Death and the Powers Program: Program Notes: Librettist Note
MAR 9, 2011
A note from Death and the Powers librettist Robert Pinsky.
Why write about robots? Not necessarily because I am interested in gadgets. And why a man whose body is failing? Not necessarily because I am interested in death.
It is the nature of work, and the human need to make things, that led me to imagine Simon Powers: a bullying, charismatic lover of money and poetry, power and family.
When we strive, in the characteristic human way, to create a business or a garden or a poem or a collection or a piece of music, we want what we make to have life. The made thing, if we succeed, has something resembling a soul: it is capable of action. In English, we say that it is “a work of art” or simply “it works.”
The word “robot,” one reads, comes from a Czech word meaning “one who works,” with connotations of drudgery but also of independent ability. The things we make – if they are all we hope them to be – imitate something of ourselves. A poem, says William Carlos Williams, is “a machine made out of words”: a poem is a robot that performs the work of meaning and emotion. The garden, the business, etc. are robots that perform versions of that same work.
The robots who perform the opera-within-the-opera of Death and the Powers are the creatures or descendants or avatars of Simon Powers and his family. In trying to re-create the Powers family and their reality, the robots are in a sense returning the favor of creation…as our works may sometimes do.
