Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts in 1934 and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess the next year. (Both works were operas, not the musicals normally expected in Broadway theaters.) Smallens also conducted the Porgy and Bess revivals on Broadway in 1942 and 1953, as well as the famous 1952 world tour of the work, which culminated in that 1953 Broadway production.

Smallens also conducted orchestras for music as part of several documentary films in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He retired from music in 1958 and moved to Sicily. In 1972, He died in Tucson, Arizona and is buried there.

At left: Original photograph of Smallens (left) with George Manzau (orchestra supervisor of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra), mounted on cardboard. Above it, "An Herrn Manzau zur Erinnerung an "Porgy and Bess" in Hamburg 3.12.56, Alexander Smallens" ["To Mr. Manzau in memory of "Porgy and Bess" in Hamburg 3.12.56, Alexander Smallens."]

[DeMain continues] Gershwin himself was a Russian Jew, and apparently the news of this piece traveled back to Russia immediately. When the Russians heard this piece for the first time [program shown below], the reaction of people like Shostakovich and Prokofiev was that it’s the American Boris Godunov. They didn’t have a problem of trying to figure out whether it was an opera or musical, because they understood that taking American source material and writing the opera was the same thing that Mussorgsky had done, taking folk themes and creating an opera out of it. So they got it right away, but Americans had more of a struggle.

But there’s no question that the piece was in danger in the ’50s, which would only be 15 years after it opened. The rights to do the piece were very, very strictly controlled by the Gershwins, and there was only one person who was directing it, Robert Breen. Later Ella Gerber took it over [and, according to David Gockley, had her own musical comedy version of the piece]. In all these productions around the world, whether it was in a roadhouse or wherever it was playing, it didn’t necessarily need to be produced by an opera company, because most opera companies didn’t have all those black singers available to them. So it always took a special creation to do the work, and there was the admonition that in all stage productions, the cast had to be all black. What would happen is you’d put together a company, and you’d tour, and you’d play these big venues. But the world was seeing only one interpretation. The significance of the Houston version in ’76 was to get it away from that one interpretation and open it up. This eventually became a white Jewish woman’s impression of the black experience in the ’50s. People like Sidney Poitier were having trouble that it was an opera about an impoverished group of people, and would be the first thing that Russia was going to see on the stage representing the African American community. He didn’t like that. The director at the time really did not understand the black experience. She was dealing more with the superficial music of the show, and turning it into more of a Broadway show in the way it was staged. I once saw a piano vocal score from that production, and the one thing that stood out in my mind was that they gave the second verse of A Woman is a Sometime Thing to Sportin’ Life. [The whole number is supposed to be sung by Jake.] That song became a production number, but that’s not what it’s about. A young couple, Jake and Clara, have just had a child, and we’ve got one number to meet them and see their relationship, because they’re going to get killed by the end of the opera. We have to feel something for them, so we have to quickly get to know them. So that’s the big arch that we tried to put back into Porgy when we did it as an opera. It doesn’t stop for A Woman is a Sometime Thing. It doesn’t stop for I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’. It’s all part of the story. You’ve got to go back to the play, which was laced with spirituals, read that story, and then stage it, because on the surface, the spirituals which were rewritten by Ira and George in the ’30s, sound like Busby Berkeley production numbers out of film music of the time. We know that theater composers always wrote in the style of the decade that they were in. [Pauses a moment, then continues with the history of another music theater work.] Years ago at Houston, we did a production of Showboat, and that’s when John McGlinn called me up. It was before he made the recording, and said he could get all the original 1927 arrangements. I asked what he meant, and he said that when the show was redone in the ’40s for Carol Bruce, the keys were changed. Robert Russell Bennett did new orchestrations for Old Man River, and they didn’t sound like the 1927 version. The music library just put them all together and sent it out as a rental. So, people were playing from ’45 and ’27 at the same time. What blew me away was Robert Russell Bennett in the ’20s and in the ’40s. Later he was in the ’50s and ’60s. The arranger who creates that Broadway sound changes each decade. So here was this 1940s Old Man River, but I feel the 1927 version is so much better. It is dignified and simple, and the ’40s is soupy. With Gershwin, the temptation is to make Porgy into a Broadway piece. But when you go back to the play, and see what it replaces, and see the line of the story, that’s what we did in ’76, and suddenly it took on operatic proportions. We heard 500 singers in New York, and the older cast members would come up to the table, and they would ask if ‘that woman’ [Gerber] was directing. We’d say, no, we have a new director, and then they’d say all right, they’ll sing. That’s how much hostility had developed towards the piece, because they didn’t feel that they were being honest about their experience. We hired Jack O’Brien, and he wanted to give it back to the people it was written for. Then we brought in Mabel Robinson, who was a black modern dance choreographer. The young choristers who grew up in the North don’t know what that Pentecostal experience is in the South. A lot of them grew up Catholic, and they needed to know what shouting meant, and what it meant when it says Serena starts to shout. So, by having this black choreographer, we were able to get that culture correct. When Todd Duncan, the original Porgy, saw the ’76 production at the Wolf Trap opening night, he came up on stage, and the first words out of his mouth were, “It’s so black!” Then I knew we’d achieved something, because then the singers would begin to reclaim this piece for themselves and love it, and indeed be proud of it.

BD:   Now, with all your immense experience with it, should they always ask you to conduct?

DeMain:   No. Heavens no! I’m very grateful that I don’t always conduct. A lot of times they wish I would do this production over and over again, because I know what Francesca’s doing. I can make the stage and the pit have the same purpose. The danger of switching conductors in a show that has a lot of performances is that they will come in with a very, very different view, and that could be a bit of a struggle with the stage director. It was very different, but I had big admiration for some of the things that Simon Rattle did. I’ve probably done over 350 performances so far, and I’m grateful at this point to have gaps.

BD:   How do you keep performance number 320, and 330, and 340 fresh each night?

DeMain:   I try to tell myself that I should conduct like my life depends upon it. For example, the Chicago Lyric orchestra works hard, and they’re in there every night this week. They play with a fierce commitment, so if they’re going to come in and play with that kind of commitment, I’m not going to phone it in. Besides, the piece is such a big choral work. It’s so emotional that it is very hard to conduct. It’s very, very tiring because it’s so big. When you do Barber of Seville, it’s all off-the-string playing [short notes, with the bow picked up between them]. It’s all in the wrist for those players. But every number in Porgy is a very big piece.

BD:   On Sunday morning do you feel you should go to a revival service?

DeMain:   Actually, I’ve started hiring my gospel choir in Madison to sing with me every year because I’ve enjoyed them so much, but it’s like anything... you don’t want to do it every single night. I did 56 performances of Porgy in seven weeks the year that it opened in New York, plus the whole summer before where I probably did another 48. So, it was 100 performances before you even knew it, and that was hard.

BD:   Can I would assume that you would tell your agent not to find more performances of it for at least five years?

DeMain:   I would tell my agent I don’t want to do a tour, and I don’t want to do them back-to-back. Here in Chicago it’s fabulous, with days off in between. [The performances were November 18, 21, 23, 26, 29, and December 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 19. Kelly Kuo conducted on Dec 5 and 6.] It’s really treating the work like an opera, and giving the principals and the chorus rest. It’s a huge chorus-sing, and they’re fresher when they have a little time off.

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BD:   Coming around to a little different part of your career, how do you decide which offers you will accept, and which offers you’ll decline?

DeMain:   I like to think that I can conduct a telephone book. [Both laugh] I have a big spectrum and repertoire, but one thing I would avoid conducting is Baroque opera.

BD:   No Handel for you?

DeMain:   No Handel for me. I like to go hear Handel operas. I enjoy them immensely, but the scholarship has developed with the ‘period instruments’, and that whole re-look at the Baroque style, and that is not something that I have. With the whole business of bow strokes, and the dynamics, the big symphony orchestras are playing less and less of that period, because there are ensembles devoted to that. I could conduct a Handel opera just fine in terms of energy and tempo and all of that, as long as we believe this to be the authentic way, we should let the experts do it. In my role as Artistic Director, if I’m going to produce a Baroque opera, I would hire a guest to do it, because there are some people out there who are just terrific at it.
demain

BD:   Then let’s move over to new operas. When you get a new score and you’re committed to do it, how do you know if it’s going to be either a smash or a bomb? Can you even know that before you produce it?

DeMain:   No, I don’t think you do know. You try to go with a composer who has some track record. At Houston Grand Opera, over the years Carlisle Floyd was in residence we workshopped his pieces to try to get rid of the over-writing that he would tend to do. When he would write a piece for the first time, he would tend to overwrite in order to get all that he wanted to say out of it. The advantage of a workshop is that we’d do it, and we’d have this secret agenda that we needed to have him get rid of 35 pages in the score, because they were really not crucial to the opera. One time after the workshop, I asked him out for a drink. He said, “Save your money. The 35 pages are already in the waste basket.” [Both laugh] When you think about the 18th and 19th centuries, when those pieces opened they had a life. They went to Paris, and to Vienna, and to Prague...

BD:   ...and each time, they were tampered with?

DeMain:   Yes, each time they were tampered with. Now, it costs a fortune. The public is resistant, so the guy or gal gets one shot at it. John Adams never revised a note of Nixon in China, but it got a lot of performances. On the other hand, Ricky Ian Gordon has been tampering with Grapes of Wrath right from the beginning, two years ago when it first opened. He’s been making some adjustments because it’s a very, very big sprawling piece. It tends to be how he writes. I remember doing Sir Michael Tippett’s last opera called New Year at Houston Grand Opera [produced by Peter Hall]. We got the published score in its final edition six months in advance, and there was not one wrong note in the orchestra. Those parts had been proofread within an inch of their life, nor was there any interest on Sir Michael’s part to see what worked and didn’t work. This work was his vision, his opera with his own libretto, so he just wanted to put it on. They came to the first rehearsal and explained what a few things meant in the score. They then came to the final dress rehearsal, patted themselves on the back, had a glass of champagne, and that was it.

BD:   Was that 70 years of experience in the theater? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interviews with Sir David Willcocks, and Kirke Mechem.]

DeMain:   No, I think it’s the way he wrote. Carlisle is a man of the theater, and he needs a theatrical environment to edit. Beethoven did a lot of work on Fidelio. Look how short the Puccini output was, because he reworked those pieces to try to get them just right. Other people just work more abstractly.

BD:   Do you have some advice for young composers who want to write opera these days?

DeMain:   The first thing is learn. Also, try to figure out how to get yourself a good libretto, so that it brings out the best in your musical writing. Don’t be so arrogant to think that you have to write the libretto yourself... although Carlisle, who was an English major, wrote his own libretti. But finding that marriage is the most difficult thing. A libretto is very different than a play. It’s even hard for us, when we’re reading a libretto, to be able to judge it. We can’t view it the same way we can read a play because it has to work differently. It’s very mercurial. I once said to Tommy Tune, after he had that string of hits quite a few years ago, “You’ve had three hits in a row, so you figured out what creates a hit Broadway musical?” He replied, “Not at all. The parts of Nine that I thought were a bore, the audience loved; and the parts that I loved, the audience just sat on their hands.” He thought it was a crap shoot. Young composers really need to hang out in the opera house. One of the things that hurt the creation of new operas for a long time in the 20th century was composers who became virtuosic with the writing for the orchestra. The orchestra was exploding in the pit, and the singers on stage were singing obbligatos while the pit was going wild. That’s not what turned people on to opera. What turned people on to opera was the Olympics of singing, the pyrotechnics that these singers had. That goes all the way back to the fiery coloratura of the Handel operas, and even before. That’s why people liked Italian operas so much, because it was all about the voice. Even when you go hear Strauss — and we joke about passages in Arabella and Rosenkavalier that are long-winded — but there are flights of lyricism. When you get Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos, you are just completely up there where you should be. The orchestra’s not on the stage, it’s in the pit, and while it can play fabulously in Wagner, the singing is interesting. But if you want to make the singing uninteresting and only make the orchestra interesting, don’t write an opera.

BD:   Despite all of this, are you optimistic about the future of opera?

DeMain:   Oh, I think we’ve been getting some very good ones right now. John Adams has done a good job. Ricky Ian Gordon’s doing a good job. In the last 20 years we’ve been seeing an effort to do that. Jake Heggie is very virtuosic with the singers. He gets it. He worked in the marketing department of San Francisco Opera, and was writing songs. Patrick Summers [then principal guest conductor at SFO, and later Artistic and Music Director of the Houston Grand Opera] heard them and told Lotfi [Mansouri, then General Director] to commission him. Then he wrote Dead Man Walking. The orchestra’s busy, but the stage is busier. The interest has to be on the voice in opera. Then you’ll have a greater chance at having a success.

BD:   Thank you for bringing all of your experience to opera houses all around, and thank you for coming to Chicago. I hope you’ll come back.

DeMain:   Thank you. It’s a thrill to be here.

See my interviews with Spiro Malas, Anna Moffo, Julian Patrick, Robert Orth, Barry McCauley, and William Eichorn

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on December 17, 2007. This transcription was made in 2023, and posted on this website at that time.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here. To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago. You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.