Tireless Mauceri makes sure to save time for fundamentals

One word to describe John Mauceri, conducting this fall's production of "The Pearl Fishers" at Lyric Opera of Chicago, is "indefatigable."

Mauceri is not only a world-class conductor but also a noted educator and leader in the preservation for future generations some of the most important music ever written, be it traditional operas and orchestral works, music for the Broadway theater and for the Hollywood film industry.

Somehow, amid all those pursuits, Mauceri finds time to visit the Lyric as well as most of the world's other major opera houses to do what he loves best: conducting traditional operas:

"It's a matter of the choices that one makes," Mauceri said last week during an off day from his work with "The Pearl Fishers."

"I'm chancellor of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, so I have 1,100 students I'm really responsible to - high school, college and postgraduate.

"I certainly work all the time with them, and because of the Internet I'm constantly in touch with them, and I'm physically in Winston-Salem seven or eight months out of the year. But the whole function of our school is that everybody in the school should be at the cutting edge of their fields. So conducting opera, which is essential to my life, is fundamental to who I am."

This fall, Mauceri, whose college is preparing a new production of Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George," invited several members of the student design team Chicago. Why? To view George Georges-Pierre Seurat's painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the Art Institute, the work which inspired Sondheim's award-winning musical.

"This also gave them an opportunity to see 'The Pearl Fishers' and to go backstage," Mauceri said. "So, we're taking them from their academic world to the whole world."

But it is Mauceri's untiring work on behalf of the American musical and film music that will likely give the New York-born Mauceri his most lasting fame.

"Part of my doing that is a sense of fairness, because it seems unfair that the public is robbed of the experience of this music, " Mauceri said. "When I started out, I wanted to maybe point out the responsibility that our country has to preserve its own great art forms. In our lifetime, we've seen jazz move from being something quite fringe-like to being central. Broadway is a place that has very little memory, and does not preserve its own history.

"So I was very much pointing that out and coming up with sometimes full productions, such as we did with Rodgers and Hart's 'On Your Toes,' which we did in the early '80s. George Abbott was 96 at the time and George Balanchine (choreographer) and Hans Spialek (orchestrator) were all part of the original team from 1936, and they all were able to be with us when we restored their work."

The 1983 revival of "On Your Toes" earned several Tony Awards, including one for Mauceri.

Two other notable Broadway restorations (again with Spialek's assistance) were "The Boys from Syracuse" and "Anything Goes," along with several other 1930s and '40s shows. Mauceri also created a new performing edition of Leonard Bernstein's "Candide" in 1973 which received a special Tony Award for "Advancement in Musical Theater." The recording of his opera house version of "Candide" for New World Records earned a 1983 Grammy Award, and he also edited Bernstein's 1988 "final revised version" for the Scottish Opera, which was later recorded in London under the composer's baton and earned him a posthumous Grammy Award.

As an example of mainstream 20th century American opera, he worked up a performing edition of Marc Blitzstein's "Regina," which he conducted at Lyric Opera in the 2003-04 season.

Film music is an equally important part of Mauceri's life.

He has done much to preserve the scores of émigré composers (such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklos Rozsa and Franz Waxman), and he also works with current Hollywood film composers. One of his major goals is to make it possible for orchestras to play this music in an authentic version. His "classic" film score editions include "The Godfather - a Symphonic Portrait," by Nino Rota; "Cleopatra Symphony" by Alex North; "Psycho - a Narrative for String Orchestra" by Bernard Herrmann, and many others.

"These are huge jobs, by the way," Mauceri said. "But as you build it piece by piece, you build a repertory that orchestras can play, and it also makes it possible to perform these works which otherwise would not happen. I feel a kind of responsibility to do that. All of these are available for rental by orchestras."

Mauceri realized years ago if he did not do this important work, it simply wouldn't get done.

"In the case of film music, what most people don't understand is that right from the beginning of Hollywood, the scores are owned by the studio, not by the composer," he said. "That's just a deal that was made starting out in the 1930s, and it continues basically to this day. The bottom line is those big companies are not particularly interested in putting a penny into restoring this music because you don't get any money back. They don't want to have lending libraries; they're in the business of making movies. So basically, if you want to do it you have to earn their trust and they let you do it. They still own it, but they will allow other people to rent it. So that's really how it works."

The project that made Mauceri his most recent fame was his 2001-03 collaboration with film composer Howard Shore in creating the two-hour, six movement "Lord of the Rings Symphony" from Shore's soundtracks for director Peter Jackson's film epic of the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy. It is scored for large orchestra and chorus, along with a children's chorus.

Since its premiere in New Zealand in 2003, the "Lord of the Rings Symphony" has been performed around the world to public and critical praise. Mauceri conducted the Asian premiere in Taipei, Taiwan.

"At first, no orchestra wanted to play it. They were being very removed from this," Mauceri said. "Then, one orchestra decided to do it, and they sold a lot of tickets right away, and slowly but surely there came this overwhelming support for this work. Since then, I've conducted it with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Leipzig Gewandhaus, as well as in Tokyo. It's something extremely moving about seeing the children of the world in these choruses, learning Elfish," Mauceri said. "I was coaching Chinese children, 10-year-old kids. It was the most moving thing; it really united all these people.

"I feel sorry for the snobs who want to dismiss this as not real music," he said. "I don't know what they mean, except they're closing themselves off from an experience that is legitimate. The Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig is one of the oldest orchestras in Europe - Mozart was a guest conductor - and I had the principal oboist come up to me and say it was one of the greatest experiences they'd had and how much they loved playing that music. That means a lot to me and it means a lot, of course, to Howard Shore."