Opera Comes to Lake Wobegon?

Michael Barone speaks with Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra conductor Andreas Delfs.

Michael Barone: This is kind of like the good old days ... where the librettist is slipping pages of the text under the door of the composer, who is rapidly scratching away with his quill and tossing the completed manuscript out the windows for the copyist...

Andreas Delfs: ... and the overture is quickly written the night of the first performance ... Yes, definitely. You read all these stories about how Mozart's and Rossini's operas were produced for the first time, and that's probably exactly like what we did this week.

JMB: This was your idea, wasn't it?

AD: Well my idea was to work together with Garrison Keillor. I admired him for a long time many years before I ever came to St. Paul, and when I was offered the job here I said one of the things I want to secure is to make sure GK becomes a frequent visitor and hopefully already in my first season. And in order to get that, we kind of needed to give him carte blanche-and that it would become an opera I had no idea. But I trust so much in his talent, that I knew whatever it was going to be would be wonderful and funny and great, and I think it is.

JMB: And working under these conditions is this a little unnerving, having things still moving around under your feet?

AD: No I was actually very happily surprised. For me it's not unusual, because I come from the theater, and in the theater you often have-not the music part of it, but the stage part of it-is often put together last minute, last-minute changes and hysterical nervous breakdowns and all of that. So I'm very used to that.

What surprised me so pleasantly is how willingly the musicians were to play along with that. I just told them once weeks ago that it's going to be very special and unusual and lots of things will happen last minute, and they were fine with it, and they are enormously flexible. I mean, some of the things that are easy for them to play we had to repeat 20 times for some amplification reason or some stage reason, and they were almost docile, they were very sweet about it. And that is great because it's a completely different requirement when you rehearse a Mozart symphony or a Haydn symphony, then you have the printed material and that's God's word, and you don't change that and you try to make it as good as possible. Here, where God sits in the audience and hands you a new sheet of material every five minutes, it's a completely different set of tasks, and I think the orchestra and the singers-who of course are more used to that-they all interacted beautifully and were wonderful to work with.

JMB: Mid-life marital ennui. Is that the substance of opera? Or, actually, if I reflect, maybe it is.

AD: If you think of Mozart's Figaro, absolutely. When the Countess sings in the second act that, because she lost the bloom of her youth, her husband is going astray, and how sad it is to be middle aged and married and not have the passion of your husband any more, that's very much what Mr. and Mrs. Olson is about. And I think it's a universal theme in opera. Rosenkavalier is another one that comes to mind of an aging woman who loses her young lover to a younger woman. I think it's an eternal theme in opera and it's good stuff.