Origins of Plump Jack
The three plays of Henry the Fourth and Fifth add literary invention to famous history. This rooting in fact, as with Julius Caesar, seems to give them a head start toward a story line more plausible and vital than what we expect from the time. I found them an easy choice when Sam Wannamaker suggested in 1982 that I should set something by Shakespeare. The opera grew by pieces. A part of what is now the Boar's Head Inn scene was performed by John Del Carlo and Paul Sperry and the San Francisco Symphony in 1985. Within two years I had added Shallow's Orchard, Banishment and Off to War, and all four scenes were performed by the same forces with added singers and chorus. I then filled out the story with spoken scenes, changing Shakespeare as little as possible, and gradually set those spoken scenes to music as I came to realize that I could not control moods and inflections in any other way.
Mood and inflection are everything in Plump Jack. The words come first, and I prefer them to keep the contours and cadences of the spoken stage. Shakespeare in any case is mainly prose and iambic pentameter, both of which I tend to hear as recitative. Thus I place most of the musical content in the orchestra, like Wagner in the Ring, and fit a recitative-like prosody to this melodic background. Most of the few vocal melodies, such as the choruses in Jerusalem and Off to War, are set to my own texts or other exogenous ones rather than to Shakespeare's. His drinking songs in Pistol's News scan in tetrameter, however, and are composed melodically.
This bias toward recitative, leaving most melody to the accompaniment, makes it easy to write ossias to suit voices of different ranges. I need only pick other notes in the harmonies in a sequence that keeps the rough shape of the line. Thus Falstaff may be sung by bass-baritone or high baritone, and Henry IV by bass-baritone or bass. A single bass-baritone might therefore double both roles, following Peter Sellars' fine idea, although singing Falstaff alone is an ample workload.
Taking my cue from the plays, I wanted Plump Jack to be bursting at the seams, as vivid and varied and multitudinous as possible. I could not have done that within the musical idioms of Shakespeare's time, even if I wanted to try, and like other composers I am pretty much stuck with my own musical language anyhow. But I have sought realism by quoting music from the Renaissance wherever I usefully could. Falstaff's reference to the "Carman's Whistle" in Shallow's Orchard, for example, is set to that once-popular tune. Students will also recognize "Tapster, Drinker" in the first bars of Pistol's News, and again whenever Davy is about to sing. Other quotations include the "Agincourt Song" and "L'Homme Armé" (both twice) in Off to War, and the second "Agincourt Song" ("Enforce we us") in Banishment. The longest and most interesting quotations are also in Banishment, in the offstage Latin plainsong that begins and ends this scene. These are apparently the actual words and music sung at the coronation of Henry V, beginning with the Proper Mass for that week ("Judica me deus. . .") and ending with the Ordinary Mass ("Agnus dei").
I would have stolen more if I had found more worth stealing. I set "Veni, Sancte Spiritus" in a way to suggest a work of the time because I could not find an authentic setting that I liked. Authenticity does not imply quality. Likewise the "bagpipe" music from Off to War (oboes and strings non vibrato), and the woodwind motifs from that scene, suggest the period within my own notions of how such music ought to go. Many touches in Plump Jack are meant to give an impression of Ars Nova or earlier schools without fooling any experts. What matters is that the music must be my best.
Although Plump Jack has been performed over the years, or as much of it as existed at a given time, all of it is recently revised. Its slow genesis has tracked my slow development as an orchestrator. Composing and orchestration are separate gifts. Composing is melody, rhythm, harmony and counterpoint. Orchestration is choice of instruments to play notes already written. Composing is like writing a play, and orchestration is like casting the play. Although composing always came easily to me, it has taken good teaching and stubborn repetition to pound orchestration into my head. Good orchestration simply means getting the balances and colors you meant. I preferred to make my own mistakes, rather than let specialists do the orchestration, because the specialists might not know what I meant. At long last, somehow, what I hear back is converging to what was in my mind.
I find it much easier to rank my favorite composers, past and present, than to figure out which ones have influenced my music. It takes shape, and I write it down. Of course it is derivative. I did not invent the triad or the diatonic scale. Beyond that, I am something like an unwed mother who cannot name the father. The composers I most revere begin with Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner. Yet I hear little trace of them in Plump Jack. What I hear more of, come to the think of it, is movie music. Falstaff's monologue in Gad's Hill may derive from what we hear when Sylvester is sneaking up on Tweetie Pie. Likewise the harp/violins ostinato in Hal's Banishment aria, as gentle as the ticking of a time bomb, or the celesta theme that introduces and describes the pilgrims in Gad's Hill, might fit the same moments in a film where the lines are spoken rather than sung. Movies, after all, are spoken operas where the score tells us what to expect and how things feel.
Movie music is all-inclusive. We might hear Heavy Metal as the camera tools along the freeway, then neoclassicism for a picnic in the park, then atonalism as the murderer stalks his prey. By the same token, movie music is less proprietary and single-authored than opera. A film score might include nothing original, and no two pieces by the same composer. Plump Jack doesn't fit that model, but shows a similar bent in its eclecticism and love of contrasts. Clearly it derives from Western music as a whole, but perhaps from nothing more specific. The surprise is that I myself do not know what my sources are, even though it is my job to study such things.
Gordon Getty Performance notes
A wise scholar has said that the real protagonist in the plays from which Plump Jack is drawn is neither Hal nor Falstaff, but the English people. We see an age in which war, peril and treason crowd everywhere, but in which spite and malaise cannot be imagined. There are no villains in the three plays, nor even a single unsympathetic character.
A chief theme is the conflict between the worlds of impulse and responsibility. Falstaff and Hal are large enough to be at home in both, but must take the main roles in the struggle between them. In the end, Shakespeare endorses both worlds and both men, and so should we. We are meant to love Falstaff, and yet support every word of Hal's renunciation of him. Whether we humanly can do both these things has been much debated, but there is no doubt Shakespeare intended us to. It may be relevant that the defeat of the Armada was of very recent memory when the three plays were written, and that English audiences might have been willing then to give old friends' feelings a low priority against the soundness of the state.
And soundness of the state is the real issue in Falstaff's banishment, rather than any hollow "confirmation conversion" of Hal to establishment mores. Shakespeare takes pains to reassure us of this. Hal's wooing of Katherine in Henry V long after the banishment will be set in unbuttoned prose, full of humor and self-deprecation. Hal has not lost the common touch. He is never a prig, but rather always a king who does his duty to old friends and strangers even-handedly.
For Shakespeare's audience, Henry V was one of the greatest Englishmen in history, and the three plays are built around this perception. Never mind that historians today take a dimmer view of him. What matters is that the plays and Plump Jack can't work if Hal loses our respect at any point, particularly in the banishment scene. He will lose it if he pulls his punches there. He must chill Falstaff to the bone without the least indication that he either enjoys the business or is squeamish about it. In particular, he must not smile. He must leave the crowd desperately glad they are not Falstaff, and convinced that they have a great and fair king. No doubt the scene plays easier, in an antiheroic age, if Hal is shown as a demagogue whose latent mean streak has been brought out by power. But it cheats Shakespeare and it cheats the audience in the end.
The court scenes are all gravity and melancholy, while the scenes in Eastcheap and Gloucestershire are all zest and sunshine. Stanislavsky must be forgotten when we enact the latter. The Falstaffian men are built on familiar theatrical models, but exalted and ennobled by genius. Pistol is the miles gloriosus (glorious soldier) of Roman comedy, the blustering blowhard who would not frighten a moth. Think of Yosemite Sam. Better still, see Robert Newton's Pistol in Olivier's movie of Henry V. Shallow is the soul of Merry England, the irrepressible opposite of Pistol. Think of Mr. Magoo.
Hostess has more dimension. By giving her some lines of Doll Tearsheet, I have cobbled together a romantic history and love duet between Hostess and Falstaff which does not exist in the plays. She can be as shrill as a fishwife in firing up the constables, and then otherworldly in recollecting moments of tenderness. Hostess and Shallow must draw tears as well as laughter.
Falstaff is all the world. We must meet him at the top of his game; outwitting his arresters, winning the crowd, pulling the Chief Justice's beard and borrowing another ten pounds for good measure. His next scene at Gad's Hill is the endearing opposite. Here Falstaff is flustered, flummoxed and apoplectic as Hal and Boy play their tricks on him. It makes little difference whether Falstaff is really fooled or is pretending, since the scene plays and registers about the same either way. It is at Gad's Hill that we love Falstaff most.
Love him we must, since all who know him do. He is mourned in the end as much as Hamlet or Brutus or Lear. "Falstaff, he is dead," says Pistol, "and we must yearn therefore." "He's in Arthur's bosom," says Hostess, even though she never saw a farthing back from him. Bardolph adds the most beautiful tribute of all: "Would I were with him, wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell." (I give the line to all of the Falstaffians.) Before Shakespeare and Falstaff, the world was not accustomed to comic figures who aroused feelings of that kind. A great performer can show us why this one does.
Gordon Getty
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