Alice Goodman

Alice Goodman (* 1958 in Saint Paul , Minnesota ) is an American author, librettist and priestess of the Anglican Church. She wrote the textbooks for the operas Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) by John Adams .

Life

Born in St. Paul, Alice Goodman attended the private Breck School in neighboring Minneapolis. Her parents were reform-minded Jews. She studied American and English literature at Harvard and Girton College , Cambridge . She graduated from Boston University with a Master of Divinity degree .

Librettist

In 1985 she worked with the composer John Adams (composer) and the director Peter Sellars as a lyricist at the opera Nixon in China , a work that has meanwhile become a classic of minimal music . Sellars knew Goodman from their student days at Harvard University , where they had attended basic courses together in the late 1970s. The Goodman libretto, hired for its exceptional competence in English-language literature from William Shakespeare to Allen Ginsberg , made a major contribution to its success and is considered a masterpiece that opened a new era in musical theater. Your text was criticized by parts of the press as "hideous" and "thickly applied". In fact, Adams asked for an emphatically artificial, “archetypal” textbook that should clearly point beyond the historical facts of Nixon's visit to China in 1972. In the character drawing of Mao, Goodman claims to have been based on her notoriously irascible husband Geoffrey Hill . According to his self-assessment, he had the potential to become a “mad tyrant”. Adams was so pleased with Goodman's work that he also employed her as the author of his next, politically highly controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer . Goodman thought this libretto was her best work ever and vehemently denied that the opera was anti-Semitic and sympathized with Palestinian terrorists. However, after 18 months of preparation, she withdrew from working on the opera Doctor Atomic , a play about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb , because there had been quarrels with the client, the San Francisco Opera . The fragment was finally completed by Peter Sellars. Years later, Goodman commented on her artistic separation from John Adams with the sentence that she felt like an "old, divorced couple" who love their "children".

In 1991 she translated Mozart's Magic Flute for an English-language production. Since 1997 Goodman claims to have received requests for opera projects again, but none of them interested her, and her ideas, on the other hand, did not meet with approval from composers. In an interview with the Guardian, she named two of these unrealized topics that she had proposed: Waco on the mass suicide of a sect in Texas in 1993 and Elián González , about the Cuban boy of the same name who was rescued from the sea and brought to Florida in 1999, from where he was finally sent back to his Cuban relatives. Since no more projects came about, she switched to other fields of activity, “as is customary in her family”. Nonetheless, she wrote the cantata A Letter of Rights for Tarik O'Regan (2015, a commission from Salisbury Cathedral to commemorate the Magna Carta Hibernae from 1216) and made her early poems available to him for setting (2017).

Anglican pastor

Goodman converted to the Anglican Faith in 1989 and was ordained a priestess in 2001. In 2006 she became a chaplain at Trinity College in Cambridge, in 2011 she took over several parishes in Cambridgeshire, including her ancestral church of St. Vigor in Fulbourn, where she looks after around 6,000 believers and is regarded as an emphatically liberal representative of her clergy. She is traveling in a company car that is littered with stickers on which provocative texts that she herself describes as "vulgar" but not "blasphemous" can be read such as "Doing my part to piss off the religious right" (" I'm doing my part to scare away religious rights ”). Goodman explained the abbreviation WTFWJD on their vehicle to a reporter with "What the fuck would Jesus do?" When asked about her relationship with Judaism , Goodman said, “That is difficult to answer. For the Christians I am still a Jew, for the Jews not anymore. "

family

Goodman married the well-known British writer Geoffrey Hill , who died in 2016, in 1987 and is the mother of their daughter Alberta. Goodman had met her much older husband as a 22-year-old student in Cambridge, when he was 48.

literature

• Alice Goodman: History is Our Mother: Three Libretti - NIXON IN CHINA, THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER, THE MAGIC FLUTE , foreword by James Williams, New York 2017

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.breckschool.org/
2. ↑ https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/08/the-woman-who-changed-the-direction-of-opera/
3. ↑ http://www.houstonpress.com/arts/nixon-in-china-returns-to-the-wortham-with-musical-glories-and-a-dense-libretto-9132293
4. ↑ https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/alice-goodman-on-writing-political-operas-and-her-late-husband-geoffrey-hill
5. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jan/29/alice-goodman-death-klinghoffer-interview
6. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/arts/music/nixon-china-john-adams-alice-goodman-peter-sellars.html
7. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jan/29/alice-goodman-death-klinghoffer-interview
8. ↑ https://www.chamberchoirireland.com/events/a-letter-of-rights/
9. ↑ http://www.fulbournandthewilbrahams.org/about-us/our-staff/
10. ↑ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10230199/Vicar-claims-her-rude-bumper-sticker-is-a-vulgarity-not-blasphemy.html
11. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/arts/music/nixon-china-john-adams-alice-goodman-peter-sellars.html
12. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jan/29/alice-goodman-death-klinghoffer-interview
13. ↑ https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/alice-goodman-on-writing-political-operas-and-her-late-husband-geoffrey-hill
14. ↑ https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/alice-goodman-on-writing-political-operas-and-her-late-husband-geoffrey-hill