Postcard from Composer David Hanlon and Librettist Stephanie Fleishmann
In SFGC’s Postcard series, our guest artists, collaborators, and faculty take us behind the scenes and share an intimate look into their thoughts about music, life, and art-making.
This postcard features composer David Hanlon and librettist Stephanie Fleishmann, the creative duo behind the world premiere opera The Pigeon Keeper! Don't miss your chance to see this new work, March 7-9th.
David Hanlon, Composer
David Hanlon is a composer-in-residence at Minnesota Opera, where he most recently conducted the world premiere of his orchestration of Cruzar la cara de la luna (which later went on to Austin Opera.) Before The Pigeon Keeper, David's last collaboration with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann was the chamber opera After the Storm, whose premiere he conducted at Houston Grand Opera (HGO). David has often written and conducted work for HGO, including the chamber opera Past the Checkpoints. David frequently works at Wolf Trap Opera, who commissioned his orchestration of Pauline Viardot’s Cendrillon (which was been revived at Knoxville Opera and is heading this summer to the Brevard Festival) and his children’s opera Listen, Wilhelmina! (which was revived at Lyric Opera of Kansas City.)
As a conductor, David led the world premiere of El Milagro del Recuerdo at HGO, which he also co-arranged. David made his Kennedy Center debut conducting the Washington National Opera Orchestra in Don’t Let the Pigeon Sing Up Late! with Renée Fleming and author Mo Willems. He returned to the Kennedy Center last season to chorus master Otello with the NSO under the baton of Gianandrea Noseda. Among the many world premieres David has conducted, he has long been associated with mariachi operas Cruzar la cara de la luna (World premiere and recording; revivals in Houston, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Diego Opera, Arizona Opera, Fort Worth Opera, and New York City Opera) and El Pasado Nunca Se Termina (World premiere at Lyric Opera of Chicago; revivals at San Diego, HGO, and Fort Worth). David has worked on the music staffs of HGO, San Francisco Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Dallas Opera, and Washington Concert Opera.
In addition to composing operas, you also conduct them! How do these two pursuits color the other? Do you find that they strengthen each other?
Conducting opera is so helpful to opera composing. There are so many nuances to creating operas—understanding singers’ registers, common balance problems, even understanding how much time there is to rehearse. It’s an endless list. You have to live in opera to achieve fluency, and conducting is one way to get that fluency. But with it, one can write music that (hopefully) takes imaginative risks while still feeling natural. And if one’s first attempts don’t feel natural, or don’t work, that practical knowledge makes it easier to diagnose and improve.
Likewise composing affects my conducting as well. Every Italian maestro I’ve ever known had to study composing if they wanted to conduct. It’s really two ways of coming at a musical mystery. When you are composing, you are starting with an idea and then searching to find the notes and rhythms and textures that will express that idea. When you are conducting you are starting with the musical details and then working as a musical detective to find your way back to the ideas that animated the music's conception. I love coming at music from either direction!
Opera is by nature a very collaborative artform. What is your approach to collaboration and how did that manifest in the process of creating and producing The Pigeon Keeper?
My first and foremost collaborator is librettist Stephanie Fleischmann. We have a very close relationship, and every step of creation has an extensive back and forth process. The result is something that feels truly ours. I could never have written this opera with a different librettist, and Stephanie would say the same about me.
This open approach to collaboration continues in the workshop and rehearsal room. We’ve benefited from the insights of so many collaborators during the opera’s development. Even now, I’m making adjustments so that the singers feel their notes are tailor-made to both them and the dramatic beats we’re finding in the room. And sometimes a trusted collaborator’s insight can lead me to rewrite a passage entirely. Once conductor Nicole Paiement suggested a singer adopt a particular vocal color for a few bars. It was a beautiful idea, but it didn’t quite fit with what I had written. And yet, I realized Nicole was so right about the vocal color that moment needed, that I rewrote those bars to fit the vocal color!
It is a balance—you have to have conviction in what you write, while being open to any idea that could make it better. But I love that the opera is both something from me, and so much more than that because of every collaborator's contribution.
What inspires or moves you about The Pigeon Keeper? Tell us a bit about the story and how you connect to it!
The Pigeon Keeper is a modern fable set on an imaginary Mediterranean island. A girl and her fisherman father are out at sea when they rescue a refugee boy from the open water. The girl convinces her father to let the boy stay for three nights while she searches her village to find him a home.
Stephanie and I first dreamed up the story in 2017, amidst tales of refugees coming across the Mediterranean to Europe. The story is all the more urgent today. The opera’s fable-like structure connected me to my childhood, reading stories of magical creatures in disguise, testing a host’s hospitality. And it also connected me to my family’s past. Just as Orsia knocks on every door on the island, my grandmother knocked on the doors of every consulate in Vienna in 1939 trying to find a country to take her family in before it was too late. The question of how a society treats the stranger is both ancient and contemporary, both universal and intensely personal.
The Pigeon Keeper has undergone multiple workshops over multiple years before reaching its premiere. What was your experience of bringing an opera to life from scratch?
We were very lucky to have three workshops—a libretto workshop with actors, a piano workshop which included the San Francisco Girls Chorus, and an orchestra workshop at the University of Michigan. Each has been invaluable. No matter how much you do on your own, you always discover new things when you get a work on its feet with talented collaborators.
What has been the happiest accident of your career so far?
When I was in my twenties, I was a new music pianist in New York. I loved opera and playing for singers, but I thought it was too late to pursue that as a career.
Then my longtime (and long distance) girlfriend got a job in Houston and asked me to move there so we’d live in the same place at last. I had no idea what I’d do in Houston. But I made the move.
In Houston, a coffee with a friend somehow led to me getting hired by Houston Grand Opera as the principal coach for a new oratorio. It went so well that HGO invited me to join their young artist studio. That led to every other professional opportunity I’ve had since, every opera I’ve conducted or composed. I’m now doing what I feel I was always meant to do with my life—and all because I moved somewhere for a girl. (We’re now married and have two wonderful kids.)
What inspires you about working with SFGC?
I’ve been working with SFGC on this piece since 2021. We were still in the midst of the pandemic, and our first rehearsals were on the internet, with each singer in their respective home! That was the first time I ever heard a note of the piece sung out loud, and it was a ray of light in a dark time. I can’t overstate how moving it was to see these young singers triumph over our isolation to find communion and beauty in singing together.
From then to our 2022 workshop and to the premiere, I’ve been awed by the SFGC’s skill, talent, and most of all spirit. It is miraculous to behold how committed these young singers are, and what joy they take in creating art together. It’s a joy that is contagious to their colleagues and audiences alike, and I am very happy that the opera is a vessel for their extraordinary artistry.
What are you excited to work on in the future? Give us a sneak peek!
I’m a composer in Minnesota Opera’s New Works Initiative where I’ll be teaming with three other librettists in the program to write a song cycle, chamber opera, and a full scale opera.
What advice can you give to our singers that you wish you had received when you were their age?
I had a music teacher in High School. Given my passionate love of both music and theater, he told me I was destined to write operas. But I demurred, and said I didn't think I could. I was creating music of all sorts, but I was intimidated by composing classically. Some of my classical pieces had promise but more were awkward. Certainly nothing was in the same universe as the Mendelssohn Octet (to take another teenager’s composition) so who was I to compose? The teacher accepted my demurral. But I think he should have said “You just need to work your way through it. In every worthwhile pursuit, there will be long periods of discomfort, uncertainty, and searching. That’s part of the process—don’t run away from it, make friends with it instead. Don’t let it be the thing that stops you from doing what you love.”
What inspires you about working with SFGC?
I have always for my whole life gravitated to working with youth. It gives me such hope and strength and delight for our future knowing how many young people are embracing music and art. The enthusiasm and joy is always so abundant and palpable, and I often still feel like a kid, and so I find myself enjoying being surrounded by them. Valérie Sainte-Agathe is just an amazing human being. I'm so grateful to my dear friend Nel Snaidas for introducing us. The human voice is the most organic way to hear a story being told. I spend my whole life trying to make my violin sound like a human voice. This collaboration is one of my favorites and I have been looking forward to it all year!!!
Stephanie Fleishmann, Librettist
Stephanie Fleischmann is a librettist and playwright whose texts serve as blueprints for intricate three-dimensional sonic and visual worlds. Her “lyrical monologues” (NY Times), “finely tuned” opera libretti (Opera News), plays, and music-theater works have been performed internationally and across the U.S. Libretti include: IN A GROVE (Christopher Cerrone; LA Opera, Pittsburgh Opera; In a Circle Records; NY Times Best Classical Music Albums 2023); MEDEA, Michael Hersch; Ensemble MusikFabrik, Cologne) & POPPAEA (Hersch; Wien Modern, Zeiträume Basel; New Focus Recordings); PARADISO (Yevgeniy Sharlat; Hub New Music/Austin Opera); DIDO (Melinda Wagner; Brentano Quartet; 92nd Street Y, Rockport Music Festival and more); ANOTHER CITY (Jeremy Howard Beck; Houston Grand Opera) & THE LONG WALK (Beck; Opera Saratoga, Utah Opera, Pittsburgh Opera); AFTER THE STORM (David Hanlon; HGO) & THE PIGEON KEEPER (Hanlon; Santa Fe Opera); REMEDIOS VARIOS (Carrillo; Chicago Opera Theater). Selected plays/music-theater: RED FLY/BLUE BOTTLE (HERE, EMPAC, Noorderzon), THE SECRET LIVES OF COATS (Red Eye), SOUND HOUSE (New Georges) music by Christina Campanella; THE SWEETEST LIFE (Saskia Lane; New Victory). Selected grants/fellowships: Campbell Librettist Prize, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, Venturous Fund, Howard Foundation, NEA, NYFA, NYSCA, MapFund, Macdowell, New Dramatists, HARP, American Lyric Theater.
Opera is by nature a very collaborative artform. What is your approach to collaborating with composers when writing libretti for operas?
I deep-listen to the composers’ music. We talk forever, dreaming into a story. I devise a structure based on those conversations. We have extensive back and forth about that structure, and then I go away and write. I then revise endlessly (revision is key!), in response to the composer’s (and others’) thoughts. The composer composes, and as they write, I respond at points along the way, asking questions about dramatic arc, build, intention… And so it goes! But most important to me is that the composer is open to a conversation about dramatic intent and how the story is being told in the music, just as I am open to a conversation about how to shape the text so that it supports, responds to, serves both the story we are telling together, and the composer’s unique voice.
You’ve written libretti for many operas. What draws you to opera as an artform? What keeps it relevant to today’s audience?
Opera is transformative. The marriage of music and words has the potential to not just tell stories, but to transcend the literal and the figurative, to reach for what lies beyond the surface of this broken world. Telling stories via the medium of opera allows me to conjure that which is larger than life in order to tap into its essence. The convergence of music, text, and staging transports the viewer/listener into a highly charged emotional space. A haunted space. A space in which anything is possible. Now, more than ever, we need this space.
In addition to libretti, you also write poetry and prose. How do these art forms differ in your experience? How are they similar? Does working on one strengthen the others?
I write plays, and I also write fiction, but I wouldn’t presume to say that I write poetry—even if my libretti might be considered to contain some poetry in them. I do read a lot of poetry, and I am besotted with words, their sounds, the shapes they make when strung together to form a phrase, their kinetic and emotional torque, the way words become worlds in singers’ mouths. There is part of me that believes that hope is not a thing with feathers. Rather, it’s the vocalization, the singing of a single-syllable word with an extended, open vowel, framed by perfectly articulated consonants. I’m also obsessed with the images that words manifest. The worlds conjured in those images. Building worlds from a handful of images, visual images constructed out of a minimum of words. The fact that I am a playwright very much informs the dramatic structures I am constantly experimenting with and putting into motion. That sense of ] urgency, and event. As a playwright I am by necessity interested in set design and visually attuned, which means I think about space, and light as I write. How my characters move through space. How different locations, juxtaposed, resonate. The architectonics, or 3- or even 4-dimensionality of the theatrical space. I think about time as an element, a tool, how does one grapple with the passage of time in the arc of the story? Especially since music is one of the few mediums that allows us to stop time and live in a suspended moment. At least briefly, before the world starts up again. And yes, working on one always strengthens the other! When I was younger, I used to worry that I wasn’t focusing enough on one form to really move forward, careerwise, and then I started to understand that one of my mentors, Thulani Davis, librettist of The Life and Times of Malcolm X, wrote in so many different forms. And that each form informs the next, and that my work is stronger, more idiosyncratic, and also more multi-dimensional, deeper, because of my practice of working in so many different mediums.
What inspires or moves you about The Pigeon Keeper? Tell us a bit about the story and how you connect to it!
My best friend on the planet is a Greek playwright. I’ve spent a lot of time in Greece, amid its elemental landscapes—sun, sea, sky, rocky coasts, olive groves. It’s a place where the past is present, where the days have a certain rhythm, and where people live out their lives in proximity. It’s the birthplace of democracy, which, by the way, was born in a theater. It’s a land of myth, and it’s also a deeply philosophical place. That landscape in itself is inspiring to me. It’s also an entrypoint for people from multiple parts of the world who are fleeing their homes, seeking asylum in Europe. The ongoing crisis of these mass migrations, and how we as humans are responding, or not, to provide aid—safe passage, food, shelter—to those in need, is, for me, at the core of The Pigeon Keeper. And so is the notion of telling a deeply human story via the form of a fable, the imagination at play when birds sing, when a family struggles to grieve, and a boy appears in the middle of the sea. More than anything, what moves me about this story is the way it looks at the elemental and essential human quality of hospitality, which, especially in these times, seems to be in peril; and the resources one plucky 12-year-old finds within herself to overcome the barriers to that hospitality emanating from her environment, her impulse to welcome a stranger into home with an open heart.
The Pigeon Keeper has undergone multiple workshops over multiple years before reaching its premiere. What was your experience of bringing an opera to life from scratch?
David and I thrive in a workshop setting. We learn SO much about the piece we are making when we can hear it in the mouths and bodies of singers. We learn about its arc, and pacing. We learn about which small moments and exchanges are landing, and which aren’t, what’s funny and what’s not, and what tweaks we need to make if our goal is indeed for a certain moment to be funny. Where the thing needs to breathe. How it soars. Without these workshops, the piece would not be where it is today. I’d add that although I’m always inspired by the challenge of an adaptation, I particularly love writing operas whose stories are original, whose stories emanate directly from the creators. I am so grateful to have had this opportunity to dream into this story with David. It’s a story that feels as if it has truly come from that heart place.
What has been the happiest accident of your career so far?
What a wonderful question! I think growing up steeped in music, classical music, may be the happiest accident. That music is in my DNA. So that when I started writing libretti, writing words with and for music, I felt somehow that feeling of coming home, that I had truly found my stride as a writer, a dramatist.
What inspires you about working with SFGC?
What a beautiful sound! What joyful, rigorous music-making! So inspiring to hear all these young treble voices rise up in song! Together! I love how when our amazing SFGC singers are warming up, Terry says to them “Stand tall,” and they do. I wish I’d had someone telling me that when I was their age.
More than anything, what a joy to be able to explore, with young people, a world in which birds witness and speak, and schoolkids, who even if they have a penchant for bullying, are also capable of being moved, of experiencing empathy.
What are you excited to work on in the future? Give us a sneak peek!
I’m working on a beautiful opera with composer Carlos Carrillo called Remedios Varios para las Affliciones del cuerpo y el Espíritu for Chicago Opera Theater, which is having its concert premiere in Chicago on April 5. I’m working with West Edge Opera here in the Bay Area, on a new commission with composer Alyssa Weinberg and San Francisco locals director Elkhanah Pulitzer and mezzo Nika Printz, which will premiere in 2027, with in-process showings upcoming this year and next. Future plans are afoot for In a Grove, the opera I wrote with composer Christopher Cerrone, which just had its New York premiere at the Prototype in January. And Tevye’s Daughters, with composer Alex Weiser, commissioned by American Lyric Theater, is currently in development.
What advice can you give to our singers that you wish you had received when you were their age?
Let it—whatever it is, whatever you dream of doing—take the time it needs. Figuring out your passion and following the path that takes you to where you want to be, doing what you love doing, is a process. A process of discovery. Follow your instincts. Be as open and attuned as you can be to the journey and where it takes you. And don’t be too hard on yourself.
I’ve lived a pretty darn long time, and I feel like I’m just coming into my own!