Mountain do Director Leonard Foglia
Director Leonard Foglia
Leonard Foglia didn’t set out to make a career in opera. In fact, he didn’t even start out as much of an opera fan. “I’d been to the opera twice in my life before I directed my first opera, so it’s not really my world,” he recalled when he sat down with Pasatiempo on a sunny afternoon on a terrace on the grounds of Santa Fe Opera. It was a week before the world premiere of Cold Mountain, the adaptation by composer Jennifer Higdon and librettist Gene Scheer of Charles Frazier’s award-winning Civil War novel. If Foglia was nervous, he didn’t show it — although he did compare the process to preparing to give birth: “Nothing’s quite ready. The suitcase is under the bed, and it isn’t packed.”
Before the world of opera came calling, Foglia’s life was in the theater. “For many, many years I was exclusively a theater director, until about 12 years ago when I directed my first opera. And it’s sort of balanced out since then. Although in the past couple of years, opera has predominated, mainly because they schedule so far in advance. You’re booked! And theater’s always so last minute.”
Perhaps opera was always in the cards. His first directing job on Broadway was Master Class, Terrence McNally’s 1995 Tony Award-winning play about Maria Callas teaching at Juilliard, which originally starred Zoe Caldwell. (In his cast was a young tenor named Jay Hunter Morris, who sings Teague here in
Cold Mountain.) “That’s when I first began studying opera,” Foglia said. “I thought, I’m doing a play about Maria Callas, I’d better learn something!” But he continued working in theater, helming Broadway productions of 1998’s Wait Until Dark, 2005’s
On Golden Pond, and 2008’s Thurgood. He will be back on the Great White Way this fall with The Gin
Game, starring James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson. “The first person who hired me [for opera] was a conductor named John DeMain. I said to him, ‘I presume if you wanted an opera director, you would have hired one.’ ” DeMain assured Foglia that that was the case. The opera was Dead Man Walking. “The first thing he said to me was, ‘Talk to them [the singers] like you’d talk to actors, because no one ever does.’ ”
The biggest difference Foglia has found between directing in the two forms is that the dramatic pace has already been established in opera by the music. With a play, he said, “It’s a blank page. You can try it a million different ways, and you, with the actors, have to come up with the arc of the scene. In an opera, the composer’s already made that decision. So my job, and what I talk to the singers about, is I try to make them think: Why did the composer do it that way? You’ve got to come up with your own reason for going there, and not just because the composer said so. But that’s the biggest thing. The arcs of the scenes have already been created.”
Foglia has been involved with the operatic adaptation of Cold Mountain from the start. “In this particular piece, I was hired first as the dramaturge. So I’m hired really before anything is written. I spend time working with the librettist. Of course, the words come first, and then the composer comes into it, and I’m there, involved in the whole process from the beginning. On this one, it’s been about four years.”
The amount of time spent working on Cold Mountain has given the director a chance to steep himself in it. “You dive into the form. You dive into the music. The process was really quite long, and that was good for the development. Gene Scheer finished the first act of the libretto, and then Jennifer [Higdon] did the music for the first act, and then we workshopped the first act. And then the whole process began again for the second act. I was pretty immersed in it, and early on, when Jennifer would say, ‘How much time do you need to get from this to this to this?’ I would say, ‘I don’t have a clue.’ I always say to composers, ‘Don’t think in those terms. Just think in your musical terms. I would rather follow your lead.’ ”
Foglia does not work in the standard opera repertory. “I only do new operas, so we’re always shooting it out of the cannon, and the reactions always surprise me. I find people are really split. They’re either overwhelmed by the story and the storytelling, or it’s all about the music. And hopefully, if we’ve all done our jobs right, it’s too mixed up to even divide it so neatly.”
He reached back for an old theater anecdote to illustrate the excitement and the perils of creating something completely new: “The great George Abbott, the Broadway director, his quote was, ‘A musical will live or die on how you end this sentence: Let’s do a musical about . . .’ We’ve all seen musicals by really reputable people, and you just sit there and shake your head and say, What were they thinking?”
Cold Mountain tells a story in which a main character covers hundreds of miles, trying to make his way home from war, and barely says a word. How much of a challenge was that to translate to the stage? “Into an opera with singing?” Foglia said. “Well, you have one person who covers 550 miles, and the other person is all in one place. And we flash back to different times in their lives, as they flash back to times before the war. So, in a way, it’s back to basic Elizabethan theater. You just didn’t have a lot. You know, you put a wall here and a throne there, and everybody goes about their business. You’re out in a field, you’re here, you’re there, and hopefully things have been written into the text, or the way you light it, so that actually kind of strips away a lot. You just go there without having to reconstruct it. Now you’re 50 miles away, now you’re 30 miles away — it doesn’t really matter. It’s the emotional journey that matters.”
To create the look of the piece, Foglia spoke with his longtime collaborator, scenic designer Robert Brill. “I said, ‘This is the way Gene has synthesized the libretto and has come up with his way of telling the story.’ And Jennifer took that and created the whole musical landscape. I said, ‘I want us now to respond to all of that.’ . . . So this is our response to the Civil War. This is our response to the story. And now the actors have to deal with it!”
Cold Mountain hits the boards in a year that marks the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, a war that, as Foglia observed, “still continues in a lot of people’s minds.” This summer has seen the crisis over the display of the Confederate battle flag. “It’s a good story, isn’t it?” he said, shaking his head. “I’m just so pleased that discussion’s happening. It’s kind of extraordinary that it’s all happening around this.”
“It’s the emotional journey that matters.”