THE SECRET AGENT :

Remarks for readings of excerpts at

The Center for Contemporary Opera (Feb 22, 2008)

Long Leaf Opera (June 26, 2008)

His name is Adolph Verloc – he’s the secret agent – and he is an opportunist and a coward. An opportunist because he’s the leader of a terrorist cell, but he’s also a spy for the German Embassy and a police informant; he’s playing all sides at once. And a coward, because when the German Ambassador threatens to stop paying him unless he blows up the Greenwich Observatory, instead of doing it himself, Verloc tricks his wife’s little brother Stevie into carrying the explosive alone up the hill to the Observatory : the boy trips and the bomb goes off, killing him. Conrad then leads us through a police investigation, unraveling a plot that links Verloc to high-ranking government officials, wealthy society ladies, and a terrorist cell.

The Secret Agent was published in 1907. The public was shocked and the reviews were, let’s say, “unappreciative.” Not because terrorism was unheard of – quite the opposite – the turn of the 20^th century saw many terrorist acts – especially bombings. In fact, Conrad based his novel on real life -- a similarly botched attempt in 1896 to blow up the Greenwich Observatory – an act he described as “having all the shocking senselessness of gratuituous blasphemy.” No, the public and critics couldn’t figure out why Conrad would choose to write about such selfish, uncharitable, and unredeemable people.

When I first saw Long Leaf’s brochure for this year’s festival, and got to the page for The Secret Agent, my eyes were drawn to the bold letters at the bottom, saying that The Secret Agent was the book that inspired Ted Kacynski -- The Unabomber. I didn’t know this, but it didn’t surprise me: the terrorists that inhabit The Secret Agent do what they do for different reasons: for money, for distorted idealism, for a sense of just belonging to something, anything, or the twisted pleasure of having the power of life or death over other people. . Whatever their motives – or Kacynski’s – or for that matter Timothy McVeigh’s or Osama bin Laden’s – Conrad sees them all capable of something the rest of us are not: they’re capaple of contemplating, in his words: “ blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought.”

Since Sept. 11th the novel has been often cited in newspaper and magazine articles – it isn’t Conrad’s most popular novel, even though Alfred Hitchcock based his 1937 movie “Sabotage” on the story, and since then there have been another half dozen British or American movies, either from Hollywood or made for TV. I suspect these days the novel gives us all small comfort in knowing that terrorists have been walking the earth for at least 100 years, their motivations as unclear in Conrad’s time as they are today. I know that I found such comfort when I first read the novel during the summer of 2002, when I was just another post Sept-11^th New Yorker obsessively wondering about the nature of destructive and self-destructive actions, as well as what motivates those who commit them.

It wasn’t as if I wanted to write a September 11^th piece, as some composers had, but when, early in 2006 I was approached by the Center for Contemporary Opera in New York about writing a new opera on a contemporary subject, I immediately thought of The Secret Agent. The Center, since it was founded 25 years ago, has, like Long Leaf, been devoted to operas written in English from the 20^th and 21^st centuries, but unlike Long Leaf, had actually never commissioned a new work before, and so were looking for commissioning and producing partners. After some discussions, and generous support from two foundations, The Center joined forces with Long Leaf and San Antonio Opera. The next step was to find a librettist.

(I’m so sorry the librettist, J.D. McClatchy, can’t be here tonight. Something entirely unexpected came up at the last minute and he had to cancel this trip.)

Writing a libretto is tricky business. Turning a novel – where the words are meant to be read silently to oneself, and at one’s own pace -- into a libretto – where the words are meant to be sung, accompanied by instruments, to a room full of people, at a rate imposed by composer and performer, is an art few people dare to practice, and even fewer practice successfully. McClatchy is one of those few people and, I thought, a perfect choice for The Secret Agent. A mention of some of his other librettos will show his gift for dramatizing those dark parts of our psyche that are apt to make us feel uncomfortable: – Emmeline (which he wrote for Tobias Picker on the novel by Judith Rosner), 1984 (with Lorin Maazel, based on George Orwell’s classic), Grendel (with Julie Taymor and Elliott Goldenthal, after the novel by John Gardner), Our Town (with Ned Rorem, based on Thornton Wilder’s play). And McClatchy has just been commissioned by La Scala to write the libretto for Italian composer Giovanni Battistelli and director William Friedkin : the subject – Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, as dark and timely a subject as we’re likely to get. So when I called him and told him I’d been considering Conrad’s The Secret Agent as an opera subject, I was delighted to hear him say that he too had always thought The Secret Agent was a story that would make a good opera.

I’ve had the libretto for about a year. As you all know, this is a work-in-progress. Meaning the score is in various stages: chunks of the libretto are in sketches; much of it in piano score, some of it very close to being finished, as you will see and hear shortly, scored for the 13 member orchestra you see on stage.

And so, because it’s still a work-in-progress; and while I hope you are entertained this evening, a workshop like this – where fragments of an unfinished opera are played to andience – is, in the short run, an opportunity for me, the composer to hear what works and what doesn’t, and to get feedback from you, since I will be incorporating them so that when the opera is presented in its entirety – 2 years from now – it will, hopefully, be a stronger work.

We’ve chosen excerpts from three scenes, totalling about 15 minutes. The first is from early on in Act I, and the 2^nd and 3^rd excerpts are from the end of Act II. These excerpts involve the following four characters:

Adolf Verloc - A man in his mid-40s Verloc is the secret agent. Head of a small cell of anarchists, he is on the payroll of at least one foreign embassy and the local police. He, his wife Winnie, and Winnie’s younger brother Stevie live together behind a shop which serves as a front for his political activities. The shop sells radical pamphlets and pornography.

Winnie Verloc - is younger than her husband, attractive, and works in the shop when Verloc is out and about, which is often. She is completely unaware of her husband’s shady political affairs, she seems grateful to have a husband who protects and provides for her and her brother Stevie.

Stevie - Winnie’s younger brother, is emotionally and mentally underdeveloped, overly sensitive to violent actions and words, and what he perceives as injustice. He is devoted to Winnie and, therefore, to Verloc.

Ossipon - a member of Verloc’s gang. An opportunist, without a job or prospects, he likes to keep up on the latest scientific theories which explain human behavior. He considers being an anarchist Romantic and bohemian. He also has a crush on Winnie and flirts with her at every opportunity.

In the 1st excerpt, which opens scene 2, we meet Winnie and Stevie for the first time. When Winnie asks Stevie what he did today he gets upset, and begins to tell her about a man he saw whipping a horse. Winnie calms him by singing a lullaby. Verloc enters. He has just come from the German Embassy where, in the previous scene, he has been ordered by the Ambassador to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. He is clearly agitated: essentially a lazy man, his life as a secret agent has been in the trafficking of mostly useless information. He has never been actively involved in an overtly destructive act.

From the libretto: The parlor behind Verloc’s shop, plainly furnished, its poverty partially disguised by sad touches of decoration. A staircase leading to rooms above is stage left. The only entry to the room is through the curtain at the rear that leads to the shop. Winnie is wiping the oil cloth on the table at the center of the room. She is about thirty, hair done up neatly, quiet bearing, good figure. Her younger brother Stevie is coming down the staircase. He is seventeen, fair, pale, nervous, weak-minded, and at times a little vacant.

Between what you’ve just heard and the next excerpt are 3 scenes and an intermission. The explosion has occurred, though not as planned. Winnie, who has been at home, knows nothing about it, though word is out on the street that a man has been killed – the anarchists and the police both assume it was Verloc. The police visit Winnie and soon discover it was not Verloc who was killed but Stevie; Verloc arrives soon after, agitated, and guiltily confesses that his plan was for Stevie to just plant the bomb and run away, but that Stevie must have tripped and the bomb went off accidentally. Winnie grows silent, disappears upstairs. The excerpt begins with her coming down the stairs, wearing a hat and veil, and carrying an umbrella as the strings play the theme previously associated with Verloc. During the concluding measures she picks up a knife and murders him.

This will lead straight into Scene 7, the final excerpt. From the libretto:

An hour later. Verloc’s shop, the reverse of the earlier parlor scene. The curtain at the rear, leading to the parlor, lets light through, though no lights are on in the shop. Verloc’s name, in reversed letters is on a window, next to the door leading to the street. Shelves of shabby books can be made out. Huddled behind the counter, Winnie can eventually be seen, her knees drawn up, her arms around them. She is staring blankly ahead. The door opens and Ossipon slips in.

This last excerpt ends abruptly just as Winnie is about to enter an extended aria – a mad scene -- beginning with her words “blood and dirt, blood and dirt.” Tonight I will have to leave the rest of the scene to your imagination, but I will tell you that what she sings will make the police sympathetic to her: As the Chief Inspector says toward the very end of the opera: “No one can touch her now.”