The act of setting a word to music is an act of “crossing” from one medium to another: the word’s bare form, dipped in the bath of music, becomes a new entity, neither language nor music but an independent substance with new properties and powers. Language, when it reaches us through music, no longer seems an abstract, bodiless means of signification, as it so often seems in our daily use or misuse of it: rather, it becomes a sensual presence, a graspable form. A word set to music is not, of course, pure sense data, like the sound of traffic, since—even through music’s radiance—we can still discern that it “stands for” something outside itself. But it is precisely this doubleness—this sense that an abstraction has been made whole again; that a mere “signifier” has been given new bodily form; that the gap opened by human consciousness has somehow, by human means, been healed—it is this unique capacity to reconcile and unite the senses that draws me to opera.
It drew Walt Whitman to opera, too. “But for the opera…I could never have written Leaves of Grass,” he reminisced late in life. It’s perhaps surprising that the quintessential American poet, the writer whose signature bard-call is a “barbaric yawp” rather than a refined warble, spent his formative years—before setting off to cross a wild, apparently “formless” poetic frontier—soaking in the bel canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini, and the young Verdi. I happen to share Whitman’s opinion that the essence of operatic singing has nothing to do with the stuffy salons and social one-upmanship of the wealthy Americans who imported it to New York in the nineteenth century: opera is a primal union of animal longing, as expressed in sound, and human meaning, as expressed in language. Indeed, Whitman considered opera the pinnacle of human expression, something “beyond” the powers of language alone. But in his best poems, Whitman operates like an opera composer: he carries the English language, whose laws we thought we knew, across the border into a new musical landscape, where it is suddenly capable of formerly undreamed-of flights and cascades.
Crossing is the title of my new opera, premiering this season at the A.R.T. It was inspired by Whitman’s years working as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War; though the primary narrative is fictional, inspired by just a few lines in Whitman’s diary, I sought to portray Whitman as himself—not as the persona we know from Leaves of Grass, but as the man whose powers and insecurities prompted him to create that persona. Gestures of “crossing”—that is, attempts at transcendence, escape, disguise, transformation—pervade the piece. Whitman has crossed into a world that is not his own, a world of guns and honor, black and white, North and South, a world without room for poetry; he has done so in an effort to step out of himself, out of his own life.
Near the end of the war, a young Confederate soldier, John Wormley, unwittingly crosses into Union lands, and suddenly has to pretend to be an entirely different person in order for his wound to be treated. Whitman wants to offer the soldiers a kind of visionary escapism—comfort, beauty, entertainment, anything to take their minds off their current situation—but he quickly learns the limits of his own powers; the question of when and how every character in the opera will “cross” into the next life hangs over the action. And when Whitman falls in love with John, and risks crossing the line of his self-proclaimed sacred duty as “everyman” and healer, he is forced to confront the very insecurities he had come to the hospital to avoid.
This gesture of stepping out of oneself in order to find oneself is fundamental to this opera, equally present at the micro- and macroscopic levels. It’s there in the basic action of singing a word, which dissociates it from its familiar sound and meaning in order to render its underlying sense. And it’s there in Whitman’s long arc, from the moment he bravely crosses out of his old life to the moment when—well, I’ll let you see the piece to find out.
Matthew Aucoin is the composer and librettist of Crossing.
