made in small batches from Napa Valley and Russian River vineyards.

["Plump Jack" overture] ♪ ♪ This isn't just a pastime for him.

It's something that's essential for him, for his quality of life, for his savor of life.

♪ (Lisa Delan) ♪ Gentles, children, ♪ ♪ come awhile, ♪ ♪ ♪ my song to hear... ♪♪ (Delan, voice-over) He has a deep interior life, and you often see him disappear into that place.

He leaves his ego on the shelf.

It doesn't factor in to his experience as a composer.

The only thing that he cares about is what serves the music.

Okay, let the English horn not play.

Da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum; see?

♪ By God, either one works.

♪ I can't name many composers off the top of my head, but we've had composers that were lawyers, doctors.

We've had all kinds of composers.

This one happens to be a very wealthy billionaire and the son of an oil mogul.

♪ (Job Maarse) Gordon always loved writing and poetry.

He knows everything about Edgar Allan Poe.

He knows everything about Emily Dickinson.

♪ ♪ He is a person who was born to be... in another world.

♪ (Getty) My language is more rooted in the 19th century than in the 20th.

It seems to me that the real me down there that is producing this music is an old-fashioned guy.

♪ (Tom Woodhouse) He is a musician.

He is a financier; he's a mathematician.

There are many more aspects beside those.

♪ This is an amazing wine.

♪ Oh, my God.

♪ He understands human beings.

And he has a very, very good skill for bringing their human qualities through the characters, onto the stage, and into our hearts.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (Getty) I didn't realize my father was the richest American until the "Fortune" article came out in the late '50s.

I was already graduated from college when I knew he was the richest man in America.

He was pretty good at concealing that.

But I knew he was rich.

My father had a lot of hangers-on.

He didn't open the door to everybody, and, of course, Sutton Place is fairly remote, and you can't get past the dogs without an invite.

My father was, I suppose, the model for Scrooge McDuck.

It's true that my father had a pay phone in Sutton Place.

It's a little harder to take me seriously if you... come with the knowledge that I'm the son of J. Paul Getty.

You wouldn't expect the son of an oil billionaire to be an important composer.

On the other hand, it has raised curiosity.

People will listen to say, "Well, what in the heck does the son of J. Paul Getty sound like?"

So it's neither been a curse nor a blessing.

It has been an influence.

[playing notes] (voice-over) If you're a composer, melodies are going on in your noggin all the time.

That was the root of it, wasn't it?

It was melodies that were going on.

When it comes--and you can be doing anything.

Something will hit, and it's got ahold of you.

So when that happens, what do you do?

I have no urgency to run write it down.

If it's any good, it'll still be there.

There are different degrees of thinking a thing through.

In economics or business or music or life, you think it through up to a point, and then you figure the rest will come.

Tunes were going on in my head, some of them just repeated from what I'd heard and some not.

(Thomas) There is a certain mood in your music, Gordon, a couple of moods.

One is this very kind of innocent, happy, kind of lost in the glow of love or remembrance of love, and there is also another mood of yours which is a kind of challenging, kind of eerie mood, sort of your Edgar Allan Poe kind of mood.

Yeah, that registers with me, creepy music.

♪ ♪ ♪ (Getty, voice-over) I don't know what century I belong to.

I'm 75 now.

When I was going to the conservatory, my teachers thought, "Well, here you are "experimenting with this tonal stuff, but surely you're gonna graduate to serialism."

I said, "I'm not so sure!"

When you say 75-- it makes you a boy as far as I'm concerned.

I know, a senior citizen!

Yes, I could pat you on the head!

["Ancestor Suite"] ♪ But with "Ancestor Suite," looking at it, first of all, because it was all dances, I assumed it was for a ballet, but I don't believe this was in your mind.

Actually, yes, it is a ballet.

♪ The subject is the walking dead.

[laughing] ♪ To be performed at the Bolshoi with the National Orchestra, danced, that's a big event for any composer, a big event.

♪ (voice-over) What is fantasy about?

It's about the fact that we learn about the world by making stuff up that describes the world in vivid Technicolor and maybe not in the light of day.

♪ [indistinct chatter, musicians warming up] My version--not Poe's-- of "Usher House" is like "Swan Lake."

There are demons and pure souls.

[speaking in Russian] (interpreter) It was strange, but in Edgar Poe's story, initially there was no love.

There was no love.

No, but in me-- Yes, but you had it.

♪ ♪ (Thomas) That period, you know, that sort of Edgar Allan Poe kind of period, that period in American literature, which I think appeals to you very strongly and from which some of your own texts seem to arrive, has those moods, doesn't it, of that kind of fragile innocence on one side and kind of this specter of terror on the other side.

It has to be a complete picture.

There has to be yin and yang to it.

It has to be me.

♪ In all the work of Poe put together, there is scarcely a single attractive character, in all of his stories put together.

But if you write a ballet without a single attractive character, it's hard to keep the audience on board.

There has to be somebody they care about.

Giving myself three sympathetic characters-- Madeline is mad, and she cannot speak, but she's pure, mad but pure, like Lucia or Ophelia or Olympia.

♪ ♪ ♪ Usher also has one foot in the ancestors' camp.

He took the oath, but now he repents having done so.

♪ Poe is the outsider and who they want to suck in to taking the oath.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Here, in a big part of your life, you're dealing with issues of finance and not just the decisions of what moves you want to make, but also the kind of theoretical ideas of what's going on in the world of economics and finance.

That's so, isn't it?

About two months ago, I started to write a book on it and trying to really wrestle all the issues to the ground, and it takes everything I've got.

(Woodhouse) The sale of Getty Oil, I believe, was the largest corporate transaction in American history.

It was a $10-billion transaction.

J. Paul Getty decided that Gordon would be a proper person to act in this trustee role.

Gordon arranged for the sale of the company to Texaco at precisely the right moment.

There is certainly an acuteness that I imagine they both share.

Voluntarily, a single-mindedness.

If they want to be thinking about a particular thing, nothing is going to interrupt that.

You know, a strong focus.

My own two bits' worth, it's almost more dangerous to have too much money than too little, to have been born that way.

If you make it once you're a grown-up, that's a different story 'cause you're already complete.

But children can gag on a silver spoon.

My father thought that way, and I've always felt the same.

I think that more than just a little is a curse.

If you have ideals and the ideal is something bigger than you-- music is something bigger than me.

It's...a mountain I'm trying to climb.

Then, then you might escape the curse.

There are other Gettys that have dodged it.

Others have been clobbered.

[indistinct shout] [siren wailing] (male reporter) Paul Getty III, the grandson of the American millionaire, was eventually released in exchange for a $3-million ransom in December 1973, but only after his abductors had cut off his right ear and sent it to a national newspaper.

(William Newsom) I was the godfather of young Paul Getty, who was kidnapped.

The senior Paul Getty and I became sort of involved in that case.

I was with Gail when she-- a lurid detail of life-- but when she received his ear in the mail.

Mm, great God!

Yeah, and I remember saying the most inane thing I'd ever said in my life.

I've said a lot of inane things, but this takes the cake.

I said, "That's not Paul's ear."

I didn't know what else to say, you know.

And she said, "Oh, yes, it is, Bill."

And it was, of course.

God.

["Usher House" overture] (Getty, voice-over) Three years after that performance in Moscow of "Ancestor Suite," I had the good luck to have "Usher House" recorded.

♪ I first thought of writing an opera on "The Fall of the House of Usher" when I was still in college, and maybe earlier, I don't know.

♪ Well, to hear a piece of yours for the first time, especially when it's being recorded at the same time, is a little scary.

"Usher House" is my opera based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," and I've kept his first paragraph, which I set to music: "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day "in the autumn of the year "when the clouds hung "oppressively low in the heavens, "I'd been passing alone "through a singularly dreary tract of country "and at length found myself, "as the shades of evening drew on, within sight of the melancholy House of Usher."

♪ In the dramaturgy of "Usher House," most of the ideas are hackneyed, and I don't mind that.

A lot of the musical devices are corny.

I don't mind that, if it is from way down deep.

♪ (Larry Foster, voice-over) There is nothing new in musical composition as such.

What is new, in a funny kind of way, is to compose the way Gordon Getty composes.

He is clearly a composer who loves writing for singers and knows how to write for singers.

(male singer) ♪ I had been passing alone ♪ ♪ on horseback ♪ ♪ through a singularly dreary tract of country ♪ ♪ and at length found myself, ♪ ♪ as the shades of evening drew on, ♪ ♪ within view of the melancholy House... ♪ ♪ of Usher.

♪♪ (Getty) Dearheart Lisa, she's Madeline, but she has no words, comes in at the end.

♪ Sister, I am here!

♪ [vocalizing] ♪ I will comfort you!

♪ [vocalizing] ♪ Madmen!

Madmen!

♪ ♪ I tell you, she now stands ♪ ♪ behind that door!

♪♪ [dramatic music] ♪ ♪ ♪ I think that's all.

Let me see if there's any other Ushers to usher in.

[chuckles] I think that's the lot!

I think we've ushered them in.

(male emcee) As her first selection this evening, Miss Lynch sings the famous "Gypsy" song from Bizet's opera "Carmen."

♪ [recording of Lynch-Getty singing in French] (Getty, voice-over) Teddy was my dad's 5th wife.

She lived in Italy during the war.

She's still glamorous to me, dear soul, and just turned 100.

She's just always very dear to my heart.

Who, living and breathing, knew me as a little boy?

Offhand, I can't think of anyone else.

You were in a wonderful uniform.

(Getty) We went to military schools.

Tried to teach us some discipline, [laughing] I think with total failure!

Well, it brought out a wonderful thing in you: your idea of saying, "I will do it "no matter what the guard says here, "or the president says; I shall do what I want."

This man had a determination at seven that you see now.

(Lynch-Getty, on recording) ♪ Fish got to swim, ♪ ♪ and birds got to fly.

♪♪ (Lynch-Getty, voice-over) I was singing in a nightclub, and Betsy Beaton from California walked in with a whole group.

She said, "Teddy, I want you to meet Paul from California."

I said, "Hello."

He said, "Hello, Teddy, nice to meet you."

He said, "You have an interesting voice.

I like the quality of it."

I thought, That's a nice introduction.

Why didn't he say, Gee, you're a pretty sexy-looking dame, you know, or something?

I said to Paul, "What do you do?"

And Betsy called across the table, "He's in oil."

And I said, "What show is that?"

[laughing] (Getty) Teddy, when she came back to America, they lived in the beach house, which was right in Santa Monica on the water.

(Lynch-Getty) And he made it.

Nobody helped him.

(Getty) The most amazing man I ever met was my dad.

(Lynch-Getty) Yes.

The most amazing man I ever met.

So many men, they depend so much on another person, and he seemed to be a loner.

If he was worried about something, he went and studied it.

He could do any job of any employee in his company.

For example, the electro-logs, he could read 'em as well as the engineers.

(Lynch-Getty) Marvelous.

(Getty) He could drive the forklift.

(Lynch-Getty) He was out there in the oil field with his father.

It's sort of like your story.

You've done the same thing, so I admire you.

(Getty) Teddy and my dad had a son, Timmy, born in 1946.

At age 6, he developed a brain tumor, and at age 12, he died during one of his many brain operations.

(Lynch-Getty) He was a great little boy.

There was an angel.

And he was very close to God all his life.

He would tell me, "Don't worry; God'll fix it."

♪ [soft piano music] (Delan) ♪ She bore it ♪ ♪ till the simple veins ♪ ♪ traced azure on her hand.

♪ [music pauses] [piano music resumes] ♪ Till pleading, round her quiet eyes ♪ ♪ the purple Crayons stand... ♪♪ Just incredible to think of her sitting in this very spot and looking out this window while she was writing all those... hundreds of... poems.

♪ "How we sung," see?

Maybe sang; I don't know.

I think it's sung, though.

(Woodhouse) I went to Amherst and was quite fascinated at the time with Emily Dickinson.

So when I heard from Lisa that there was a new recording of "The White Election" and it was going to have an inaugural performance somewhere, I urged her to consider having it at Amherst.

The librarian had prepared for his visit and had the manuscripts of many of Emily's poems, which are in the Amherst collection, on display and was good enough to actually open the display cabinets and let Gordon touch them if he wanted.

But he was reading those manuscripts with immense interest, and, in particular, since most of them were poems that he had put to music in "White Election," he was reading those poems.

♪ ♪ ♪ It gives you a turn to hear that, having seen the little guy's rocking horse.

(voice-over) And this was the room of the little boy Gib, who died of diphtheria at age eight.

Playing in the mud and got a cold, and it got worse.

And one of... the songs from "The White Election" is set to a poem of Emily's that seems to have been about Gib.

And it goes: "The going from a world we know "to one a wonder still "is like the child's adversity whose vista is a hill..." ♪ Behind the hill is sorcery ♪ ♪ ♪ and everything unknown.

♪ ♪ ♪ But will the secret compensate... ♪ ♪ ♪ for climbing it alone?

♪♪ (Getty, voice-over) The last one is her death: "I sing to use the waiting, my bonnet but to tie, "and shut the door unto my house.

"No more to do have I "till, his best step approaching, "we journey to the day "and tell each other how we sang to keep the dark away."

The problem is that you... (Maarse, voice-over) My role is pretty modest.

I'm a record producer, and I've been in the music business a long time, so I certainly can give him some advice here and there.

...low and then you correct it.

(Maarse, voice-over) A lot of people think he is a little different from most other people or he's sort of an absent-minded professor.

Sometimes he might be; I don't know.

On my most alert days, I'm pretty absent-minded.

When composing the piano version of "Annabel Lee" way back when, in the '80s, I was at it so intensely that, one night, I went to the symphony.

Well, I noticed, at the intermission, I didn't have my car keys on me.

I phone home and ask them to come pick me up 'cause I realized I must have left the keys in the car.

They come over with another set and open the car.

I had left the keys in the car and left the motor running!

I mean that absent-minded!

[plane engine idling] (Maarse) Most composers find it very difficult to have their music performed.

I think with Gordon there is something on top of that.

He also happens to be probably the richest composer in the world.

And I think there is this perception with a lot of people that if you are that famous and wealthy, you can't be a real artist, you can't be a real fantastic composer, which of course is nonsense, but that's what people think.

So I think that doesn't help him.

My very first reaction was also like, "Gordon Getty?

Does he write music, and can it be any good?"

There's no reason for thinking like that, but you do, and it's obvious that a lot of other people do that as well.

(Delan) First of all, I think it takes tremendous courage to go out there again and again in the face of critical press calling you a dilettante or not taking you seriously because of your backgroun He went through the years where he had to struggle against this kind of perception until the music spoke for itself to the extent that he could overcome it.

[indistinct voices on intercom] (Getty) It's quite true that sometimes I get a little bit impatient with the people that think I'm a dilettante.

That's not quite-- that's not the case.

I do think that my music happens to reach the big audience, whether in the concert hall, the opera house, anywhere.

And it's not because I'm targeting my music to any audience at all.

I'm targeting to an imaginary audience of a thousand people just like me.

I'm trying to please myself.

I'm the only critic I really care about.

But I think that I happen to be on the wavelength of the big audience, and I'm not ashamed to be, like some composers might be.

How many years, all told, have you worked on the "Plump Jack" project?

It's what, 10, 20?

It's a big chunk of your life.

Sam Wanamaker came to me, wanted me to set one or two of the Shakespeare sonnets for his Globe thing, and he offered me a commission.

So I accepted, really tongue in cheek.

Instead of the sonnets, I began all of "Plump Jack."

[laughing] [instrumental music from "Plump Jack"] The first time that any performance of mine has been on a billboard.

♪ (Gordon Campbell) He came here to hear the piece in its totality, and so he had a chance to see whether or not what he had written worked in the broad scope, from beginning to end.

And all of a sudden he said, "My goodness, I didn't do what I wanted to do in that very opening part."

♪ My Lord Chief Justice... ♪♪ (Campbell, voice-over) It had to do with his moment of saying, You know, I just didn't compose this well enough.

♪ Live from France.

♪♪ Okay... un, one, two.

(Getty, voice-over) And it's just so tough.

They've been working so hard, and even if they worked another thousand years, it wouldn't work 'cause I botched my job.

♪ ...his Fancies ♪ ♪ or his good-nights.

♪ [dramatic burst of music] ♪ And, and-- ♪♪ Sorry.

Where is it starting to-- The first 40 or 50 measures... (Delan, voice-over) He's aware that he is constantly evolving, that he's gaining new insights and skills as he moves through life... Is there somewhere we could cut that's not so far into the scene?

(Delan, voice-over) ...and is courageous enough to criticize his previous work through the lens of where he is in the present moment.

And he has no qualms about going back and saying, "That's not it; I could do this better."

(Getty) I couldn't make head nor tail of it.

I can't even figure out whether it's me or what.

I know that the first 30 or 40 or 50 measures, I've screwed up.

In the end, he decided that he wanted to make the jump right to the place where there would be no problem with the dramatic content and completely deep-six the opening part.

I know what I should do at the beginning there, but I just didn't do it.

But I've got to rewrite it; I really do.

My humble opinion is that at least the first 16 bars...go fine.

Oooh, oh!

I've got to worry about my reputation.

The problem is that I was too stuck with my solutions of 15 years ago, and I got to just kind of get 'em out of my mind and start over.

It's a work in progress, isn't it?

Yeah.

[indistinct chatter, musicians warming up] (Getty) Yeah, you get apprehensive, what's gonna go wrong.

(voice-over) What are the criteria by which you judge a composer?

I can only think of one: Does he make the audience cry?

Even better, does he make me cry?

To hell with the audience.

That's my only standard of a composer.

Your operas are performed at the great opera houses, whereas mine have never been performed yet at a major opera house.

It's a labor of love.

Yeah, it's always a labor of love.

(Corigliano) I took 12 years to write "Ghosts," and you took 20 years to write "Plump Jack."

I would keep thinking it was finished.

The first scene was the whole thing, and then three scenes.

Then I had spoken scenes, and they didn't work, and so I had to set them to music.

How come you can write an opera now in two weeks?

That's what I want to know!

What is your secret to that?

[laughing] I'm slipshod!

[laughing] How long does it take you to write a big piece like that?

It takes me two weeks to write an eighth note, and then I erase it.

In recent years, the direction your music has gone has, of course, continued to be tonal music.

It grows more adventurous, especially in some of your pieces which deal with weirder or more dangerous subjects.

Also, there has been a tremendous increase in your handling of the orchestra, and you're actually assigning a lot of very challenging solo parts for members of the orchestra.

Orchestration came slowly to me.

I'm the same composer I was at age ten.

I find some old scraps of stuff somehow or other of my writing: letters I wrote home from summer camp in grade school.

It's me!

You can tell it's me.

And music, too, it's me.

But as an orchestrator, I was a very slow learner.

Even now, I consider myself above average, but that's all.

[choir singing] ♪ (Getty) Two years after the performance we saw in Mexico, I had the opportunity to record not all of "Plump Jack"-- I wouldn't want to record all of it-- but the scenes I was most confident of.

♪ I never got any practical experience of what instruments can do what.

I never played in an orchestra, and so I never got hands-on experience.

It's like a guy who sits in the stands or reads a book on baseball, but never got out there and fielded a grounder.

Where now, I have a pretty good idea of what's gonna be heard when I write it down.

♪ Another rule that I follow-- it's just instinctive with me-- is to.. keep changing.

I don't want to be too predictable.

You keep the audience on its toes by a little surprise here and there.

["Plump Jack" cello solo] ♪ Here you have... a bit like in French paintings, pointillism.

So you can have a look to each point of the sound.

♪ ♪ So what was the very first part that you composed?

"No, My Good Lord," the aria, "No, My Good Lord."

One good rule in composing anything, if a certain part of it is going to be particularly challenging and take everything you've got, why not do it first so you have the freedom of not being boxed in by decisions?

♪ Banish not him thy Harry's company.

♪ ♪ ♪ Banish not him thy Harry's company.

♪ ♪ ♪Banish plump Jack...♪ ♪ ♪ and banish all the world.

♪♪ ♪ A great deal of your music actually does spring from you singing this, really trying it out with your own voice.

And I have sung it for the public.

I mean, not much of a public, just a little classroom or something.

When Gordon Getty sings impromptu a song unaccompanied, he reveals himself.

[singing a cappella in foreign language] (Breault) He doesn't have the greatest voice.

I mean, he's in his 70s.

[singing] But there's an incredible skill there, and the skill is that, when he sings, he touches your heart.

[singing] (Breault) It's because, when he sings, he means it.

He means it.

[laughs] [vocalizing] (Breault) My job is to try and figure out how to do what he does so memorably, which is to care so much about the human beings that he puts onstage and the characters that he creates.

That's the greatest call, the greatest challenge, too, that I have as a performer... ♪ ...the days that we have seen!

♪♪ The ideal of singing is a... (Breault, voice-over) ...is to see what he does when he's eating his food and drinking his wine in a rathskeller in Munich... (woman, laughing) No, no, no, no!

(Breault, voicover) ...and try to put that same energy into that which we put onstage and have the audience get it, have them think, Hmm, this is real.

A big piece of music, it usually takes a gestation period.

You are never quite ready to sit down and hammer into it, and one day, you are and you do, and it just blasts along.

So when that happens, does that mean you're kind of in a period of withdrawal from your economic theories or your other processes and that's what you're doing?

Any composer worthy of the name or any composer that's outside of a lunatic asylum has a lot of integrity as a composer because there's no money in it anyhow.

The only way to make money is in some other field than composing.

We do it 'cause we have to.

[bicycle bell ringing] [fountain babbling] (Getty) It's a rare honor to have your opera premiered at one of the major opera houses.

[indistinct chatter, musicians warming up] (female director) It's your first call.

Ladies and gentlemen of the orchestra, this is your beginners' call.

Mr. Bevan and Mr. Bridges... [ominous music humming] ♪ ♪ [buzzing percussive sound] ♪ (Getty) When I first discussed this project with David Pountney, I suggested to him that the ancestors could very well be projections and that the set itself could be essentially projections.

♪ ...then the ride here ♪ ♪ through your picturesque marshland.

♪♪ (Pountney) And what was new about what we did here, which was David Haneke's idea, is that, instead of having a fixed projector, which projects an image and you may move scenery through the projection, actually we would build a piece of scenery which included the projector so that, when you move the piece of scenery around, the projection always stayed where it was, and you don't lose the focus or move out of it.

And that's kind of a rather pleasing illusion, isn't it?

♪ ...without further preface by me.

♪♪ Good God!

(Haneke) If you want to create the house, you're talking about walls.

A house has walls.

And having three walls on a stage, which I can alter constantly because it's video-- I don't paint it-- and be able to add a physical movement of these walls as being able to move the screens, it's a complex process, and you have an idea, and as long as you don't see this idea working, it is a theory.

And it's very relieving that it works.

♪ (Getty) You would have practically no architectural sets to move off and on again, and at the touch of a button.

And if The Met did things that way, their stagehands would be reduced, I think, from several hundred to something in two figures.

♪ To me, there are certain things where it would not be appropriate: you know, if you are doing "The Magic Flute" and want to say, "Well, this is a lake," and you pull a blue handkerchief out and create a lake in a very simple way.

But if we're just moving a handkerchief, that doesn't take 300 stagehands either.

That's, that's true!

That's true!

[indistinct comment] I play the role of Roderick Usher, who lives in splendid isolation in the middle of nowhere.

♪ Nothing can be... ♪ (Bevan, voice-over) I've gone mad in this house, and Edgar Allan Poe comes to visit.

(Bevan, voice-over) So, um, it's a very spooky and strange place and the perfect setting for a very gothic turn of... the living dead.

I even get to do a horror laugh.

How about that?

[sinisterly] Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

♪ And I've got this sister who is a zombie, right, and she lives in a coffin in the vault.

♪ ♪ ♪ And then I have a resident doctor to look after her, who also happens to be my ancestor, who died... [laughing] about 1500 years ago!

♪ ♪ [Madeline screaming] [dramatic music] ♪ What is it like for you when you hear one of your pieces for the first time?

Especially if it's a piece that I know is going to work, then it's exhilarating.

♪ [applause] ♪ ♪ You have done prodigies... ♪♪ [music and singing] (Getty) My cantata "Joan and the Bells" is based on the story of Joan of Arc, one of the greatest heroes of France.

She was a central figure of the Hundred Years War in the 15th century.

The year is 1431, and Joan is on trial for heresy and dressing as a man... and convicted.

And she admitted to those charges based on the promise that her life would be spared.

♪ [chorus singing] ♪ Your music seems to be very sincere.

You write what you have in your heart.

You don't invent music, which is what to write, what combination of sound, maybe use this and that.

It's not you.

If you write with enough integrity, originality will come as a by-product.

Exactly, exactly.

Justice, she's a witch.

♪ Justice, she's a witch... ♪ [music and singing] ♪ She is a witch!

♪ [music and singing] (Pletnev, voice-over) When I talk to him, I always have a feeling he's living in his own world, a world of fantasies, world of art, world of music, world of history.

(Delan) I've often thought that he seems to have a direct psychic connection to the characters that he writes about.

It's uncanny, the extent to which he's able to inhabit their experience and write about it in first person.

And looking at the way that he's portrayed the inner life of a 16-year-old girl about to go to her death in Rouen is almost unimaginable.

He experiences joys and pains of others as his own.

(chorus) ♪ What is it?

She's... ♪♪ (Getty) She is executed and burned at the stake and is now a saint and, to my mind, one of the most moving and powerful figures in all of history.

I wrote this cantata because I think this is a tremendous story.

At the end of it all, three separate sets of bells ring out fortissimo in cacophony from the back and front of the house, surrounding the audience with bells.

[singing and bells ringing] [singing and bells ringing] [music rising in intensity] ♪ ♪ [rhythmic clapping] (Getty, voice-over) Any composer worth his salt, and including me, doesn't really care what trends he fits and what trends he doesn't fit.

Any composer worth listening to writes the music that's inside of him trying to get out.

That's what I'm doing.

We just got past a century, the 20th century, where there was a perception of trends.

That perception is past us.

We're no longer thinking in terms of trends.

The story of music may or may not have a past and future.

Music is simply music.

♪ CompuScripts Captioning ccaptioning.com ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (announcer) Support for this program was provided by Peter Paul Wines, made in small batches from Napa Valley and Russian River vineyards.