Composer Ricky Ian
Gordon’s opera-oratorio “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” had its world premiere
at Houston Grand Opera in May 1996. A literal interpretation of the Buddhist
text of the same name, with libretto by Jean-Claude Van Itallie, the
composition process was intensely personal for Gordon. Written for the
composer’s partner Jeffrey Michael Grossi as he was dying of AIDS, “The Tibetan
Book of the Dead” became the means through which Gordon and Grossi came to
terms with death.
The piece is the
enduring legacy of that journey, and now – more than 20 years later – it’s being revived by Eastman Opera Theatre, in a production staged by
EOT’s director Steven Daigle, with music direction by Timothy Long. The opera features alternating casts and runs from November 1 through 4 at Kilbourn Hall.
Gordon recently spoke over the phone about revisiting the harrowing times in which
“The Tibetan Book of the Dead” was written and what has changed for him since
then.
CITY: How did this collaboration with Eastman Opera Theatre come to be?
Ricky Ian Gordon: The director Steven Daigle ended up calling me and saying, “We’d love to
do ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead,'” and I loved the idea because it hasn’t been
done since its premiere in 1996, because it was written under very unusual and
painful circumstances. So I sort of put the piece away for a long time. And it
was sort of good timing. I was ready to look at it again, and deal with it
again.
In working on the
opera again, you must have returned to what the writing process was like. Was
it important to separate the personal feelings you were having about the loss
of your partner and the larger message of the work? Or are they inextricably
linked?
Now I see it as more
connected to the world, more connected to subject matter, more connected to the
people performing it, and to the content of the piece, to what it says. At the
time it was very inextricably linked, and it was written in sort of a fever,
and quickly. It was practically in competition with Jeffrey staying alive. I
mean, he died like two months after the premiere. So it had to be written, it
had to exist, and it had to help him. But now it’s just a piece in the world,
and it’s actually very sort of pleasant to revisit it and to see what I had done
– just to see what you did in such a sort of emergency situation.
It sounds like
you wrote this piece out of absolute necessity, emotionally, perhaps not only
for your well-being but for your partner’s well-being as well. Maybe as a sense of closure?
It’s not closure. I
had to write the opera for Houston. I needed the money, and they wanted me to
write an opera. The artistic director, David Gockley, saw what I was reading,
which was “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,” and I told him, “I’m
trying to learn the teachings because Jeffrey wants to die as a Buddhist.”
He said, “Why don’t you make an opera out of that?” And that suddenly
felt like an incredible way to sort of include what was happening to me, that
not only would I be learning the teachings, but I would be setting them to
music so Jeffrey’s entire life would be inundated with them, you know? It was
like the teachings became our life at that point.
The second section
of the piece is called “The Moment of Death,” and it’s after the person who’s dying has died, and a sort of angelic character sings,
“My friend, now is the moment of death. The time has come for you to start out.
You are going home.” And it was literally the aria. Jeffrey wanted to hear it
when he died, and we had like a recorder set up so that if at the moment he was
dying, we could get to it and turn it on, that would be what he was listening
to. But the moment he died, he was sitting on me, and there was no way to go to
the stereo, so I just sang it to him myself.
I can’t think of
a more thorough integration of art and spiritual teaching into one’s life. It’s
such a confluence of these different facets of your life.
It’s unlike anything
that’s ever happened to me. It was so surreal, you know what I mean? To have
been away from that piece for so long and that period, and to go back to
Rochester, it was like the minute they started, it really conjured up Jeffrey.
But it didn’t necessarily conjure up the unbearable pain of that time. It
conjured up the sort of fever of creativity in the atmosphere of enormous need.
Has your
perspective on death and the grieving process changed since you wrote the
opera?
It was a very
traumatic time for me, but most of the comfort I was given was, Jeffrey showed
me in a million ways after he died that he wasn’t gone. And it’s the first time
I really had my only experience of “We don’t die. I don’t know what happens,
it’s a mystery, but it’s clear to me that we don’t just end.” It was as if
someone was constantly showing me, from the world behind the world, that he was
still here.
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2018.
