Maestro Ching joined Executive Director, Julia Cooke, for a fascinating interview about his extensive career in every job in the opera business, his ideas about composing and contemporary opera in general, and his connection to Baltimore. Read on to find out about the very interesting, very fun Maestro Michael Ching.
JC: What drew you into a career as a composer?
What I think happens is that the audience or the culture somehow thinks we’re all supposed to become proficient geniuses at 22 or 25 years old. It took Verdi three tries to get it right, it took Wagner three tries to get it right, it took Puccini 3 tries. Carlisle Floyd had a couple pieces he wrote before he wrote Susannah, it takes practice. And so for me, it’s a lifelong commitment to writing, whatever you want to call it -- opera, lyric theater, musical theater -- whatever the heck it is! And the older I get, the more I realize I actually have a gift for language. And the two pieces I’m best known for, Speed Dating Tonight and Buoso’s Ghost, are comedies where I’ve written the words and music. It turns out that as I get more confident about things, it’s not just about being able to write some decent music, it’s being able to write music with the right words, and in my case, generally funny. I mean funny is a good thing, and comic opera is not as rich of a vein in the opera tradition. I don’t know what it is, we take ourselves so bloody seriously in opera, I don’t know why that is! Somehow we ceded comedy to the musical, and I think that was an unfortunate thing that we’ve done, and so I’m very happy to be known for writing comic opera. It’s not exclusively what I do, but I like comic opera, and I think the older I get, the more I want the words to come through because I want the audience to have that experience.
JC: They can make a choice!
JC: Have you made any changes to Buoso’s Ghost over the 22 years?
JC: How did Buoso’s Ghost come to be?
JC: How did you decide on the story?
JC: Do you write your words first?
JC: You have some connections in Baltimore, can you share what they are?
MC: Here’s the deal: I went to school in North Carolina at Duke, and I had a very flexible program of study there because they brought in one composer a year; I was the composer in my class. And one of the things I said I wanted to do was to go to Peabody for a semester to study with a piano teacher there. This was in the late 1970s when Baltimore was a pretty gritty place, and I made it grittier by taking the bus, taking Continental Trailways up from North Carolina, getting off in downtown Baltimore, walking to Peabody Conservatory. So I spent one semester of my life in Baltimore back when Divine was still around, you know, that era of Baltimore. It was very gritty, but it was enjoyable. I haven’t seen it since before the Inner Harbor was established!
JC: It’s a wonderful, wonderful city. We love it! Anything specific about this production that you would like to share?
JC: Do you have favorite composers, anyone you emulate in your personal style?
Anyway, it’s fun to be here to conduct Buoso. I’ve actually conducted Schicchi more than I have Buoso and it’s exciting to be able to conduct Buoso again, and work with a group that’s so clearly well chosen and well prepared. And I’m looking forward to the chance to show it off.
MC: Buoso works through a lot of stylistic borrowing and quotation - you’ve got to have your musical thesaurus there to get the “in jokes” because there are quotations that are not just from Gianni Schicchi -- there are quotations from Madama Butterfly, there is a quotation from Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, and those are just there to keep me amused and for the sophisticates to go “I know that!” You don’t need to know those things but they are there. But there are other things that everyone will certainly get. There are allusions to gospel singing and Stephen Sondheim, and things like that and the audience will get those, either on a conscious or subconscious level. But it’s really all in the service of the characterization and story telling of this devious family, and how this smart newcomer to Florence, Gianni Schicchi, outwits them in the end. And he gets it all!
JC: Thank you so much!