“ I hate them, one and all, ineptitudes which constitute surely the lowest form of amusement, affording nothing more in the way of art than a flickering distraction to dolts condemned to sit in darkness, mental life utterly suspended, watching patterns of pretense gibber and squeak before them.”

So rants novelist Joseph Conrad in 1907 about the Hollywood movie, that newest of narrative forms. Actually, Conrad himself didn’t say that – the words are given to him by poet Richard Howard in “Lost Horizon,” one of the poems that comprise Howard’s imaginative and entertaining Masters on the Movies, a series of poems published in his book, Talking Cures. (Turtle Point Press, 2002)

Some years ago, soon after finishing The Masters on the Movies, Howard pressed a copy of the manuscript into my hand. “This may interest you” he said. “Think of it as a libretto.”

Those familiar with Howard’s poetry know of his penchant for putting words in the mouths of other people: “outrageous ventriloquisms,” he calls these poems, spoken in the voice of such historical figures as Cosima Wagner, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Verdi, Toulouse-Lautrec; he even dramatizes a conversation between John Milton’s daughters as their father dictates Paradise Lost. So when I first read The Masters on the Movies, I could see that Howard was at it again, this time assuming the personae of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather, each a master at creating narrative and character and each of them commenting on, via Howard’s fanciful ventroliquism, fictional characters that inhabit the silver screen.

For example, in the first of the series we overhear James, in 1885 (the year he finishes The Bostonians) proleptically responding to the movie Now, Voyager (1942). In it, Bette Davis plays Charlotte Vale, a Boston socialite suffocated by the strictures of her class and who, after psychiatric treatment, transforms from an “ugly duckling” into a “swan, odorous with erotic reminiscence.” No doubt colored by the characters he’s just created in The Bostonians, James is not very complimentary; he seems disappointed both in Charlotte and in the movie, wondering what the whole point of it was.

Next we hear the very un-Utopian Conrad rail against Frank Capra’s dreamy Lost Horizon (1937), the story of a man’s search for Shangri-La.. And lastly, we hear Willa Cather, after seeing her novel A Lost Lady distilled and dumbed-down into a Hollywood screenplay, bemusedly entranced by Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933), a film besotted more with Christina’s love affair with a Spanish nobleman than her numerous, very notable accomplishments.

Marvellously inventive as these texts are, I worried about how to engage the listener who had never seen (or didn’t remember) these movies; how much would be understood, especially when the words are not read but sung, and at a rate determined not by the listener but by the composer and conductor? Since what the masters have to say will likely give more pleasure to the listener familiar with the movies, I have strategically assigned lines of dialogue to a small group of chorus members who, in some sense, are asked to “play” the movie characters. These lines are intended to jog the memory of a listener who has seen these movies, and to tell the movie’s story in as few words as possible to those who have not. I have partitioned the chorus, then, into three overlapping layers: the three “masters” (James, Conrad, Cather) as soloists; the small group of actors; and the chorus. Since my work for voices is often shaped as much by the sound of a word as by its meaning, I have assigned an unusually complex role to the chorus. They must not just incorporate the personalities of the masters and movie characters, it us up to them to convey, with words and the sound of words, such non-semantic entities as state of mind, foreboding, sense of time, or memory. In short, they take on the role of the orchestra in an opera; without them the characters are vacant, the drama non-existent.

For, in the end, these poems are not really about novelists or movies but about what concerns us most: Life, Death, Love. Underneath the fanciful, playful exterior-- great literary figures responding to our most popular art form—we hear James, Conrad and Cather comment on the human condition. Life, Death, and Love: these are the great themes of opera. Richard Howard was right: The Masters on the Movies is a libretto after all.