In a Nutshell
Local composer Craig Bohmler takes his inspiration from E.T.A. Hoffmann
By Mary Ann Cook
Local opera lovers can be among the first to take in The Tale of the Nutcracker, which debuted Nov. 13 at the Montgomery Theater in San Jose. Opera San Jose commissioned composer Craig Bohmler of Los Gatos to create the piece two years ago. Ten more performances of his finished work--the first commissioned premiere produced by the local opera--are scheduled through Dec. 5.
"It's the longest and the most complex work I've ever done," says Bohmler, who has composed three musicals and three operas. "It's a painful process, but it's a good pain. Like running a marathon when you hit the wall and think you can't go on, but you do--you go beyond yourself, beyond anything you think you can do."
With six full-scale musical pieces making the rounds, it's likely one of Bohmler's works is in production some place in the world at any given time. This time, the honor belongs to San Jose.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Craig Bohmler makes minor changes to the sheet music during a rehearsal.
Bohmler comes to the job with brass-band credentials. At Opera San Jose, he has served for years as master coach, preparing singers for their roles while accompanying them on the piano. His compositions have consistently won recognition, including first prize in an international competition for his musical, Enter the Guardsman, which bested 370 other entries.
In addition to being a composer, Bohmler is a harpsichordist, a synthesizist, a conductor and a teacher. He has taught music appreciation and private composition to students at San Jose State University. The 43-year-old composer has a master's degree in piano performance from the University of Houston, a bachelor's in music theory from North Texas State University and a diploma in French from the University of Nice in France.
In post graduate studies, Bohmler has amassed more than 100 hours in vocal coaching, conducting and language. He is a sought-after accompanist for all manner of groups, and that role is one of his special delights. "Composing is such a solitary business that I look forward to performing with others," he says.
The Tale of the Nutcracker is based on a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann called The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, not to be confused with Tschaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet, which is loosely based on the story. Bohmler and librettist Daniel Helfgot stick close to the Hoffmann story in the first act, but take off on their own in the second.
No mice appear in the opera version because, as Bohmler puts it, "An opera is no place for dozens of youngsters on stage." What's more, "we never sing the word 'nutcracker.' You try singing it," he challenges.
Bohmler and Helfgot pay subtle tribute to their source by using the word "tale" in the title of their work, so listeners will be reminded of the classical Tales of Hoffmann by Offenbach.
The opera, which is performed in English with English titles, is two hours long for pragmatic reasons. "I think that's all the longer audiences of today want. I know my bottom gets tired after two hours," Bohmler says.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Craig Bohmler watches a rehearsal of his new work, 'The Tale of the Nutcracker.'
The opera is also site-specific. Bohmler was limited to a 14-piece orchestra because that's all the Montgomery Theater could accommodate. Thus, the work is written for four winds, four brass, four strings, harp, percussion and piano/celeste. The strings are two violins, two cellos; the horns are English and French horns, trumpet, tuba/euphonium; the winds are flute/piccolo, clarinet, bassoon.
Yes, that adds up to more than 14 instruments, but some musicians do double duty: the oboe/French horn is essayed by one musician, for example.
"Do you hear all of those different instruments in your head?" Bohmler was asked during a lecture sponsored by the San Jose Opera Guild several weeks before the work's premiere. "I sure try," Bohmler responded.
Bohmler admires composers Stephen Sondheim, Puccini, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Philip Glass, Britten and Verdi, among others. "I like a lot of highs and lows. I'm after peaks and valleys, a lot of contrast," he says.
And the style of this opera?
"It's a fusion piece, but I don't want to supplant [any other style]. Hopefully it won't feel like a hodgepodge. I like to set up a scene and then sing about it. I miss that in modern music," he says. "I pay homage to my work in the musical theater." This opera has the full spiel--chorus, duets, arias.
Bohmler created a specific musical theme for each character in The Tale of the Nutcracker. These themes supply the subtext, the background, whenever that character appears on stage. Weaving all these instruments and personalities together into a coherent whole is a challenge, definitely not for the weak-hearted.
It's just plain hard work. "Boy is it hard work!" repeats the rapid-fire, intense composer. "We figured out there are 70,000 noteheads in the piece. This opera been my companion day and night for two years. My whole life is centered around it. Imagine spending two years in a room with the same person," he says, trying to explain the process.
"I love and hate them at the same time. If it has a flaw, the flaw becomes the only thing I hear. But then last fall the singers started to workshop it, and they studied it and loved it. That gave me a new lease, a new way of looking at it. Sometimes I even caught myself thinking, 'Wow! Who wrote that?'
"Irene [Dalis, the founder and general director of Opera San Jose] has given me free rein. And, of course, Barbara Day Turner is my staunchest support and my conductor of choice. It's a musical sweep."
Theater is a collaborative process, as Bohmler points out, and suggestions have come throughout the year from musicians, singers, librettist, conductor--everyone who's part of The Tale. He says he never becomes so attached to what he's written that he resists changes. In fact, he says that the suggestions they gave him only served to make it stronger.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Composer Craig Bohmler reviews the musical score for 'The Tale of the Nutcracker.'
The characters are Marie, who is 16, just emerging as a young woman; Drosselmeier, the kindly godfather; the Nutcracker (the love interest); and the Mother and Father, whose conflicting themes are, respectively, wake up to reality and hold onto youth.
Bohmler calls these last two the "June and Ward Cleaver" of the work. The opera is set in the Cleaver era, too--1954 to be precise. The Drosselmeier character, called "Drossy," represents timelessness. He knew the mother when she was young. In fact, Bohmler quips, Drossy is so timeless, "he was probably the same age then."
The motifs of the opera are youth, time and growing up. "When the Nutcracker asks Marie to come back with him into the clock, what does she choose? That's the nugget of the tale," librettist Helfgot, the man who wrote the words, tells the Opera Guild lecture. He sums up the story in a nutshell--pun intended.
"It's the story of the rite of passage of a young girl with help from the Godfather. The Nutcracker [who emerges from the grandfather clock armed with a gong] inspires dreams of an ideal life. Is reality more fascinating than illusion? It's a Freudian tale or a fairy tale. Actually, they're the same thing." Helfgot says.
The opera, in contrast to the ballet, is listed not as a children's piece, but as a family piece, says Barbara Day Turner, resident conductor of Opera San Jose. Guest Yefim Maizel directs the work.
Set design is by Jean-Francois Revon and costumes are by Allison Connor. Anthony Quartuccio conducts some performances of the double-cast opera.
Playing Marie are Suzan Hanson and Sandra Rubalcava; the Nutcracker is portrayed by Brandon Jovanovich and Thomas Truhitte. Drossy is sung by Constantinos Yiannoudes and Roberto Perlas Gomez; Father is played by Christopher Dickerson and Clifton Romig. Mother is Janara Kellerman and Patrice Houston; and younger brother Fred is Noel Carey and Jonathon Amores.
Helfgot, the librettist, is Opera San Jose's resident stage director, but his early training was in journalism. A native of Argentina, Helfgot wrote music review columns and headed the Sunday edition staff of the newspaper El Dia. He has written ballet scenarios and work for multimedia productions, as well as a book called The Third Line: The Opera Performer as Interpreter.
In Argentina, he founded Ritmo, a magazine for the arts, and he has received the Koret Israel Award. For the past 30 years, he has been an opera stage director, and the results of his work have appeared worldwide, with 150 productions to his credit.
Other works by Craig Bohmler include the musical, Gun Metal Blues, a murder mystery that has had 50 productions since its completion six years ago. The New Yorker called it "the best small scale musical we've seen in a long time" when it premiered off-Broadway.
His Enter the Guardsman played at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival in September to "extraordinary reviews," its creator says. As an accompanist, Bohmler plays with all kinds of groups all over the world. "Making music with other people is the biggest high there is," he says.
"Where the gardens are always green, we'll never grow old. All the shadows are gone. I have chased them away," sings the Nutcracker to Marie, as he tries to lure her into staying in the grandfather-clock world. Audiences, too, can respond to that allure by stepping inside a magical place where time is suspended--at least for two hours at the Montgomery.
Tickets for "The Tale of the Nutcracker" are $35-$50 and more than half the performances are sold out. Opera San Jose's box office is 408.437.4450.
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