Congratulations to fellow blogger Terry Teachout, who is writing an opera with Paul Moravec for Santa Fe. It will be based on Somerset Maugham's story "The Letter" and will have its premiere in 2009.
Incidentally, some of you are probably curious about the status of my long-bruited Broadway musical, Zemlinsky in Larchmont, featuring such sure-fire hits as "One Cannot Find Even a Good Glass of Coffee," "I Once Knew a Girl Named Alma," "Ja, Hot Enough For Ya" (swing duet with Chet the Hep Mechanic), "Shostakovich Schmostakovich" (transcontinental telephone septet with Hindemith, Bartók, Stravinsky, Virgil Thomson, Theodor W. Adorno, and Gertie the Operator Gal), and the heart-rending "Schreker My Friend (Veren't You the Lucky One in the End)." The project recently experienced a setback with the death of Galina Ustvolskaya, who had promised to write the score and had sent me a few settings in a surprisingly peppy, Gershwinesque style (though the orchestra was austerely limited to contrabassoon, pipa, and cement mixer). With Milton Babbitt no longer returning my calls, I am again without a composer. But I just had an interesting conversation with Ringo Starr....
