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Sendak into Opera: <i>Wild Things</i> and <i>Higglety Pigglety Pop!</i>

1992; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.0.0282

1080-6563

George Bodmer,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

Sendak into Opera:Wild Things and Higglety Pigglety Pop! George R. Bodmer (bio) The subterfuges of language, the artifices of style, brilliant turns of the phrase that sometimes please me as an artist are not suited to my barbaric heart, which is so hard, so loving. One understands them and tries one's hand at them; it is a luxury which harmonizes with civilization and which for its beauties I do not disdain. Let us learn to employ it and rejoice in it boldly, the sweet music which at times I love to hear—till the moment which my heart asks for silence again. —Paul Gauguin, Intimate Journals (245) The American picturebook artist Maurice Sendak has long felt a strong affinity between music and his own work. In a long out-of-print essay, "The Shape of Music," recently republished in his volume Caldecott & Co., he writes, All of my pictures are created against a background of music. More often than not, my instinctive choice of composer or musical form for the day has the galvanizing effect of making me conscious of my direction. I find something uncanny in the way a musical phrase, a sensuous vocal line, or a patch of Wagnerian color will clarify an entire approach or style for a new work. . . . Music's peculiar power of releasing fantasy has always fascinated me. An inseparable part of my memories of childhood, music was the inevitable, animating accompaniment of make-believe. . . . The spontaneous breaking into song and dance seems so natural and instinctive a part of childhood. (4) His book Fantasy Sketches reproduces from the middle 1950s comic strip interpretations that Sendak made of musical works from Wagner, Strauss, Liszt ("Benediction de Dieu dans la Solitude"), Berlioz, and Brahms ("Trio in E Flat Major"). These pen and ink sketches have found their way into his later work, in his illustrations for Ruth Krauss, I'll Be You and You Be Me, for example, and show an idea unfolding, like a ballet or an opera. The Dia Celli Variations by Beethoven is portrayed in 31 [End Page 167] sketches, dated February 1953, on a single sheet of paper, which show an effeminate dandy posturing with his walking stick, courting a young woman and being seduced by her in return, ending up with five children and supporting himself with his cane as his oldest son mocks him. To accompany these drawings, Sendak wrote in April 1970, "Music helped unravel my imaginary scenes; it pressed the button, turned the key, kept my pen moving across the paper" (Fantasy Sketches 2). In this case, the music helped the artist to improvise in his visual art, and the evidence of Sendak's affinity with music is everywhere evident in his work, from album covers (for Mahler's "Symphony No. 3 in D Minor" and Leos Janacek's "The Diary of One who Vanished") to the stunning color illustrations he did in 1965 to accompany the songs of Alex Wilder in Lullabies and Night Songs to stage and production designs (Nutcracker and Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges) to the cover of Wolfgang Hildesheimer's biography of Mozart, and pictures of Mozart hidden away in Nutcracker and Dear Mili. In the middle 1980s, he helped produce operas from two of his books, Where the Wild Things Are and Higglety Pigglety Pop! When the painter Gauguin wrote of music and harmony in his work, as he often did, he was referring to color; to Sendak it is a third dimension to text and picture. Opera adds not only spectacle to the historic fact of his books, but also places him on the same public and historic stage with his heroes Mozart and Janacek. But since Sendak is not a musician, the means for him to create this dimension is only through collaboration. One of the earliest such collaborations for him was the February 19, 1975, CBS production Maurice Sendak's Really Rosie Starring the Nutshell Kids, combining two of his books (or five actually), The Nutshell Library and The Sign on Rosie's Door, with songs by Carole King. Selma G. Lanes, in The Art of Maurice Sendak, writes that the artist was first...