The Brightness of Light, for Soprano, Baritone, and Orchestra
Kevin Puts was born January 3, 1972, in Saint Louis, Missouri, and lives Yonkers, New York. An expansion of his 2016 song cycle Letters from Georgia, The Brightness of Light was commissioned at the request of soprano Renée Fleming by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, Music Director; the University of Texas at Austin/Texas Performing Arts; Colorado Symphony (Brett Mitchell, Music Director); National Symphony Orchestra (Gianandrea Noseda, Music Director); Eastman School of Music/Howard Hanson Institute for American Music; and Artis-Naples for the Naples Philharmonic (Andrey Boreyko, Music Director). The libretto was created by the composer from Georgia O’Keeffe’s letters. Renée Fleming and baritone Rod Gilfry were the soloists in the world premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons at Tanglewood on July 20, 2019. Wendall Harrington created the visual projections that accompany the piece in performance.
The score for The Brightness of Light calls for soprano and baritone solo voices, 2 flutes (2nd and 3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets (2nd doubling E-flat clarinet), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets (1st doubling piccolo trumpet in B-flat), 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (3 players: crotales, glockenspiel, chimes, xylophone, vibraphone, gongs, triangle, suspended cymbal, Chinese symbol, claves, bass drum), piano/celesta, harp, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Since I cannot sing, I paint.
—Georgia O’Keeffe
Kevin Puts was approached in 2015 by the Eastman School of Music to write a piece for a fellow Eastman alum, the soprano Renée Fleming, to be performed by the Eastman Philharmonia in New York City. The result was Letters from Georgia, an orchestral song cycle setting correspondence from Georgia O’Keeffe assembled into a libretto by the composer. Puts by that time had become known as an opera composer: his first operatic project, Silent Night, composed for Minnesota Opera, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, and his The Manchurian Candidate was premiered by Minnesota Opera in spring 2015. (His chamber opera Elizabeth Cree was premiered by Opera Philadelphia in 2017. All three set libretti by Mark Campbell.) As the composer relates in his own program note (see below), it was Fleming who suggested the piece be expanded to incorporate the dramatic and balancing presence of Alfred Stieglitz, here sung by the baritone Rod Gilfry.
Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, Puts came to classical music through recordings of such composers as Beethoven and Dvořák in his parents’ collection, but he was also inspired by film soundtracks. A particular favorite film composer was John Williams, whose music for Star Wars and other films Puts tried to emulate at the piano as a kid. Drama, storytelling, and character development, the central forces of classic film music, have always been key elements of Puts’s own work, even before he began concentrating on opera as a genre. When he did begin composing opera relatively recently, it was a kind of relief to be able to have fully fleshed-out characters actualized with words and deeds as well as with music. Poetry, too—the sound of words and the liveliness of imagery—is a strong inspiration, as is evident from the texts the composer selected for The Brightness of Light.
Puts attended the Eastman School, where he earned his bachelor’s degree and returned for his doctorate; he earned his master’s degree at Yale. He was also a Tanglewood Music Center Fellow in 1996. Among other honors, he received the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Rome for the 2002-03 academic year. Puts is a strong advocate for younger composers: he has directed the Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute and has taught at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the University of Texas, and the Juilliard School.
The Brightness of Light was the first of Puts’s works to be played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra when the orchestra premiered it in summer 2019, but many of the BSO’s players have performed his music. The Boston Symphony Chamber Players played his Seven Seascapes in 2017, and his Millennium Canons was commissioned for the Boston Pops, who premiered it under Keith Lockhart in June 2001; it was brought back for the 2002 Pops season. Puts’s orchestral works include his Symphony No. 2 for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and a multimedia orchestral work The City, co-commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra along with the Cabrillo Festival and Carnegie Hall, which was premiered in Baltimore in 2016. Along with four symphonies, he has written a number of pieces for soloist(s) with orchestra, including concertos for string quartet, flute, oboe, clarinet, percussion, marimba, violin, and cello. The Minnesota Opera released a recording of Puts’s Pulitzer-winning Silent Night, and his Silent Night Elegy, an orchestral fantasy based on the opera, was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in October 2018. In September 2019, his orchestral work Virelai was premiered by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra led by Stephane Dénève in his first concert as music director. His triple concerto Contact for the trio Time for Three (two violins and double bass) was premiered by the Florida Orchestra in 2022 and won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
Puts’s most prominent success so far has been his opera The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham’s novel, which also developed from conversations between Puts and Renée Fleming. Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, it was premiered in a concert version under Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s direction in March 2022 in Philadelphia. Nézet-Séguin also conducted the first staged production at the Metropolitan Opera in November 2022. Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, and Kelli O’Hara starred in the original run; it was so well-received that it was brought back the following season.
Although The Brightness of Light is not an opera—the composer thinks of it more as an orchestral song cycle—the libretto exhibits a compelling dramatic arc complete with a kind of dénouement, assembled thoughtfully and painstakingly from image-filled, poetic selections from a huge cache of letters between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Puts asked the renowned visual artist Wendall Harrington to create, from images centered on O’Keeffe, her art, and her world, projections that add a further dimension to the piece and continually remind us of the painter’s distinctive work.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), arguably the most popular and familiar U.S.-born painter in history, famously lived and worked in Taos, New Mexico, for much of her life, but she grew up in Wisconsin and Virginia and pursued art studies peripatetically. It was via a friend that a few of her abstract drawings found their way to the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery on New York’s Fifth Avenue, where he exhibited several in spring 1916. The Hoboken-born Stieglitz (1864-1946) was educated in Germany and came to photography in part via the study of chemistry; he started receiving recognition for his photographic work already in his early twenties. Returning to New York City in 1890, he began promoting photography as an art form, and along with exhibiting his own work promoted the work of other photographers. He established the 291 gallery in 1908. Following his encounter with O’Keeffe’s art and then the woman herself, she became the subject of much of his photography between 1918 and 1925. He divorced his wife of thirty years, Emmeline Obermeyer, in 1924 and married O’Keeffe a few months later. Complications ensued. Stieglitz had an intense and ongoing affair with another woman, and by the end of the 1920s O’Keeffe was largely independent, spending significant time in New Mexico and elsewhere, and over the course of the 1930s becoming one of the most sought-after living artists. Nevertheless she and Stieglitz remained emotionally close until his death in 1946.
Kevin Puts’s The Brightness of Light begins with an Introduction, a brief textual and somewhat more expansive orchestral evocation of O’Keeffe’s connection to the luminous universe. “First Correspondence” introduces the characters as they are in 1916: O’Keeffe begins with a prosaic query and is answered more volubly by the older, more confident Stieglitz. In turn her words bloom, at the same time becoming more personal. The vocal melodic lines expand correspondingly, as does the coloristic activity of the orchestra. Pulsing sixteenth-notes in the vibraphone, a recurring sonic idea, provide energy and tension. Note the slight overlap of O’Keeffe’s second letter with the end of Stieglitz’s signoff; later in the setting the complete overlap of their sung texts represents total intimacy. Another detail: the pauses throughout the soprano’s melodic lines reflect O’Keeffe’s hesitation, reflected in her confession that “Words and I—are not good friends at all.” In the following song, Stieglitz’s “A Soul Like Yours,” he expresses his breathless infatuation, ending with repetitions of O’Keeffe’s name. “Ache” is O’Keeffe’s reply, brief imagistic interjections by Stieglitz seeming like physical manifestations of her memories of him.
In “Georgia and Alfred” (Orchestral Interlude No. 1), Puts displays one of his most important talents, already heard in the Introduction—that of creating through music, especially his fine ear for orchestration, an “emotional contour” and sense of the environment, part physical, part metaphysical, that underlies the narrative. A sixteenth-note sextuplet pulse in the vibraphone and flutes contrasts with the sustained, wispy harmonies in the lower winds. Strings join with quiet harmonies, but eventually sparks start to fly, little flurries of activity in vibes, piano, violins, and flutes.
At the end of the interlude the violinist is asked to “Begin tuning violin with great, amateurish difficulty,” announcing the humorous “Violin,” which also serves to re-center our attention on O’Keeffe as a hermetic being. She addresses Stieglitz but is somehow centered in her solitude. Stieglitz’s impassioned “Faraway” acknowledges the inevitability of their separation: “Haven’t I worked all these years to set you free from me?”
“Taos,” like the Introduction, “Violin,” “Friends,” and “Sunset,” is one of the original Letters from Georgia movements, which Fleming requested be incorporated essentially whole into the bigger piece (though they’re reordered for narrative purposes). Each puts the focus on the best-known version of O’Keeffe, essentially alone in the desert, working intensely on her very personal, unique art. By contrast, “The Thing You Call Holy” is an intense duet that brings them together while setting the stage for her independent artistic life. “The High Priestess of the Desert” (Orchestral Interlude No. 2), is active and energetic in its depiction of O’Keeffe’s focus and imagination as she engages in that pursuit. Taking artistic license, Puts thought of the two final songs as letters written by O’Keeffe to Stieglitz during the years and decades after his death. “Friends” is anti-rhapsodic, introspective yet practical in its language. O’Keeffe’s violin, or an idealized version of it, is her own accompaniment. With the glowing harmonies of “Sunset,” the painter herself expands and glows, ultimately becoming one with her art, with the whole of her world.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.
Kevin Puts on his The Brightness of Light:
In 2015, I received the honor of a commission from my alma mater, the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. The school’s orchestra was planning a trip to perform at Lincoln Center and wanted to include a new work written by an alumni composer to feature an alumni performer. The performer they had in mind was Renée Fleming and—to my great excitement—she accepted the offer, thereby initiating one of the most treasured collaborations of my career.
We wanted to focus on an iconic American woman as the subject, and I happened on a quote by Georgia O’Keeffe: My first memory is of the brightness of light, light all around.
I could imagine this line sung right at the start. I learned that O’Keeffe had written thousands of letters over the course of her lifetime, many of them to Alfred Stieglitz, the renowned photographer and art curator who became her husband. Sarah Greenough’s indispensable two-volume My Faraway One (Vol. 2 forthcoming) includes the complete correspondence between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz from their first contact in 1915 until Stieglitz’s death in 1946. With intense emotion—and often humor—these letters chronicle O’Keeffe’s journey from a young artist enthralled by and indebted to the older Stieglitz to her complete immersion in the North American Southwest where she lived alone for many years, finding inspiration for her best-known works. The letters themselves are the property of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, and I am deeply grateful for the right they granted me to craft a “libretto” made of excerpts from the letters. Letters from Georgia was premiered by Ms. Fleming and the Eastman Philharmonia at Alice Tully Hall on November 14, 2016, with Neil Varon conducting.
Having wholeheartedly embraced the role of O’Keeffe, Renée proposed expanding the work to include an equal part for Stieglitz. I welcomed this challenge of creating a larger work which would encompass their years both together and apart, from the first cautious exchanges between the two artists, through their impassioned and complicated relationship, to the years long after Stieglitz’ death, when I imagine O’Keeffe writing to him even still.
By design, all the music from Letters found its way into The Brightness of Light. Ironically perhaps, it was the vivid, poetic language of these two artists best known for their visual art which I found most inspiring in the creation of these works.
It has been a great privilege to work with the baritone Rod Gilfry who brings his tremendous gifts to the role of Stieglitz. I am grateful to Wendall Harrington for creating the projections which accompany the work, to Bette and Joseph Hirsch for their generous support of the work’s first incarnation, and to all the co-commissioners who have made its creation possible.
Kevin Puts, 2019
