In early 2016, LA Opera’s CEO Christopher Koelsch announced that Matthew Aucoin was to be appointed Artist in Residence for a three year term, starting in October of that year. The announcement was remarkable for two reasons. Firstly, the scope of Aucoin’s duties was to be exceptionally broad: composing operas, conducting both classic and contemporary works on LA Opera’s main stage as well as its smaller venues, engaging in educational and community engagement projects as well as leading whole new initiatives. But what really raised eyebrows was Aucoin’s age: just 25 years old.
Koelsch had been tipped off about Aucoin’s work when Boston’s American Repertory Theater commissioned his opera Crossing, an exploration of the poet Walt Whitman, one of the giants in the American literary canon. Koelsch flew to Boston to hear the piece, and was bowled over: “I knew instantaneously that this was the kind of artist that needed to be part of the LA Opera family and that he represented a perspective that we didn't currently have inside our glittering and substantial masthead”.
Not only was Koelsch deeply emotionally moved by the piece, but he was convinced that what he had in front of him was an authentically unique voice. “Aesthetically, his set of influences was clear, but his variations on those themes, where he might be going as an artist, the exploration of variations on those influences was very clear, so it wasn't derivative and yet you knew that he understood the foundation elements of operatic composition. And I thought as storytelling went, it was a very idiosyncratic and interesting take on a familiar figure that was to my mind sui generis. This was the perspective of an artist that was not represented in any other artist that I knew as working in the world today.”
Faced with that response, Aucoin’s youth was an irrelevance. The subsequent negotiations proceeded remarkably smoothly, as did Koelsch’s discussions with LA Opera’s artistic leaders Plácido Domingo and James Conlon. A year into the residency, Koelsch views the appointment as “a perfect marriage, which continues to pay off for both parties”. Aucoin agrees, describing the role as “a tailor-made suit” and himself as “a kid in a candy shop”. He spoke to me from his California home.
DK: Given that you’re all of a composer, conductor, poet, pianist, educator, that’s an awful lot of things to combine. What does a working day look like?
MA: I think of myself as a composer head and shoulders above all of the other things, so for most of the year, the typical working day is just that I wake up and stare at an empty page until eventually something happens. But for specified periods of the year, for example during a production I'm conducting, it's a nine to five rehearsal schedule. What's interesting is the in-between periods when I'm in town but not conducting a main stage production, when I will work with the young artists on a much more flexible basis. For example, the After Hours series has allowed me to dream up programs that show off the company's young artists in repertoire that really suits them.
With the young artists and members of the LA Opera Orchestra, we also did a tour of Los Angeles County – which is massive, there are something like 87 cities – to all kinds of venues and communities that don't normally see opera. We did a program that spanned Mozart's creative life through the lens of his operas, trying to chip away at the notion that he burst out of the womb fully formed. So we looked at the development of his emotional and psychological maturity and acuity through a kind of guided tour of his operas from Lucio Silla all the way through to Clemenza. So my work takes lots of forms, but the reality is that 8 out of the 12 months of the year, I'm just writing.
Let’s talk about your opera Crossing, and its source. Our non-American readers won’t necessarily be aware of the position that Whitman, and Leaves of Grass in particular, occupies in the American literary canon – can you give them a thumbnail of why it’s such an important work, and why it needed this opera to be written?
I would just start with the distinction that the opera is based on Whitman himself as a person and as a spirit, rather than the massive composite poem that is Leaves of Grass. Why is his work so central? Basically, until Whitman, most American poets were doing these very polite imitations of poets from your side of the pond. They were very diligently copying the verse structures and the general prosody of English romantic poetry, and often it was not the wildest and weirdest and most Byronic corners of English poetry but it was a kind of domesticated thing, Longfellow and his ilk. Then Whitman comes along and much of his early work and late work is bad, but he has this shining moment of clarity and courageousness in the 1850s when he basically says why should our poetry, of any form, do anything other than embody what America is doing, flinging itself Westward and expanding and doing things that a human population had not done in recent civilised memory.
As a result, his poems that are collected in Leaves of Grass are like a raging waterfall, like this river that is just spilling over the sides of the page. He basically invented free verse, which was a prerequisite for modernism. And he was courageous not just formally or rhythmically but also in his celebration of physical love. He wouldn't have identified himself as a gay man – the term didn't exist in the sense that we know it today – but he was intimate with a lot of men and we know from his diaries, written when he worked as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War, that he felt a powerful and overwhelming attraction to the soldiers he was tending to. His poems celebrate love under the guise of universal brotherhood, he can't call it by its name and so he imagines almost in a 1960s way “I am connected to all of you”, “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”, and I do see it as this mysterious transformation of his own erotic needs.
So far, all the performances of Crossing have been, to use the Civil War term, in a very Yankee environment. What's it going to be like bringing it to the West Coast? Is the LA audience different?
I think the LA audience is actually more open to new work, not less, than many audiences on the East Coast. While it's true that the setting of Crossing is a war hospital somewhere in DC, this is at heart a psychological drama and quite a dream-like piece, not a Civil War pageant. The hospital is in a way a kind of limbo or purgatory – everybody who's there is stuck there, no one knows if they're going to get out alive, you're not quite in our world and you're not in the next world either. One of the things that emerges is that Whitman, who thinks of himself as being this kind of benevolent healer, ultimately realises that he is as stuck there as anybody else.