note to a friend (2023) 60'

program note

note to a friend was commissioned by the Japan Society in New York and the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan center in Japan. The idea for it came out of a conversation I had with the Japan Society’s director, Yoko Shioya, who asked if I would consider writing a stage work that was somehow related to Japan.

I immediately thought of the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, whose I work I have been a fan of since I was 16. Growing up in Los Angeles, my high school had a class in film studies, and we watched the film Rashomon, which is based on two of Akutagawa’s short stories. After that I kept reading his work, and eventually I discovered the famous letter Akutagawa wrote to a fellow writer, explaining and justifying his decision to kill himself, which he did do, in 1927. After his death, this letter was published in English as ‘A Note to a Certain Old Friend.’

I explained to Yoko that, as someone who has lived his whole life in the United States, I would have no ability to put myself into the mind of a Japanese writer, and I would not be able to begin to understand the complicated role that suicide has played in the Japanese imagination. I would only be able to make a piece out of my reading of Akutagawa’s text, complete with my own thoughts and misconceptions and misunderstandings. In other words, I could not write a piece that was ‘true’ to the text, or biographical, or accurate, or in any way about the real Akutagawa, but I could invent a character that was based on what I felt and understood, after reading his text.

I called this character ‘the dead man’ and to complete it I added my rewriting of details taken from two other stories by Akutagawa – ‘Death Register’ and ‘In a Grove.’

Oddly enough, this is not the first opera I have written about a suicide. In 2016, I wrote an opera based on Thomas Bernhard’s novel ‘The Loser.’ And now I have two operas about erudite, educated, successful men contemplating what it means to kill themselves, both scored for solo singer and 4 musicians. I am a happy, reasonably well-adjusted person, but for some reason I am drawn to these narratives, in which people question themselves so deeply and so completely that their very existence becomes a challenge to them. In my real life, I would be terrified to push my own personal self-examination so hard or so far. Literature or opera feel like they may be safer spaces in which to follow hard questions to their still harder conclusions.

Libretto

note to a friend
words by david lang
(after ryūnosuke akutagawa)

1. prelude

2. people who kill themselves

people who kill themselves
don’t usually tell you what they think about killing themselves
people who kill themselves
may be shy or embarrassed
may think it ugly, or shameful people who kill themselves themselves
people who kill themselves
may think that people
who never will kill themselves
will never understand
the people who kill themselves people who kill themselves

I am not like them
I will tell you
what I was thinking
when I killed myself
I will tell you clearly
since this is the last time
I will ever tell anyone anything people always guess

why people kill themselves problems with money problems with health problems with love

these are never the real reasons
people are complicated
people who kill themselves are complicated, too in my case
it started with a vague anxiety
you may not believe me
you may not be able to believe me
if you don’t believe me
my words will simply fade away

like a song in the wind

I want to tell you precisely
I want to tell you what I thought
precisely
so very precisely
that you may think I’m inhuman
I am obliged to tell you this
as simply and as honestly as I can
for years I only thought of death
I only thought of death
only of death
let me start by counting all the deaths around me

3. my mother had lost her mind

my mother had lost her mind
I never had any feelings for her
the feelings you are supposed to have
for someone who had raised you
of course, she didn’t raise me
she couldn’t raise me
she had lost her mind
she was small
she had a small, gray face
she smoked
she would paint all day
all the people in her paintings had the face of a fox

my mother died, in autumn
I was eleven years old
I remember that time, vividly right before she died
and right after
it was windless, midnight
I wore a thin, silk scarf
with a landscape painted on it it smelled of perfume
my mother was lying on a mat I sat down by her side
without making any noise

all of a sudden
she opened her eyes
and said something
that I couldn’t understand
even though I was sad
I laughed
the next night
I sat by her side until dawn
I pretended to cry
but I couldn’t cry
I knew that she would never die

but she did die

4. I had a sister

I had a sister
I never met her
she died young
before I was born
I had a sister
they always told me
she was the brightest of us all I had a sister
there is a photograph of her in my house
in a small frame
in the photograph of her
in my house
her cheeks are round and full round and full
like apricots

my sister was the child
who got my parents’ love
she only had nice things
she only wore nice clothes made only from the best
most delicate imported fabrics patterned with flowers sunflowers

camellias
cherry blossoms morning glories violets

I cut them up
when I was growing up
I made doll clothes from all her dresses I cut them up
I cut up all of her beautiful dresses
with the sunflowers
the camellias
the cherry blossoms
the morning glories
the violets

sometimes I felt that I was being watched by a phantom
by some phantom woman
watching over me

was this my sister?
was she showing me the smallest, faintest vision of the place where I am now?

5. amen (instrumental)

6. my father ran a store

when my mother lost her mind I was sent to another family the other family raised me
not my own parents

so I never had much feeling for my father my father ran a store
he tempted me with things to taste
exotic things that I had never tasted before bananas

pineapples
rum
he would give me ice cream
to tempt me
to run away with him
but I never ran away with him
I loved my other family way too much

when I turned twenty-eight
my father became ill
I stayed with him in his hospital room for three days
I was bored

and when a friend called
I left my father there
my father who was on the edge of death
when I returned to the hospital
my father was waiting for me
he held my hand and told me things
things from the past I didn’t know
simple things
how my mother and he once bought a table
how my mother and he would eat their meals together simple things

my father died the next morning
he lost his mind before he died
I don’t remember much after that
but I do remember the big, spring moon that shone down upon my father’s hearse

7. my mother, my sister, my father

my mother and my sister and my father

I would visit their graves
but nothing ever changed there
not the graves
not the earth
not the air above the graves
not my mother
not my sister
not my father
not the pine tree whose branches arched above them the three of them are buried together
in the same corner
under the same tombstone
I remember when my mother’s coffin was laid there
it must have been the same for my sister
I can imagine my father’s gold tooth
mingling with his pale, broken bones

I never liked visiting their graves if I could have stopped going
I could have forgotten them

but I was so weak
and I would wonder
which one of them was happiest now lying there
under the black tombstone?

8. I wanted to die

I wanted to die
without feeling any pain
I thought I could hang myself
but when I imagined myself hanging
I imagined that I would not like
the way that I would look
hanging
and that bothered me
everyone knows how much I care about the way that I should look everyone knows how much I care about the way that things are done I remember
I once ended a relationship
after seeing my lover’s handwriting everyone knows how much I care about such things

I thought I could drown myself but no one would believe it
if I drowned myself
everyone knows

what a beautiful swimmer I am what a beautiful swimmer I was

I thought of a gun
I thought of a knife
but I didn’t trust my hands
they tremble so very badly
and I would never jump off a building too ugly
and much too public
everyone knows how much I care about such things

I decided to die using drugs drugs might be slow
drugs might be painful
but when it was over

I would still look like myself
I would lose consciousness
before I lost my consciousness, for good and I could die in my own house
no one would see me
but my family
I was worried about my family
they would have to sell the house
once I was gone
I worried that it would be hard
to sell the house
once I was gone
how I envy the rich
who have more than one house
in which to choose to die

the last detail was choosing time and place and then I waited
and I waited a very long time
it was my chance

to play with death

we are animals
it is in our animal nature
to be afraid of death
what we think of as our life force is just our animal nature
our animal power
I could feel my animal power drain away from me
I had lost my taste for food
I had lost my taste for sex
I had lost my animal power
and that left me anxious
and able to see things
in the clearest, coldest light

when we give ourselves to death we are seeking peace
not happiness

and, having given myself to death
everything looks so much more beautiful to me now

the world is so much more beautiful to me now that I have left it
I have seen it
I have loved it

I have understood it
and this has made the life I lived worthwhile despite the pain I felt while living it

please don’t tell anyone what I have told you here it is always possible
that I died a natural death

9. long silence

long silence
I didn’t feel any pain
everything became silent
the only thing left
was a dim light
on the trees
on the mountain
the light grew fainter and fainter
the trees
the mountain faded out of view
I was enveloped
in darkness
in silence
I could sense someone coming near to me
I could sense someone
but it was dark
it was already too dark
the darkness
the darkness spread
the darkness filled up all the space around me someone came near
someone came near me
but it was too late
it was too late
I was already gone
I had found what I was looking for
and I was gone