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| George Maurer by John Whiting |
On Monday, July 23, German poet Rainer Maria
Rilke (1875-1926) and American playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) will
meet on stage at St.
Joan of Arc Church in Minneapolis. They’ll talk about poetry
and love, desire and the questions we all ask as we go through life. We in the
audience will witness their conversation, born in the imaginations of
composer/pianist George Maurer and theater director Jef
Hall-Flavin, sung and acted by Dieter Bierbrauer and Jared Oxborough.
Maurer’s new theatrical production, “Autumn Song,” has its world
premiere at St. Joan of Arc, after which (in September) it travels to the Tennessee Williams
Theater Festival in Provincetown, Massachusetts. For those who
mostly know Maurer from his festive, jovial Christmas shows, “Autumn Song” will
come as a surprise. For Maurer, this project is personal, emotional, and
spiritual. He calls it “my Sistine Chapel … a serious work that will probably
take my lifetime to build. Even as I add to it and touch it up, it continues to
transform.”
I spoke with Maurer by phone earlier this week.
PLE: When
did you first get interested in Rilke, and why?
George
Maurer: When I was 18 and a college
freshman, starting to ask those big questions: What am I doing here? What am I
supposed to do? Who am I supposed to be? I was going for my degree in music
composition at St.
John’s University in Collegeville. My German professor handed
me a copy of “Letters to a Young Poet.” I’ve been noticing Rilke ever since.
Why does
Rilke remain important to you?
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| Rainer Maria Rilke |
In 2003,
right after the ending of a 10-year relationship, I picked Rilke back up with
some earnestness. Again, I was looking for answers. I was also looking to do
the intuitive artist’s thing and create something out of chaos. Rilke seemed to
be the sealant that held all of that together. It made sense.
I was
going to have the same monk professor who gave me the “Letters” book – Mark
Thamert, OSB – read a particular Rilke poem I liked. I planned to record it,
then try and create some piano stuff underneath it, to accompany it. In the
course of reading the poem I wanted him to read, he asked, “Have you heard this
other poem?” He was referring to Rilke’s “Liebes-Lied” – “Love Song.” It had
this beautiful imagery about the spheres of a relationship. “How can I do my
work without thinking of you too much?” That sort of thing. “How do I love you
without possessing you? How can you leave me alone so I can get my work done?”
The great image is – we’re like two strings on a fiddle. Two notes being drawn
by one bow. “What fiddler holds us in his hands?” Rilke loved the unanswered
questions. A lot his poems – the ones I’ve set to music – include unanswered
questions.
What
happened next was I started working on “Stations of the Heart,” a song cycle
commissioned by Nautilus Music-Theater that I wrote with
librettist Jim Payne. I was setting rhyming, metered verses to the AABA song
form when I started to wonder, “Maybe there’s a way to manipulate translations
of Rilke to fit this form.” I found Stephen Mitchell’s translations, and the
Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy translations, and started thinking, “Let me see
if I can manipulate Rilke into the AABA form.” That’s where the song “Autumn
Day” came from. It fit into a nice gospel music package. I recorded it in 2003,
it became a favorite, and it emboldened me to do more.
I started
researching Rilke, reading biographies, and discovering more about what he was
about and what was important to him. I began picking certain poems to set to
music. Over the years, I have finished 13. I made a pilgrimage to Prague
[Rilke’s birthplace] in 2006 and wrote “The Panther” there, in a little beatnik
backpacker’s teashop in the heart of old Prague. Later, when I went back, I
found a painting of a panther on the wall over the spot where I had written the
song. [That seemed like] a sign.
I was
gradually going over more complicated stuff by Rilke. Around 2007 I started
giving concerts of this music, performing it live in church settings and the Dakota.
Where does Tennessee Williams enter in?
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| Tennessee Williams |
[Director] Jef Hall-Flavin is a big fan of the George Maurer
Group. He’s also the executive director for the annual Tennessee Williams
Theater Festival in Provincetown. He’s the one who told me that Williams loved
Rilke.
Tennessee
discovered Rilke, along with other poets, when he went to Washington University
in the 1930s. He felt that Rilke especially spoke to him when he lived in
Provincetown in the summer of 1940 and several summers after that. Rilke’s
themes found their way into some of his one-act plays. He used the first “Duino
Elegy” as a framework for one of his plays, about two lovers being torn apart.
There’s enough of a connection that Rilke can be considered a strong influence
on Tennessee Williams.
Last year
I learned that the theme of the 2012 Tennessee Williams Festival would be
“Tennessee Williams and Music.” This set the stage for Jef and I to develop a
conversation between Tennessee and Rilke, through their poetry. They sing to
each other through the poetry.
I’ve also
set two Tennessee Williams poems to music. One is “Across the Space Between a
Bed and a Chair.” The other is “Request,” the poem he wrote to the only woman
he was ever in a relationship with. We split up some of Rilke’s poetry so some
of the lines are sung by Tennessee. He asks the questions Rilke asks in his
poems.
How does
it work?
It works
great. I’ve always said the music serves to illuminate the poetry and has never
gotten in the way. Yet I’ve been able to work improv sections into some of
these songs. The music is totally original, melding together the jazz
influences, the music theater influences, and the orchestrations I’ve been
doing for other projects. The melodies are a blend of jazz, gospel, and art
song.
And we’ve added visuals. Chuck Norwood, someone I’ve worked
with for many years at the Paramount Theater in St. Cloud, designed the
lighting. The stage is a thrust stage, with the audience on three sides and the
musicians off to one side, in black, not highlighted. The focus is on two
platforms in the center – one is Rilke’s, the other Tennessee’s – and the
interaction between them.
You don't
just read a poem once and get it right away. It's something you have to reflect
on, ponder, and linger over. We're asking people to listen, experience phrases
and textures, and not try and grasp everything too fast. Whether they grasp it
or not, they'll feel it. It's rare to match poetry to music in this way.
Just to
be clear, Rilke and Tennessee Williams never actually met in real life.
“Autumn
Song” is their first opportunity to meet each other.
______________________
Upcoming
performances of "Autumn Song," composed by George Maurer, poems by
Rainer Maria Rilke and Tennessee Williams, directed by Jef Hall-Flavin:
• 7:30
p.m. Friday, Sept. 21, 2012, Town Hall, Provincetown, MA. Tickets
here.
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