Schwartz began his Broadway career with the title song to the 1969 Leonard Gershe play Butterflies Are Free. His five Tony nominations came for the scores to Pippin, Godspell, Working, Wicked and his lyrics for Rags; while his lyrics for the animated feature "Pocahontas" and his score to "The Prince of Egypt" garnered Academy Awards. The prolific writer also earned three Academy Award nominations for his work on "Enchanted," and Grammy Awards for the recordings of Wicked, Godspell and "Pocahontas."

His latest venture, the opera Séance on a Wet Afternoon, based on the 1964 film, premiered at Opera Santa Barbara in September 2009 and arrives at New York City Opera April 19 for a run through May 1. His son, Scott Schwartz (Golda's Balcony, Jane Eyre, Rooms) directs. We caught up with the busy writer.

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How did you select Séance on a Wet Afternoon? Had you been familiar with the novel or the film?
SS: I was familiar with the film, and what happened, which I think is kind of a nice story, is that shortly after Wicked opened, the agent Peter Franklin called me and invited me to lunch and pitched some ideas to me — things he thought I might be interested in for future musical theatre projects. One of the things he mentioned was Séance on a Wet Afternoon. I had a very distinct memory of the film, which I had seen when I was a kid when it first came out, but I didn't feel like it was right for musical theatre, so I sort of forgot about it. Maybe a year later, when I got a call from Opera Santa Barbara about the possibility of commissioning an opera and I said I would be interested, they said, "Well do you have any ideas?" and, more or less, instantly, I thought of Séance. It just seemed, for many reasons, not appropriate for musical theatre for me — it seemed ideal for opera. So, I called Peter Franklin, these many moons later and said, "I don't know if this would be O.K. with your clients, but I know you talked to me about Séance on a Wet Afternoon as a possible musical-theatre piece, but I think I might actually like to do it as an opera. Do you think your clients would be O.K. with that?" And he said, "I don't represent it. I just thought it was a good idea for you!," which was so interesting. But anyway, that’s how that came about. It was really put into my head by him.

The title alone has lots of mystery. It's a great title.
SS: It's a great title isn’t it?

	Lauren Flanigan in the Santa Barbara premiere of Séance on a Wet Afternoon
	photo by David Bazemore

What made you say, "This is not a music-theatre piece, this is an opera"? 
SS: Well, I think for several reasons, one of which you just sort of described — the title. It sort of suggests a certain mood, which the movie has and the novel as well, but the movie in particular. So, I thought that a sort of sustained mood is, I think, much more the sort of purview of opera than of musical theatre, and particularly a sustained mood like this. Musical theatre, I feel, is much higher energy, and also the characters are quite needy. They have very, very strong needs and emotions, which is great for musicals, but, given who these characters were, I thought they would be a little over the top for musical theatre, whereas not for opera. And the last thing about it, for me, was that so much of the story is so textual. The characters are saying things, but actually, underneath, a lot else is going on, and they have secrets from one another and they have secrets from themselves, and so music is very helpful, obviously, in telling that story and conveying the subtext. But I think you are much more able to do that in opera — musical subtext — than you are in musical theatre.

You've worked primarily as a composer-lyricist, but in this case, you are doing the entire libretto. Does it truly require putting on a different hat? Do you start to write it and follow the inspiration or do you say to yourself, "I'm writing an opera as opposed to just following where this takes me?"
SS: There were a lot of differences in the writing process, which I didn't necessarily anticipate in advance, but it turned out as I was proceeding that there were. And again, you sort of suggested a couple of them. Normally, for a musical, the first step with my collaborators is to figure out the story and the outline and really be clear about the structure. But then, by that point, ideas for musical numbers will have emerged and I can pretty well start on musical numbers. Sometimes I need to wait a little bit for a scene or two to be written just to see how the characters speak, what their location is, so it all sounds in the piece, but basically, I am able to start writing musical numbers. I start [with] what I call the path of least resistance: the number that seems most clear to me and it's not usually at the very beginning. With the opera, I tried to do that and it didn't work. I just couldn't get anywhere and what I discovered was — from stuff that I've read about other opera composers — was that I had to write the libretto from start to finish before I could start composing. And that is not to say that the libretto didn't change a little bit, or that there weren't sections that went from being essentially setting prose to being more lyricized and having a song structure or an aria structure. I can theorize as to why that is — it has to do with the development of musical motifs and all that stuff — but, basically, I found I had to work that way. The approach to the music and setting the voice was different, I discovered, for many reasons, but primarily because traditional opera, which I suppose this is, is meant to be un-amplified. So you can't depend on the guy at the soundboard to kick the voice above the orchestra. You have to make sure that it is composed in such a way that the voice is supported and there is musical excitement. But, basically, you have to be able to hear the voice above a much larger orchestra than traditional musical theatre orchestra. Séance is an orchestra of 46 players — and one little singer, no matter how powerful, has to be heard above that, and you have to understand what he or she is saying. So that effected how I was composing, also. There were a lot of adjustments.

One of the reviews from the Santa Barbara production did say that it is more melodic than most traditional or classic operas. Your melodies are, and I mean this as a compliment, they are like "musical worms." They are really great songs with a hook, that essentially, get stuck in your head.
SS: I take that as a compliment, thank you.

Is that a challenge for you, as you are writing? Are you drawn to take a motif or theme and develop it in that way?
SS: Yeah, absolutely. I suppose it was certainly an unconscious intention, but in this case, a conscious intention — I guess I had two conscious intentions in regard to this. In terms of writing a new opera and comparing it to some contemporary operas — though there are many contemporary operas out there that I like very much — one was really to concentrate on story telling and put a lie to the myth of, "When you go to the opera, just ignore the story. The stories are silly, pay no attention to them, just listen to the music." I thought, no. This is a really good story, and opera, I feel, is the ideal medium — pardon the pun — the ideal musical medium for telling the story. One of the things I wanted to do was tell a compelling story with this medium and in fact, not have the audience ignore it. And the other is, I feel that — though this has been changing in recent times — I felt that modern opera, as opposed to the more traditional operas of Puccini and further back than that, had real tunes. Some of them became sort of the pop tunes of the day and then for a while there seemed to be this attitude that if the audience can pick out a tune then somehow you weren't writing well enough. It wasn't sufficiently serious. It wasn't sufficiently important. Only academics and music critics should be able to understand what you are doing musically and there shouldn't actually be memorable tunes, and I just felt that that was wrong. In fact, in telling the story and supporting the emotions of the characters, the emotions of the piece, having things work more melodic were actually helpful in achieving that. That is not to say the music is not more harmonically complex than much of my theatre work, because it is, but it is still melodic and accessible. I may get criticized for that, but that's the way it is.