What is The Green Bird based on?
Carlo Gozzi, who also created The King Stag, wrote these things called ‘miracle plays’. Gozzi is in the style of what’s called commedia dell’arte. They were performers through the 1800s in Italy who would be given a text, which was basically used as a schematic, as a sketch, and then they would take these texts and they would improvise based on the author’s story. They were so skilled at what they did; every night like a jazz performance they would slightly change the text around to make it more topical, put in political jokes. They were like master comedians.
What was yours and Julie’s role here?
I composed the music for The Green Bird, while she was in charge of the direction and the costume design. You direct with improvisational areas for improvisation built in. Julie took this from Gozzi, the writer, and basically interpreted it into a play.
How do you musically connect with a form like that that’s become a play?
Personally, to make it very clear, the word ‘commedia’ means ‘comedy’. These are comedy routines that might change every night based on the same story. The music provides a certain sort of pace that can slightly change; there can be some improvisation in the music. Like the story, the music is the constant in things. It’s something you can rely on every night as being almost the same.
What was your greatest challenge when composing this?
Just like Juan Darien, it’s both mystery versus the most mundane, the most earthly. A fat butcher that cheats on his wife, eats up all the profits in the business that he owns – he even cooks up some liver and sleeps with the liver under the pillow so he can eat at three in the morning. Abuses his wife, calls his children bastards, and then all of a sudden he gets put into a mystical, magical environment, where he’s going to be taught a lesson. Every character in many of Gozzi’s plays go into this situation where they’re all of a sudden earthbound, and then all of a sudden something mystical happens to them and they don’t know how to react. So the large audience out there, those people who know Gozzi because they know “Turandot” from Puccini, they know that opera. They also know Gozzi because Gozzi wrote the play called “The Love of Three Oranges” that Prokofiev wrote the music to. He’s a very well-known character, but people aren’t exactly sure that they know him.