Interview: A SHINING Hour for Mark Campbell and the Art of Libretto-Writing

Do you remember that cataclysmal moment in the Stanley Kubrick film of Stephen King's "The Shining," when Jack Nicholson axes his way through the bathroom door and says, wild-eyed, "Here's Johnny!" Well, you won't find it in King's book--or in Mark Campbell's libretto for THE SHINING, the new opera written with composer Paul Moravec and directed by Eric Simonson, opening May 7 at the Minnesota Opera as part of its New Works Initiative.

Campbell says, "I love Stanley Kubrick and I love the movie, but...," he cautions, "it has little to do with the book. King had problems with the movie and they're very understandable."

Kubrick's notorious film

"Problems"? That's a euphemism. King's feelings about the film are notorious: He thought Kubrick short-changed Jack Torrance (Nicholson's role) by showing he was "over the edge" from the start and not at all sympathetic. As for his wife, Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall, King called it "one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film." King hated the film so much that he produced his own mini-series version of the story--and only gave permission for the opera with the stipulation that he had to approve Campbell's libretto. Yes, Campbell made changes in his version of the story, but King understood why.

"When you adapt a book or story for an opera," says Campbell, "it is not so much a change but really a rethinking of the story. Novels don't have arias, many novels don't have 'the end of Act I' that has to lead the audiences into Act II. When the audience walks out at the intermission they need to say, 'I need to see what happens in Act II.' If the opera's doing its job, they'll be back."

The team involved

When Minnesota Opera Artistic Director Dale Johnson first suggested the project to Campbell, the librettist said "yes" without thinking--not because he was drawn to the King novel (he hadn't yet read it) but because of the people involved, starting with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Moravec and director Simonson. "How could I say 'no' to this team? Besides, I love Minneapolis and the Minnesota Opera (which did his SILENT NIGHT with composer Kevin Puts and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE , also with Puts, earlier this year)." He adds slyly, "I also love paying my rent" on his apartment in New York's Greenwich Village.

He admits to being a little intimidated--"Are you kidding!?" he tells me--about working on a property that is so familiar to so many people. (Or so they think, since many only recall the film's departures from the book.) But turning familiar titles into opera is all in a day's work for Campbell, one of the busiest and most successful librettists working in contemporary opera today.

King's relationship to "The Shining"

"I started my work with the novel, all 688 pages of it. Honestly, I had never read a Stephen King novel before, but I did know about his relationship to 'The Shining': that he'd stayed at the Stanley Hotel, which is the model for the Overlook Hotel in the novel, and brought his own struggles with sobriety to the story. But I had to find my own way into it." He explains, "In terms of creating an opera, this novel is a good source, with its struggles, its scale. In the movie, I don't think you really care about any of the characters."

One of the (many) skills that Campbell is known for is his economy of words in helping to set the scene and build the picture of the people who inhabit the work. For THE SHINING, that translates into turning those thousands of words in the King novel into a libretto of a mere 37 pages--the framework around which composer Moravec could weave his score and the characters could express themselves. It's an impressive skill that, many feel, is underappreciated by outsiders, yet is critical in creating an opera.

As few words as possible

"When TS Eliot taught, he gave his students an exercise, to write using as few words as possible," he explains. "That's a great thing for me to think about and remember when I'm writing, because the music needs space to express itself. Of course, if the composer says, 'I have something more that I want to do musically, can you add something here,' then of course I can."

Campbell explains that, as far as he's concerned, there's no question of "which comes first, the chicken or the egg?": The libretto is where an opera collaboration starts. "Always. I have never worked on a piece where the music comes first--but then I've never worked with a composer who said, 'here's what I want you to do' (and I never will)," he swears. "Every composer will tell you--from Bill Bolcom (his collaborator on the upcoming DINNER AT EIGHT), to Kevin Puts (SILENT NIGHT and the recent MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE) to Paul Moravec (THE SHINING), to Mason Bates (the composer of his upcoming THE (R)EVOLUTION OF STEVE JOBS)--that all the emotional cues are in the libretto, that everything that they're doing is coming from the libretto."

"I'm very inclusive"

"Basically, here's my process: I work very closely with the composers and producing organizations from the start--I'm very inclusive in that way. Some composers and librettists say, 'We're going to do a workshop and that's when you'll get to hear it'. Not me. I want everyone to know where the libretto is going every step of the way so that they can start thinking about it."

"So I start with an outline--an outline is the most important thing for me. I outline and outline and outline until everything is solved, so that a transition that felt awkward is now feeling graceful. When the outline is completely set, I will send it to the composer, the producer and, if the director is on board, to the director. And I say, any problems with this? And if someone says, 'I don't understand what's going on in scene four, she seems to be coming out of nowhere,' I'll go back and fix it."

His education in opera

"The one thing that I think I do reasonably well, coming from the world of writing lyrics," says Campbell--who started out geared toward musical theatre, with Stephen Sondheim as his idol--"is that I structure things well because I'm a formalist. For example, I will do an AABA aria"--the way the sections of an aria are structured--"the composer, of course, has the option to repeat the A or not, invert it or not, but I really believe in giving him or her structure to work with. My education in opera, coming from being a lyricist to being a librettist, has been often one of freeing myself up from all of the sometimes constricting aspects of lyric-writing."

Campbell's pendulum swung toward opera after he saw SWEENEY TODD, though he "didn't know it was opera" at the time. (SWEENEY has always inspired heated arguments about whether it's a musical or an opera. Sondheim has said, "If it's done in an opera house"--as it is more frequently done, these days--"it's an opera.") He first tested the opera waters with A LETTER TO EAST 11TH STREET, which dates from 1994. (Funny enough, the work won a prize, The Dominic J. Pelliciotti Award, just last year.) An intimate work written with composer Martin Hennessy, it was adapted from a short story about a young man dying of AIDS.

"It was my first libretto and I was still trying to rhyme a lot, trying to impress people with it--trying to be Sondheim, in other words--and nobody can do that," Campbell admits. "But I learned tremendous playwriting skills from him. You asked me earlier why I didn't become a playwright--I AM a playwright--just one who uses a different language. When you write a libretto for an opera you write both things--book and lyrics in one. And I like that."

His first full-length opera

That experience with A LETTER led to a meeting, through a mutual friend, with composer John Musto and the librettist's first full-length opera, VOLPONE, based on the classic Ben Johnson comedy. "It changed my life," he avers. (Campbell never says anything halfway.) "When I heard John's music, I went: This is what I want to do. Of course, it also helped that the reception for VOLPONE was so wonderful. The Washington Post called it a 'masterpiece' and it was nominated for a Grammy."

There's an old theatrical quip, attributed to the 19th century actor, Edmund Kean: "Dying is easy; comedy is hard." It's that way for opera as well. "Comedy is extremely hard to write,' says Campbell, "for both the composer and librettist, but especially the composer."

"There are many composers who have a natural understanding of the fact that, when you're writing comedy, the lyric is going to win a little bit...until the moment that it doesn't. If you're a good librettist, you're going to write your smart comic lines and now it's the composer's turn to go crazy," he continues. "I love writing comedy, but now what I'm finding is that if I can introduce humor into a serious story like SILENT NIGHT, it only humanizes it."

An opera in five languages

SILENT NIGHT, based on a French movie about a historical, spontaneous Christmas truce between enemy combatants in World War I, written by Campbell and composer Kevin Puts, won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2012. Campbell used comedy to leaven the story of men at war; he also decided that the libretto had to be in five languages, including Latin, to give a different flavor to each of the combatants. When Campbell first suggested the use of so many languages, director Eric Simonson questioned the approach--suggesting that it could, really, be all in English. The librettist recalls saying, "'Do you really want to hear some singer do a bad 'Hogan's Heroes' German accent or a 'Pepe le Pew' French accent?' And he agreed with me." Campbell then wrote it in English but worked with a pair of translators (but took a stab at some of the French and German) to get it right.

According to the antediluvian rules of the Pulitzer committee, only Puts was cited for the work (it was, after all, the prize for music, even though an opera is more than that), but Puts took Campbell along to the Prize luncheon and acknowledged his role very clearly. Still, says Campbell, this kind of short shrift sometimes makes it tough being a librettist.

"No one understands librettists"

"Some critic will come to see the opera and compliment the composer, about the ingenuity of the story, the humor in it, but will not even mention my name. No one understands what our job is as librettists," Campbell says a bit testily. But it's not just critics who don't seem to understand the importance of the wordsmith.

"I have been known to write producing organizations for operas by other librettists and say 'You haven't given any credit to the librettist in your material. You have the composer, you have the director, you have the lighting designer. You have the wig maker. But the person who created the story, you're not even crediting them. Can you change that?" he says, relating the experience calmly...but it clearly gets his goat.

Incredibly prolific

Complaints aside, there's no question that Campbell likes what he does and is incredibly prolific. Next year alone, he has the already-mentioned DINNER AT EIGHT, based on the Kaufman-Ferber play, for Minnesota Opera (also Atlanta Opera and the Wexford Festival) and the STEVE JOBS for Santa Fe Opera. In addition, for Opera Philadelphia, he's doing THE TRIAL OF ELIZABETH CREED, based on a novel by Peter Ackroyd and his third project with Kevin Puts and, for Houston Grand Opera, SOME LIGHT EMERGES, with composer Laura Kaminsky and libretto co-authored by Kimberly Reed, which was inspired by the creation of Houston's iconic Rothko Chapel. (He and Puts are also working on revisions to THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, which had a mixed reception earlier this year in Minnesota.)

"Yes, I have a tiny bit of fame," he says, modestly, "but I hope it never stops me from appreciating the tremendous privilege I feel about writing opera. I love the form, I love what it can be, but I don't think it's fully realized," he adds "It's going in two directions right now--not a controversy between me and my colleagues but in the critical community that's trying to create a debate over 'what's opera' or 'what's not opera.' If an opera I write--with composer, production, singers, director, etc., of course--brings 2000 people to an opera house, if it makes some of them feel that next year they're going to get a subscription, that's kind of a cool thing. It's part of my job. And I feel I've succeeded.

"THE SHINING will open, the reviews will come out and I don't really give a damn what most of them say"--though there are always some useful comments, Campbell concedes--"except from the commercial side. Yes, it's nice to get praised and sad to get damned--but a good writer should view them both the same way," he concludes. "Don't believe the praise or the damnation too much. Just believe in what you've done."

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