Composer Peter Lieberson takes on the legend of India's warrior king

If there is an artistic aristocracy in America, composer Peter Lieberson is
its reluctant scion. His father, the late Goddard Lieberson, was a composer
and the revered president of CBS Records. His mother (born Eva Brigitta
Hartwig and now Brigitta Lieberson-Wolf) had been the ballerina Vera
Zorina, a former wife of George Balanchine and a principal dancer in the
Ballets Russes of Monte Carlo. Igor Stravinsky was a regular
Thanksgiving-dinner guest at the Lieberson town house on East Sixty-first
Street in New York. Richard Rodgers, Alan Jay Lerner, Rudolf Serkin and
Vladimir Horowitz were part of the circle. Leonard Bernstein gave the
sapling composer one of his early jobs, and for a while Peter dated the
maestro's daughter, Jamie.

But if a youth spent in the company of such glamorous elders seems as
though it should have eased the way for an aspiring composer armed with
talent, Lieberson has always considered his breeding to be a burden. Today,
he is a trim fifty-year-old who speaks and moves with the quiet politesse
of someone who has never needed to be pushy, but he recalls himself as a
distant, anxious young man who shrank from the silver platter. "I kept my
compositions secret," he confesses. "I was very uncomfortable about the
idea of being boosted into a world I couldn't handle."

Still, the opportunities have come, over the years, with breathtaking
regularity. When Lieberson was twenty-five, Pierre Boulez asked to conduct
a work of his. A dozen years later, his first teaching post was at Harvard.
Peter Serkin, with whom, as a child, he frequently shared a sandbox, has
commissioned two piano concertos and a fistful of shorter works. And next
month, his first opera, Ashoka's Dream, will have its world premiere at
Santa Fe Opera, which commissioned it.

How Ashoka -- the third-century B.C. Indian warrior-king who unified the
subcontinent, even as he killed off a sizable portion of its population --
groped his way to tranquility is the story of the opera. How Lieberson came
to set that Buddhist myth to music is the story of the composer's life -- a
life that, like Ashoka's, has lurched from malaise to epiphany. While
Goddard Lieberson was busy selling records that were quickly taking the
place of sheet music in America's middle-class homes, the musical life in
his own family was a more participatory one. Lieberson pere would read
through symphonic reductions at the piano after dinner, and the children
would play a parlor version of Name That Tune. Zorina was starting a second
career as a narrator and actress, and Peter would coach his mother in works
such as Stravinsky's Persephone. The business of school was show business,
too: Peter and his brother attended Dalton, a swanky private school where,
he recalls, his classmates read Variety.

When Lieberson reached high school age, though, he was sent to board at
Deer field Academy in Massachusetts, where he drifted into what he
describes as a nearly decade-long period of numbness. "I wasn't interested
in anything," he says. "I remember very clearly being in a fog." His grades
unraveled. An exasperated teacher called him "a bump on the wheel of
progress." It wasn't until he was halfway through college at New York
University that his crust of ennui cracked. "I had a sort of awakening, or
a collapse," he remembers. "The anxiety just broke through, and I was a
complete wreck. I went into therapy -- that was the route in those days --
and I became interested in lots of things." New York City, for instance,
and its music. "Breakfast at Tiffany's, that was my image of the city. I
can visualize almost every street in New York, because I've been there, and
loved it so much."

Lieberson began listening to jazz, to the Broadway musicals his father had
fought to record on CBS, and to late Stravinsky. The elderly, ill-mannered
Russian, whom he had watched drink from the fingerbowls at the dinner
table, be now considered an object of veneration. By the time he was
twenty-two, Lieberson had declared his vocation, and his father took him to
see Stravinsky, telling the fading luminary, "Maestro, Peter wants to be a
composer." "He looked at me and said" -- Lieberson approximates a Russian
accent -- '"It is not enough to want. You must be.' It was powerful, like a
transmission of some sort."

And so Lieberson was. A job as a broadcast engineer at WNCN led to
composition lessons with Milton Babbitt, who steered him into a Master's
program at Columbia and the tutelage of Charles Wuorinen. From the moneyed
music world in which he had grown up, Lieberson turned to the austere
cloisters of academe, writing solo flute studies and brief, bristling
pieces with studiously neutral rifles like Concerto for Four Groups of
Instruments. A Charles Ives Award from the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters gave him confirmation of his abilities and a cash prize
large enough to carry him through the summer of 1973.

Though buoyed by recognition, charged with the drive to compose, and flush
with the money Bernstein paid him to help him prepare material from the
Young People's Concerts for publication, Lieberson was still, he says,
"living under tremendous inner turmoil. My stomach muscles hurt." Four
Groups is the legacy of that tense period -- a score full of spiky lines
and rhythms that are furiously exact, written in the tiny hand of someone
who is gripping his pencil hard. "I was desperate enough," Lieberson
recounts, "to look outside my own culture to find the source of all that
pain." It was time for another awakening.

It was then that Lieberson met Douglas Penick, who, twenty years later,
would write the libretto for Ashoka's Dream. Lieberson, like many of his
friends, had begun reading books on Eastern religions -- "Drugs and
spirituality were the main things floating around in those days," he says
-- and Penick took him to meet the Tibetan Buddhist Rinpoche (teacher)
Chogyam Trungpa.

In 1976, at age thirty, Lieberson told his friends and parents he was
giving up music and moving to the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to
study Buddhism. His leave of absence from composing lasted only a matter of
months before he began writing a piece for the contemporary-music ensemble
Tashi, but it was nevertheless "very upsetting to my parents. My father
died before he could see that this was just a kind of evolution, rather
than a rejection." Now, two decades later and himself a father of three
daughters, Lieberson has been immersed in the story of Ashoka, who emerges
from his murderous murk into clear-eyed benignity, thereby raffling his
courtiers. "What's interesting about this story is that his transformation
was very confusing to all the people around him."

Lieberson's Buddhism has infused his music for twenty years, but he has
nothing but scorn for the ersatz religiosity of a mystical style in which
the notes are few and far between. His years of meditation have not
attenuated the clenched-gut rhythmic drive of scores that still have some
of the density he absorbed from Wuorinen. His first, fifty-five-minute
piano concerto is a vast, churning expanse, but shorter orchestral pieces
like Drala and Fire pack a lot of mercurial intensity into a few minutes.
Even his dreamier, lyrical piano bagatelles, written for Serkin, have an
undertow of tension. Lieberson's music can be difficult, certainly. So too
was his immersion into Buddhism. "If you're fortunate enough to meet an
authentic teacher," he says, "it's not really any fun. Just to sit down on
a cushion and let be, to experience the space around you, was terrifying to
me."

After two years in Boulder, Lieberson and his new wife -- another refugee
from music, jazz singer Ellen Kearney -- moved to Boston to found a branch
of Trungpa's Shambhala Training Institute. With a first child on the way
and an eye on a teaching career, Lieberson went back to school. A Ph.D.
from Brandeis led to a job at Harvard, where Lieberson found himself once
more stagnating and distant, teaching students the techniques of musical
expression but unwilling to discuss the substance of his own music or his
life. Buddhism, he felt, was not a topic of polite conversation in
university company. And so he abandoned his fledgling academic career after
only four years and moved to an even quieter, more reflective life in
Halifax, Nova Scotia. These days, he visits his once beloved New York a few
times a year and finds it shocking -- "a medieval place, with people of
enormous wealth and others of complete lunacy and degradation wandering the
streets."

The Buddhist ideal of simplicity should, it seems, be incompatible with the
complex of egos, money and machinery that constitutes the opera world, but
 Lieberson, Penick and director Stephen Wadsworth have worked hard to
streamline Ashoka's Dream. "My greatest fear," Penick says, "was that it
would end up turning into some kind of Hindu Aida."

Neither the Santa Fe budget nor the opera house is designed for extravagant
spectacle, however, and Ashoka's journey is an internal one -- just as
Lieberson's own period of greatest tumult in the mid-1970s was, he recalls,
"very uneventful, externally." Wadsworth calls the opera "a drama of inner
action," and Penick declares himself suspicious of "requiring the singers
to move around too much." So the success of this production will hinge
partly on the abilities of its principals, Kurt Ollmann and Lorraine Hunt,
to act as translucent scrims into a hidden emotional world. To get the
fight balance of passion and austerity, they might cast an analytic eye on
Lieberson, for while his manner is one of spare, wry reserve, his music can
be inflamed.

[PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): ABOVE: LIEBERSON, THE LATEST COMPOSER TO HAVE A WORLD ... ]

 ABOVE: LIEBERSON, THE LATEST COMPOSER TO HAVE A WORLD PREMIERE AT SANTA FE
                                   OPERA

[PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): LEFT AND OPPOSITE: MARTIN PAKLEDINAZ COSTUME SKETCHES FOR ASHOKA'S ... ]

  LEFT AND OPPOSITE: MARTIN PAKLEDINAZ COSTUME SKETCHES FOR ASHOKA'S DREAM

                   [PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): ILLUSTRATION]

                                ILLUSTRATION