These notes appear with Bright Shiny Things’ recording of David T. Little’s What Belongs to You.
Garth Greenwell, the author of the novel on which David T. Little’s What Belongs to You is based, is an intensely musical writer, in two distinct senses. Growing up in Kentucky, Greenwell joined his high-school choir and began taking voice lessons from its director, David Brown. At Brown’s instigation, Greenwell saw his first operas: The Magic Flute and The Turn of the Screw. The latter had a particularly momentous impact on him, ushering both Henry James and Benjamin Britten into his life. Greenwell told the writer Jordan Kisner: “My entire aesthetic compass comes from that day when I was fourteen years old and saw the Kentucky Opera production of Turn of the Screw.” Greenwell went on to study voice at the Interlochen Arts Academy and at the Eastman School of Music, where one of his classmates was the tenor Karim Sulayman, for whom What Belongs to You was written. Despite his turn toward literature, Greenwell remains an exceptionally keen listener. Periodic concert and opera reviews on his Substack, To a Green Thought, are apt to make professional critics feel superfluous.
Musicality also inheres in Greenwell’s prose. It rolls off the page with surging rhythm and burgeoning resonance. Writers of such concentrated style can pose a danger for composers. Wallace Stevens is a notorious example: his language is so steeped in sonic luxury that it routinely defeats adaptation. (God help anyone who tries to set the line “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.”) In the English-language arena, Britten sets the standard for handling writers of inborn musical power—the likes of Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Hopkins. Britten’s ultimate skill is his ability to fuse the rhythmic contours of his textual sources with the natural properties of his compositional voice. What results is a kind of uncanny transubstantiation. In place of an appropriation of one artistic medium by another, you seem to experience the original in heightened form. It is transformed and yet remains the same.
What Belongs to You, Little’s eighth work of music theater, is worthy of the Britten model. It also suggests lessons learned from John Adams, whose Whitman setting The Wound-Dresser presages this score’s piercing empathy. Little fashioned his own libretto, telescoping Greenwell’s prose while preserving its inner music. He begins with the third sentence of the book, and the conversion of prose into lyric text is relatively effortless:
Even as I descended the stairs I heard his voice, which like the rest of him was too large for those subterranean rooms, spilling out of them as if to climb back into the bright afternoon that, though it was mid-October, had nothing autumnal about it; the grapes that hung ripe from vines throughout the city burst warm still in one’s mouth.
Even as I descended the stairs
I heard his voice,
Like the rest of him, too large
For those subterranean rooms.
Though mid-October in Sofia,
It was not autumnal.
Grapes hung ripe from the vines, and
Burst warm in one’s mouth.
A subtle allusion anchors the work in musical history while foreshadowing its emotional trajectory. The tenor’s opening line quotes a corresponding moment in Monteverdi’s Orfeo, which stands close to the beginning of opera as a genre. As Orfeo goes down into the underworld, so does Greenwell’s protagonist make his own descent, into a public bathroom in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he meets a handsome, volatile sex worker named Mitko. The instrumental texture that surrounds the Monteverdi material generates a glistening, charged atmosphere. Clarinet and vibraphone drone on D, which is the tonic note for Monteverdi’s downward-stepping line. But the piano plays a jittery arpeggiated motif in C minor, generating harmonic conflict. Not unlike our narrator, we are at once seduced and set on edge.
Like thousands of operas before it, What Belongs to You is the story of a doomed love affair. The first-person narrator, who might be called the American, is a writer teaching English in Sofia—a refined soul who carries the scars of an abusive upbringing, his father having violently berated him for being gay. His attraction to Mitko is tainted by that family history; certain of the young Bulgarian’s gestures stir memories of his father. Mitko smolders with violence, on one occasion striking the American on the face with the back of his hand. But he himself is troubled, desperate, self-evidently doomed. He invites a paternal solicitude that he refuses. The unstable dynamic between Mitko and the American is at the heart of the opera, although the American’s father looms behind the scene and, in the middle section, engulfs it.
Wisely, Little tends to keep the story’s seething emotion just under the surface, swaddling the American’s monologue in music of eerie, poised calm. A series of allusions—Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Valentini’s “Enharmonic” Sonata, Dowland’s “Flow, My Tears,” Schubert’s Winterreise, Britten’s Death in Venice—hints at the American’s psychological predicament, his strategies of evasion and sublimation. He is an aesthete who seeks refuge in the realm of art. At the same time, that realm is hardly free of existential terrors. The opera will end with the shivering strains of “Der Leiermann,” Schubert’s tableau of an organ-grinder making music in a void: “No one listens to him, / No one looks at him, / And the dogs growl / Around the old man.”
The composer’s own signature is difficult to define but somehow immediately recognizable. I first encountered Little in 2004, when I came across a hyper-dissonant piece of his titled Sunday Morning Trepanation, which likened contemporary religion with the drilling of holes in the skull. More than twenty years on, Little’s music exhibits an open-hearted lyricism that I wouldn’t have expected from him back then; yet, even as he spins out graceful melodies or unveils radiant tonal harmonies, he forsakes any nostalgic longing for lost worlds. There is tension and even menace in his outwardly simple inventions; in that respect, he is close to Britten, who idolized innocence but could not embody it. For a magisterial example of this method, listen for the majestic low piano chords that introduce the American’s ostensibly blissful recollection of a night out in a field with his father (“It must have been summer. My grandparents’ farm”). It is E-flat major in second inversion—a spacious, cosmic harmony, evocative of the constellations above. Percussion adds insectoid obbligato. But this Romantic grandeur is infected. Toward the end of the passage, the vocal line slips into the minor with a G-flat—a microscopic slippage that prepares the ears for the horror to come.
At crucial moments, Little shatters his opera’s Lieder-like façade and unleashes an assaultive vocabulary that invokes not only late-twentieth-century modernism but also the punk-rock and heavy-metal music that fired his youth. There are piercing, alarm-tone dissonances in the wind and brass, cluster chords on the harmonium, junk-metal percussion (“chain on a metal trash can lid,” the score suggests). When the father’s hateful voice breaks in—“You disgust me. / If I had known what you were, / You would never have been born”—Little assigns the words to the instrumentalists, who are instructed to sing in shape-note style, “strong, bright, intensely focused, and almost harsh.” An old Appalachian sound is weaponized as a communal casting out.
Early on, listeners may wonder—even as they admire the intricacy and complexity of the construction—how operatic this opera is. By the end, they will be in no doubt. Mitko, at first so potent, so sexily in command, sheds his aura of dominance as the work goes on. He is on the social margins, and when his health begins to fail, from alcohol consumption and sexually transmitted diseases, he cannot or will not avail himself of the resources that are available to the American. In the process, he becomes a wrenchingly vivid sufferer, almost a male version of the courtesan Violetta in La Traviata. At first, everything we hear and imagine is filtered through the American’s welter of preoccupations—his desires, his fears, his hang-ups, his risk-taking, his cawing crowd of memories. In the final scene, he has stepped back, beholding Mitko’s fully operatic tragedy with an artist’s wide-open, if tear-stricken, eyes. Little gives the last word to Schubert, who, significantly, speaks from both points of the equation: he transcribed in imperishable tones our deepest sorrows, and he died of syphilis at the age of thirty-one.