A conversation with beloved and renowned soprano Marnie Breckenridge and cellist Matt Haimovitz about their development of Jacqueline by composer Luna Pearl Woolf and librettist Royce Vavrek.
Marnie Breckenridge and Matt Haimovitz in Jacqueline at Tapestry Opera. Photo: DahliaKatz
It’s so nice to finally meet you, Marnie Breckenridge and Matt Haimovitz. Many of our readers will be familiar with you, Marnie, from your career here in the Bay and abroad, and Matt, your national accolades in contemporary music often precede you I’m sure - but some of our readers will be brand new to you both.
Could you start by telling me a little bit about your careers, and how it led to this collaboration on Jacqueline together?
MH: Well, to keep it as succinct as I can...I began to play concerti at a very young age, at the age of 13. I was playing with the New York Philharmonic and Israel Philharmonic and these kinds of orchestras.
And actually that tangentially relates to Marnie’s and my story with this opera Jacqueline, because I met Daniel Barenboim, Jacqueline du Pré's husband and musical collaborator, early on as a teenager. That was the milieu that I was growing up in: trained, pre-college Juilliard artists - Leonard Rose was my teacher, one of the legendary cellists. I was growing up in a romantic virtuoso tradition, a 19th century tradition of cello playing and string playing.
The pivot for me in my career was my first year in college when I realized that there were genres of music outside of classical, which I really had no idea about because I was sheltered in classical music. And I began very slowly working with living composers, beginning with György Ligeti, one of the great 20th century composers.
(L-R) Jacqueline du Pré and Daniel Baronboim; and Matt Haimovitz with Leonard Rose and Yo-Yo Ma in 1983.
That was my first time working with a composer and it was a very fortuitous experience because he knew every detail of what he wanted and was so demanding of the performer and conceptually and compositionally was thinking about the performer in every aspect of what he did. I was very fortunate with that encounter.
A light bulb went off in my head. I had played so much music of dead people, and I was always trying to get to the heart of what I was playing - I wanted to know about the history, I wanted to know what was going through their minds while they were composing; how do I bring this to life and get to the heart of it.
And then here was this living, breathing human who could answer my questions, who could critique me! It was a very humbling experience to realize that while there were some things that the composer liked in what I was doing, there were other things that he really didn't want. It brought a humility to the process, and I became voracious about wanting to work with composers and wanting to enter the world of their compositional process.
Obviously there's a lot that went on in between, but, then I met Marnie. When you meet an artist, there's a musical chemistry that either clicks or it doesn't.
You realize that there are certain people that bring out your best. Again, a humility in the sense that the world disappears and all that's left is the work that you're doing and the music that you're creating together - true chamber music.
That happened from my first collaboration with Marnie and it's grown. And, you know, I was able to spend a lot of time with Jacqueline du Pré. Marnie...she truly embodies Jackie. It’s uncanny to kind of see that embodiment unfold on stage.
It's an emotional experience to go back in time and remember Jackie as a human being, as a hero of mine, as a cello hero from the first moments when I started to play. I always looked up to Jackie as my role model. I wanted to be able to play from the heart like that, where nothing is in the way. It just goes straight from the heart out into the world.
And so there are challenges when I'm looking at Marnie and I'm thinking: ‘oh my God, Jackie's here’.
And there’s the challenge of me coming from a very instrumentally wired, abstract world and Marnie spending her time with words and theater like a singer does. Finding a common language and meeting in the middle, there is a challenge, but it's been beautiful.
And I can't believe it's been four years since we did this and I'm very excited to do it again.
MB: That was amazing, Matt. That was it in a nutshell.
Marnie Breckenridge and Matt Haimovitz in Jacqueline at Tapestry Opera. Photo: DahliaKatz
... what would you add to that?
Marnie: Well, you know, going back to that idea of embodying... Matt and Luna taught me a new way of looking at music. At first Luna's music felt slightly difficult for me with its variation of a12-tone feel but she helped me understand the structure and I realized it was something I could handle and expand with. It was organic and from the heart - set up to easily flow through me. She commands words to make even more sense as music than they are as spoken words! It’s wild. And Matt’s playing brought out new dimensions in my vocal quality by absorbing some of his cello sounds/techniques and musicality. This plus having the permission and trust in our interplay to truly be in chamber with each other. Matt, how would you describe Luna's composition style?
MH: I find Luna very organically engaged with the words- that the music grows out of the words. So I think it varies stylistically to some degree with each piece of music. Although it all sounds like Luna no matter what it is, the composition goes through what it needs to go through musically.
For sure, she uses 12-tone-like Schoenberg techniques, but there's also tonality there. And even various popular vernacular -styles.
How did the project arrive to you, Marnie?
MB: Luna came to see me in an opera by David T. Little and Royce Vavrek called Dog Days and I was playing the mother. She saw the Opera America presentation of it and came up to me afterwards and said: “I loved your performance, can we have coffee sometime?” I said, “How about now?” We walked and talked all the way up town and started our brainstorming right then and there. I suggested Royce Vavrek as librettist much to Luna’s agreement and then he joined the brainstorming. I think it was actually Luna, with Matt, who came up with the idea of Jacqueline based on his previous experience with her.
Across all of our brainstorming, one common thread was the desire to create a powerful woman's story, not necessarily that the woman had to be powerful, but a powerful story centered around a woman.
And of course, Jacqueline du Pré was, as we keep saying, a “Supernova”. So it all started bubbling.
We did workshops in San Francisco (various homes), Montreal (McGill University), and Montana (at Tippet Rise). Royce was getting the libretto together and Luna was putting music together and we just kept experimenting. Pushing and pulling thoughts and feelings around the questions of what was the ‘anima’ of Jacqueline we wanted to express? How do we tell this particular story? I remember I came up with the word “supernova”, because I kept saying we needed an even more powerful word to describe this human being. Jacqueline du Pré came to earth and tore a hole through it with her artistry then had to leave way too early. You know?
To circle back on your first question: My musical journey began as a little girl singing hymns in church. My mom was the church organist and our family appreciated music - we sang in choir, went to musicals and concerts, etc. I played the piano and flute and went to Seventh-Day Adventist schools that all had a very robust appreciation for music.
When I went to college, I was pre-medicine because that tradition was in my family and my culture, but I really wanted to sing and act. I had done some acting in Los Angeles as a kid (where I grew up) but it didn’t seem to be a feasible career goal for a good SDA kiddo. After I realized medicine was not really something I wanted to do I thought maybe I'd become a choir teacher? The science credits were moved over to a BS in music and an Art History minor, but I truly had no idea what I wanted my career to be...
And then I was in a terrible car accident the week before college graduation, where I was almost killed. My femur broke in half on the steering wheel and lost a lot of blood.
From my hospital bed, I was watching Liza Minnelli on the TV screen, foggy in my head from all of the pain killers.
Suddenly it was there: I thought “If Liza can do it, I can do it. I need to let the music come through me. I need to sing.” I started a master's in music at the conservatory in San Francisco one year later.
Marnie Breckenridge as "The Mother" in Dog Days, (Photo: Marina Levitskaya) and as "Lucia" in
Lucia di Lammermoor at Opera Orlando
New music found me early on with various living composers in SF asking me to sing their songs. David Conte, Henry Mollicone, and Jake Heggie were early collaborators. And after two difficult births of my children in NYC, I was offered the role in David T. Little’s, Dog Days which was to be using amplification for the singers. I had never sung opera with microphones before so this was a welcome respite for my body as I was recovering from c- delivery and other birth complications. It was so cool to be able to do more subtle and contemporary singing techniques to my voice in modern music with the aid of microphones. This led to many more modern opera world premieres and recordings - not all of them with microphones! Ha! It took me away from the standard repertoire for quite a few years but now I’ve returned to bel canto with a recent Lucia di Lammermoor with Orlando Opera in a full-circle moment of full physical recovery.
I’m drawn to being part of newer stories being told by living composers - they really speak to me because they’re often telling non-archetypical stories about women. Here I'm not just Gilda in a bag at the end of the show, dead because of a betrayal by a man.
So how did you know the story of Jacqueline du Pré was the right kind of a new story to bring to the tradition of opera?
MB: Well it's truly an operatic story. For Jacqueline du Pré to be that talented and successful and married to Daniel Barenboim, playing her cello with her whole heart—her whole everything—and then to get MS and have a functionality problem with her hands because of the disease - it was all taken away from her. Matt you can maybe speak to this because you were coached by her.
MH: By the time I was working with her she was not playing anymore - her nervous system was so far gone. There was a major moment that I had with her—that made its way into the opera Jacqueline—it was actually, a really mundane moment...
There was a thing with Jackie where everybody knew her as someone without a reference, you know, you couldn't really talk about Jackie because she was her own supernova like that.
But, with MS she was suddenly stripped away of all of that magic, all of the natural instrumental gift. Not only could she not play her beloved instrument, but there was a moment when I was with her and it was mealtime and she couldn't...she couldn't feed herself. I was at the table spoon feeding her the meal.
It was already a humiliating experience for everyone, especially her, and she tried to grab onto my hand. Her hand started to shake and there was the spoon and - and all the food just spilled. Nothing made it to her mouth and she burst out, ‘This fucking disease!’
Marnie Breckenridge and Matt Haimovitz in Jacqueline at Tapestry Opera. Photo: DahliaKatz
It’s one of the powerful moments in the opera, because we rarely see Jackie that way, as just a human being. Luna, Royce, Marnie and I - we would sit around the table, going through the various facets of her life and how those moments could be represented operatically and that moment stuck out.
And on the other side of the spectrum, she and I would sit and listen to her recordings, she really loved to listen to her own recordings and watch the videos and share them with visitors, and so when I was there with her we would sit on the couch and listen to her recordings and all of a sudden her shaking would stop. Everything got quieter because she was at peace listening.
And so I think it's an operatic story because the highs were so high and the lows were so low and nearly biblical. You have everything; now everything's stripped from you. Nothing.
What did the creative process for developing this opera look like?
MB: Matt and Luna and Royce developed kind of a timeline. She was born here, she married here, she had her debuts all over the world here, here, and here...
And then we were trying to decide if it was going to be a literal portrayal of a life or a little bit more esoteric.
So we played with different themes throughout. There's a lot of ‘dream time’, her sitting on the couch and enjoying her records, and then there are more literal scenes where we portray her and Daniel getting married, but of course in the production, it's just me and matt with his cello on the stage.
There's this interweaving that’s hard to describe because it's a new form in a way, a new kind of chamber music.
MH: For example, Luna ingeniously took the piece of music that is most closely identified with Jacqueline du Pré, which is the Elgar Concerto that Jackie put on the map, really, more than anybody, and the form of the opera is that four part, four movement, form of the concerto. Luna references the Elgar Concerto in different ways all through the course of the opera.
And then there are other kinds of ingenious references that Luna makes. I think of the whole piece as very interlocked. I tell people it's like Ravel duo for 90 minutes, you know, like the violin and cello, the soprano and cello are interlocked the whole way through.
There's a moment where Luna quotes the Brahms and we don't have a keyboard so it's just cello and voice. And as Brahms does with his sonata - keeping track of the equality of the two instruments, creating a sense of balance between disparate instruments - Luna does the same thing with the voice and the cello. It’s haunting actually, where the voice sings the melody and I play the arpeggiated accompaniment of the piano on cello.
That reference is a direct connection with meeting Daniel Barenboim. I was reading that Brahms sonata at a Passover Seder on the Upper West Side at Itzhak Perlman's house, where Itzhak called me and said “Come over, Daniel's here.” And I went over and we read The Brahms Sonata. It was the first time that Daniel had played with a cellist since his wife had become sick.
Daniel teared up - it was a very emotional moment. Luna captures those moments in the opera, there's no direct reference to me in the story but I am Jacqueline’s cello so these moments make their way through.
Marnie Breckenridge and Matt Haimovitz in Jacqueline at Tapestry Opera. Photo: DahliaKatz
When the opera premiered at Tapestry Opera in early 2020, how did Toronto audiences receive it?
MH:It was, it was incredible.
MB: They received it really, really well. My children came, who were 8 and 10 years old at the time and Matt’s children were there too - they were all rapt. They saw a dress rehearsal and they said “can we go again? I want to go again.” It was so heartwarming. It moved them. They got it.
People came up to us that I'd never met before and said it out loud: that story itself, it is the human condition.
You know, we're all born to this earth with various talents. Some people use their talents in more visible ways, some have hidden talents used in more quiet ways and then here we are all just floating on this big machine together...
Awful stuff can happen to people. It bonds us as humans to get through it together or to, frankly, emote about it, cry about it together, or be enraged about it together. To say, “I'm here and I feel your pain too.”
This piece touches the nerve of the human experience, and a deep love of people who vibrate at a high level, that are connected to source. And Jackie, no doubt, was connected to source. She was connected to a kind of love source.
The music is genius. And the way Matt plays this is out of this world - on a level that you can't even believe while watching this human up there doing what he's doing so MASTERFULLY to that instrument!
MH: It’s about our human condition and the fragility of life and that we can't take anything for granted.
I mean, we did this premiere in March of 2020 and moments later the whole world shut down as we're all trying to avoid getting sick from COVID. Suddenly realizing what we’d taken for granted.
And I'll just say one response that we had, which I'm very proud of because I don't come from the theater world, the great director, Atom Egoyan, came backstage and he said: that was the best piece of theater he’d seen in a long time.
As you approach coming back into the rehearsal room in a couple of weeks, 4 years later,... is there anything that you’re coming back asking yourself, or anything that you’re looking forward to wrestling with again toward a new result?
What are you coming into this thinking about?
MB: Matt and I were able to record Jacqueline two summers ago at Skywalker Ranch and that deepened it even more musically for us.
I can't wait to come back physically now to see how the music has grown and changed having gone through a pandemic and the recording. I’m curious to see how everything that's happened to us as human beings in the past four years will add into this performance.
I'm excited to see what staging director Michael Mori is going to do - maybe there's something that's changed. I'm open to it. He did such an amazing job the first time.
MH: I mean, This is a family and we’ve all gone through a lot and that just deepens our perspective. Actually, Barenboim, he said something that was really beautiful.
He said, when you're playing Schubert, it may be the same music - the same melody - but if you're happy it can sound happy. And if you're going through a hard time, and you're feeling pathos, the music can sound very sad. You play and hear the same music in a totally different way.
I think post pandemic, we're all hearing music in a different way.
So seeing this opera is an experience where we can remember and celebrate the genius of this individual, but also just therapeutically process what all of us have been through in the last years.
Is there anything that an audience member should listen to before they arrive?
MH: The Elgar Concerto
MB: The Elgar Concerto
MH: Listen to Jackie before or after, I mean, do both. It's some of the greatest recorded cello playing. And it would have made her happy because that's what she wanted.
She wanted to share her gifts with people. Music is how she connected with people.
That made her happiest.
American soprano MARNIE BRECKENRIDGE captivates international audiences with roles ranging from the Baroque and bel canto to Modern. Contemporary works include: Mother in DOG DAYS by David T. Little, Sierva Maria in Peter Eötvös’s LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS (Glyndebourne Festival Opera), La Princesse in Philip Glass’ ORPHÉE, title role in Milhaud’s MÉDÉE, and Margarita Xirgu in Golijov’s AINADAMAR (Opera Parallèle), Ruth in Luna Pearl Woolf’s THE PILLAR (Julian Wachner and Washington Chorus), Chin’s CANTANTRIX SOPRANICA with Kent Nagano and Jake Heggie’s TO HELL AND BACK with Philharmonia Baroque, co-staring Patti LuPone.
Renowned as a musical pioneer, multi-Grammy-nominated cellist MATT HAIMOVITZ made his debut in 1984, at the age of 13, as soloist with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic. At 17 he made his first recording with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for Deutsche Grammophon. He has gone on to perform on the world’s most esteemed stages, with such orchestras and conductors as the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic with Zubin Mehta, the English Chamber Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim, the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Leonard Slatkin, and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal with Kent Nagano.