Jack Beeson
b.15 July 1921, Muncie, Indiana
Biographie
Jack Beeson was born and received his early education in Muncie, Indiana. He showed his talent for music early, beginning piano lessons at seven. Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts inspired a passionate interest in opera. While still a teenager, he wrote a five-act libretto, Beatrice Cenci, but did not complete the music. He studied composition at the Eastman School, completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and began work on a doctorate in 1943.
Beeson did not finish his doctorate but instead moved to New York. He studied briefly with Béla Bartók. While teaching at Columbia University he rediscovered his interest in opera through his involvement with the university’s opera workshop and the Columbia Theater Associates.
Winning the Prix de Rome and a Fulbright Fellowship enabled Beeson to live in Rome from 1948 through 1950. While there he completed his first opera, Jonah, based on a play by Paul Goodman. Beeson then adapted a work by the well-known American playwright, William Saroyan, for Hello Out There, a one act chamber opera produced by the Columbia Theater Associates in 1954.
The Sweet Bye and Bye, with a libretto by Kenward Elmslie, was produced by the Juilliard Opera Theater in 1957. It concerns the leader of a fundamentalist sect and her conflict between duty and love. The central character, Sister Rose Ora, resembles famous religious leader Aimee Semple MacPherson. The score includes marching songs, hymns, chants, and dances, as well as memorable arias and ensembles.
Beeson’s next opera, again based on an American subject, was commissioned by the Ford Foundation for the New York City Opera. Lizzie Borden tells the familiar story with less emphasis on the ax murders than on "the psychological climate that made them inevitable", according to critic Robert Sherman. In American Opera Librettos, Andrew H. Drummond writes, "This opera has an obvious dramatic effectiveness in which a clear and direct development with tightly drawn characterization leads to a powerful climax." New York City Opera premiered Lizzie Borden in 1965, and it was produced for television by the National Educational Television Network in 1967 using the original cast. A new NYCO production opened in March 1999 and was telecasted by PBS.
My Heart’s In The Highlands, adapted from a Saroyan short story and play, was commissioned and presented by the National Educational Television Network in 1970. The premiere production featured the composer himself in the small role of the Young Husband.
With 1975’s Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, Beeson found a gifted collaborator in Broadway lyricist (and also composer and translator) Sheldon Harnick. John Kander, like Beeson a long-time friend of the late composer Douglas Moore, thought that Beeson and Harnick were suited for each other, but they were less certain. Several years later, the two independently hit on a possible subject, Clyde Fitch’s romantic comedy about a wager on the virtue of a prima donna which leads to true love. Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines was premiered by the Lyric Opera of Kansas City in 1975, and featured in the catalog accompanying Opera America’s Composer-Librettist Showcase in Toronto.
The next Beeson-Harnick work, Dr. Heidegger’s Fountain of Youth, a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, was produced by the National Arts Club in New York in 1978. Beeson and Harnick then collaborated on Cyrano, "freely adapted" from the Rostand play, according to Beeson. Cyrano was given its premiere in 1994 by Theater Hagen in Germany. Sorry Wrong Number (based on the play by Louise Fletcher) and Practice in the Art of Elocution were premiered in New York in 1999, both with librettos by the composer. In addition to these 10 operas, Beeson has composed 120 works in various media.
In addition to his work as a composer, Beeson has had a distinguished career as a teacher at Columbia University where he is the MacDowell Professor Emeritus of Music, a chair previously held by Douglas Moore.
Jack Beeson is published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes.
July 2002
This biography can be reproduced free of charge in concert programmes with the following credit: Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes
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