Great Performances: A Streetcar Named Desire


	The Making of "A Streetcar Named Desire" By John Ardoin



	Stanley confronts Blanche.


	The premiere of a new opera is always a fascinating moment, but an opera by a renaissance musician like Andre Previn is an event. And when the opera is based on one of America's most acclaimed plays, Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire," the premiere is bound to be a sensation. "Streetcar" is Previn's first opera, and its main characters, Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, have moved from the stage to the screen and now back again, becoming fixtures of the popular imagination. At a news conference announcing the work, Mr. Previn said this dark, Gothic drama "has always been an opera. It's just that the music was missing. It's really the most poetically beautiful play an American has ever produced."


	Previn is not the first composer to attempt to transfer Williams to the opera house. There was Raffaello de Banfield's one-act "Lord Byron's Love Letter" and Lee Holby's musical version of "Summer and Smoke." While Williams's plays might appear ripe for this setting because of their multi-dimensional characters and the taut dramatic situations in which they are enmeshed, there is an inherent danger: the language is so rich that, as Previn implied, it already is music of a sort. But Previn might just be the man to surmount this barrier, for his experience in music is extremely broad-based.


	He was born in Berlin in 1929 as Andreas Ludwig Priwin. Kicked out of the Berlin Hochschule for music because he was Jewish, he immigrated with his family to Los Angeles in 1939, where his great-uncle, Charles Previn, was music director for Universal Pictures. Although Andre began his career in America as a jazz pianist, he was appointed musical director at MGM in 1949 and has since composed 60 film scores and won four Academy Awards. In 1963, he struck out in a different direction, this time as a symphonic conductor, making his debut in St. Louis. His first major post was as music director of the Houston Symphony from 1967 to 1970.



	Stella comforts Blanche.


	For Broadway he wrote the 1969 musical "Coco" for Katharine Hepburn, and for the concert hall he has composed a symphony, two concerti, and chamber music. He has now taken on his biggest challenge as a composer. But why did he wait so long to turn his attention to opera? The answer is disarmingly simple -- he says no one had asked him for one before San Francisco's general manager, Lotfi Mansouri, came up with the idea for "Streetcar." After snagging Previn, Mansouri signed Philip Littell as librettist, who had collaborated on another recent San Francisco world premiere, Conrad Susa's "The Dangerous Liaisons." The next step was adding the production team of director Colin Graham and designer Michael Yeargan.



	Rodney Gilfry as Stanley Kowalski.


	"Streetcar" the play, starring Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando, created a sensation with its first performance in 1947 and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. It reached an even wider audience in 1951, when it was filmed with Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois. Leigh's performance earned her a second Oscar; the film made Brando an acting legend. But what can one expect of "Streetcar" the opera?


	A great deal, given the story's New Orleans setting and Previn's highly charged, theatrical film scores, the lyricism of his songs, and his jazz background. In fact, a Previn opera is an idea whose time is long overdue. In a recent interview, he provided a few hints of what to anticipate: "Certainly 'Streetcar' is tonal. It isn't consummately tonal -- it isn't as tonal as, say, 'Susannah' [a popular opera by Carlisle Floyd], not by a long shot. But, on the other hand, it's not going to keep Elliot Carter awake. There are certain modern operas and song cycles where the vocal line is really tortuous. I could never write that way. I want things to be relatively singable. I want what I write for the orchestra to be playable. So if I tell you that my operatic heroes -- even though this straddles a hell of a lot of styles -- were Britten, Sam Barber, and Strauss, then you kind of know where I am heading."

Because words take longer when sung than when spoken, cuts in the original drama were inevitable. Also, as Littell observed, in an opera "that beautiful, soft rain of Southern talk would drive people crazy." To him, his basic job was "figuring out what the game was in each speech and going for a more direct route. I was actually permitted to invent, to add, a couple of arias for Blanche, a piece for Mitch."

The San Francisco Opera's exceptional cast is headed by Renee Fleming, with baritone Rodney Gilfrey as Stanley. Along with this PBS telecast, their performances were recorded live by Deutsche Grammophon Records, with Previn conducting. Not a bad send-off for a work as yet unknown and untried. But such is the power and pull of Previn's name.



	Blanche is led away as Mitch cries.


	In recent years, stage revivals of the Williams play have been few, and the last Broadway production with Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin was trounced by the press. Maybe, as Previn has suggested, it is time "to put a slight moratorium on it as a play and do it in another medium."

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