Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Frankie and Johnny, the music, was just terribly important to me – the Goldberg Variations,
not the Claire de Lune, which actually I am still very ambivalent about whether it’s
really beautiful music or if it’s a piece of schmaltz. But the Goldberg Variations is
really the music most heard in that play, because this is very much variations on, “I
love you, get the hell out of here.” I’m sort of, so as my own comment to myself, “How
do you do theme and variations?” So I listened to that piece a lot. I write to music. It
does inform. Emotionally it creates… It does two things: CD’s are 70 minutes long.
Every time it snaps off I know I’ve written for 70 minutes, 60 to 70 minutes. The second
thing, I think it puts you in a certain kind of mood and so Love! Valour! Compassion! I
wrote almost entirely to Tchaikovsky’s piano music. We’ll see how much of it is in the
play. Someone does play the piano in it. But there’s a lot of other music called for
in the play that is not Tchaikovsky, but it’s the one I wanted to hear when I
wrote it.