Little Moon (2011)

Genre: Vocal jazz ballad adapted from an opera aria

Gift of Jazz offered three classes in the summer of 2011 and I took two of them, during which I developed “Rockus Nachas” (Big Band in the 21st Century) and “Little Moon” (Jazz for Vocalists). It also gave me the opportunity to work with Tyler Gilmore one last time before he headed off for graduate school in New England.

Tyler’s assignment for the vocal class was to write an arrangement of an existing jazz standard for vocalist and five-piece ensemble that included trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano, bass and drums. He enlisted the help of Ayo Awosika as the vocalist for our projects. Instead, I decided to try to create an entirely new jazz standard, the culmination of an idea I’d been thinking about for over 25 years. Here’s the story:

In 1984, I travelled to Eastern Europe with my father to do genealogical research in communist Czechoslovakia. I was already a fan of the Czech composers, Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák, so we also sought out opportunities to hear Czech music played in its native setting. Dvořák’s opera, Rusalka, was playing in repertoire at the National Theatre in Prague. (If you’re not familiar with the story of the water nymph who longs to be human, and falls in love with a man she can never have, just think “Little Mermaid”—without the Disney happy ending.) I immediately fell in love with Dvořák’s most famous aria, known in Czech as “Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém,” usually translated into English as “Song to the Moon.”

In my opinion, the melody of this aria is one of the most beautiful in all of music. One of the qualities that makes it so arresting is the momentous octave rise at the very beginning of the “chorus” on the lyric “Oh, Moon.” Human ears are more intensely affected by melodic “leaps,” and the octave interval is about as stirring as you can get. (Harold Arlen borrowed that same dramatic interval for the chorus of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”)

Although Rusalka is one of the most well-loved of Dvořák’s works in the Czech Republic, performing it in English-speaking countries is problematic owing to the difficulty of the Czech language. It had been performed only about 50 times in the United States in the 90 years since it was composed in 1900.

I wanted to find a way to make this aria more accessible to an English-speaking audience and in the intervening years, several events encouraged me not to give up on the dream.
I was inspired first by the Czech writer, Josef Škvorecký. In his rhapsodic novel Dvořák in Love (1987), he claimed that the maestro penned the sketch for this aria while he was still in the U. S. Dvořák was invited to serve as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City from 1892 to 1895. Many of his most well-known pieces (The New World Symphony, the “American” String Quartet in F Major, Cello Concerto in B Minor) are ones he composed during that three-year period. In summertime he retreated to the small, rural, predominantly Czech village of Spillville, Iowa, where Škvorecký claimed he wrote his first sketch of “Song To The Moon.” The opera was completed late in Dvořák’s life, after his return to Europe, but if it was really true that he thought of the idea here, it seemed all the more appropriate that someone create an “American” version.

During Dvořák’s time in New York, he also worked with several African American students (Harry T. Burleigh and Will Marion Cook) and famously encouraged American composers to draw on folk melodies, specifically Negro spirituals and Native American chants, as source material for a new American music.

Škvorecký argued that despite the fact that Dvořák came to the United States on the cusp of the ragtime era (before jazz was even “invented”), his work here nevertheless “had some influence on the acceptance of jazz in America.” With some reasoning and imagination, it’s possible to draw a connecting line from Dvořák to Rubin Goldmark to George Gershwin, Aaron Copeland and Duke Ellington. Given this, it seemed fitting that “Song to the Moon” could be rendered as an American jazz ballad.

Meanwhile, Renee Fleming’s 1997 revival performance of Rusalka with the Metropolitan Opera in New York made Americans more familiar with the opera.

A year later, in 1998, in the newly liberated Czech Republic, a production team took highlights from the opera and created Rusalka: Muzikál, which premiered in Prague on November 13 and 14 of that year. In it, pop singer Bára Basiková sang a new version of the aria as a pop ballad.

In 1999, Americans got another taste of the opera when the aria appeared in the film “Bicentennial Man,” starring Robin Williams. The movie was about an android who struggles to become human, mirroring the theme of the water nymph, Rusalka. The aria played at a pivotal moment in the film, as a kind of musical shorthand for human longing. It was a marvelous use of the tune, but the lyrics were still frozen out of reach for English-speaking audiences.

All these developments helped encourage me to revive this project. Adapting opera to jazz is rare, the notable exception being Gershwin’s “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess. Creating jazz from show tunes, on the other hand, is exactly what jazz musicians have been doing since the inception of the genre. The Czech “pop” version took me conceptually half of the way from opera aria to jazz ballad.

The pop recording also made me feel better about tampering with a cultural icon such as a beloved national opera. If the Czechs could update and “popularize” the music themselves, it seemed reasonable for me to attempt the same in English.

Not wanting an exact duplication of the pop version, I consulted the original score, figured out the chord changes, and reharmonized the piece to fit the jazz idiom. Since the original was in 3/8 time, I created a jazz waltz in Db (a key related by a fifth to Dvořák’s original Gb).

The final obstacle was the most difficult. How do you translate a very difficult language into English, retaining at the same time the essential meaning of the piece, the rhyme scheme of the original text, and all accompanying literary devices? I consulted the original Czech libretto by Jaroslav Kvapil, compared it to several of the (rather stilted) English translations of the text I could find, and attempted to craft a flowing lyric line that would sound like colloquial English speech. I borrowed some of the lines from previous translations and invented the rest, keeping it as close to the original meaning as possible.

At the time, I was playing piano for a jazz ensemble called Zázemí, so I designed the new song, which I called “Little Moon,” for performance by them. Since there were no other English recordings to draw from, I created a Band-in-the-Box prototype and overdubbed it with my own falsetto voice, demonstrating what I thought the phrasing should sound like. Our singer, Mardi Moore, learned the tune and contributed suggestions for improving the singability of the text.

My plan was to record a version with the band that we could have ready for airplay in Denver to coincide with Opera Colorado’s first ever performance of Rusalka in the state of Colorado in February, 2011. I envisioned a “B” side that would include a jazz version of Dvořák’s famous Largo theme from the New World Symphony. Unfortunately our group disbanded and for a variety of reasons—foremost that the plan was never remotely realistic!—it never came to fruition. Thankfully I had a new chance to broaden and formalize my arrangement when Gift of Jazz offered the summer class.

I enlisted my daughter, who was an aspiring vocalist, to sing, dropped the score to the Key of C, and arranged the piece based on my original conception, including a request of the flugelhorn player to “drop in” quotes from the New World Symphony into his solo.

“Little Moon” (“Song To The Moon”) premiered at Dazzle on July 24, 2011. Instead of Ayo Awosika taking the vocal part, daughter Anna performed with a rhythm section that consisted of three of the four members of the local ensemble, Essence Rider: Adam Revell on piano, Jean-Luc Davis on bass, and Josh Moore on drums. The horn parts and solos were performed by Danny Meyer on tenor saxophone and Gabe Mervine on flugelhorn.