‘McTeague’ for Two : Filmmaker Robert Altman teams with composer William Bolcom to create an opera out of a tragic turn-of-the-century tale of greed

In the early 1920s, Erich von Stroheim made a film adaptation of Frank Norris’ 1899 novel “McTeague,” a long, naturalistic story about the devastating effect that a lust for gold has on a brutish San Francisco dentist and his miserly wife.

The film, “Greed,” originally intended to run nine hours, then cut to four and finally reduced to two hours for its 1923 release, was Von Stroheim’s almost paragraph-by-paragraph filming of Norris’ story. Von Stroheim’s extravagance made him a pariah in Hollywood, causing his retirement from directing just a few years later.

How appropriate then that “McTeague,” a new opera based on the novel and film, written by William Bolcom for Lyric Opera of Chicago, should be directed by none other than Robert Altman--who can probably relate to Von Stroheim’s plight. Altman, after all, had been forced to the fringe of the business until this year’s “The Player” returned him to the glory of his 1970s heyday.

But Altman’s involvement in “McTeague” wasn’t a publicity ploy on the part of Lyric Opera. It was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bolcom who brought in Altman, chiefly because the composer had been mightily impressed with a production of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” that Altman had directed in the early ‘80s at the University of Michigan, where Bolcom teaches.

Bolcom appears relaxed and calm a few days before the first of nine sold-out performances of his work at the Civic Opera House on Saturday. Rehearsals are “great,” Altman is “terrific,” and the cast is “marvelous,” he says. Things are going so well, in fact, that he and his wife, soprano Joan Morris, can slip away from their rented Chicago apartment for a day trip to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana to present one of their popular concerts of old American songs.

Before leaving, however, he sits down to recall, in a mellow and reflective mood, how his first full-scale opera had its start 30 years ago, when he was a graduate student at Stanford University.

Bolcom, now 54, was studying for his doctorate in music then, and to help out the school’s film department in its screenings of silent movies, he often would provide piano accompaniment.

Occasionally, however, the films would arrive either without a score or too late for Bolcom to see them before they went on, forcing him to improvise his way through the screenplay. Such was the case with the presentation of “Greed.”

“I had never seen the movie,” Bolcom says, “and I had no notion about it, but I fell in love with it right there as I improvised--mostly to the tune of ‘Oh, Dem Golden Slippers.’ ”

When Bolcom later read the novel, he recalls, “I couldn’t see how the book and the film melded. The movie was like German Expressionism, and the book, on the other hand, offered an incredible transition in style, from the strong naturalism of the first page to the impressionistic, surrealistic passages of the last page.”

Aside from that initial observation, Bolcom did not think of “McTeague” as a possible project until four years ago, shortly after Ardis Krainik, Lyric’s general director, asked him to compose a work for the company’s 1992-93 season.

In its 38 seasons, Lyric has not had great success in commissioning new operas. “The Harvest,” by Vittorio Giannini, was roundly panned and quickly disappeared in 1961, and “Paradise Lost,” by Krzysztof Penderecki, was a 1978 budget buster that helped bring down the administration of Lyric’s co-founder, the late Carol Fox.

For the first opera to be commissioned under her own administration, which began in 1981, Krainik declared in 1989 that she and Bruno Bartoletti, Lyric’s artistic director, after “painstaking and soul-searching care” and after giving “full consideration to all of the contemporary American composers,” had settled on Bolcom’s “great talent.”

Krainik and Bolcom had become friends while serving together on a music panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and she had followed his work closely, attending a performance of his “Songs of Innocence and Experience” at its local premiere.

Bolcom, eager to tackle the opera project, nonetheless suffered through several months of searching for the right subject.

“We tried all kinds of possibilities, including the Oedipus trilogy, and I even thought of trying a comedy,” he says. Then an old friend, the Rev. Andrew Greeley, also a novelist, suggested Norris’ final book, 1903’s “The Pit,” about gambling in the Chicago wheat exchange. “That didn’t feel right,” Bolcom remembers, “but as long as I was into Norris, I thought, let’s take another look at ‘McTeague.’ ”

Once again the book hooked him, and he knew he had found his story. “It has the qualities of a Greek tragedy,” Bolcom says, “in which the characters’ flaws bring them down.”

For a libretto, Bolcom went to Arnold Weinstein, who had collaborated with the composer in earlier theatrical pieces, including 1988’s “Casino Paradise.” “Arnold’s the best wordsmith there is,” Bolcom says, “in writing words to be sung.”

For his part, Altman, who also became co-librettist, brought in set designer Yuri Kuper, a painter who had worked with him on the 1990 film “Vincent & Theo” in France. Dennis Russell Davies, who has led several Bolcom works in their premieres, was picked as conductor for the 75-piece orchestra. And Canadian tenor Ben Heppner and American soprano Catherine Malfitano were signed to portray the murderous dentist McTeague and his ill-fated wife, Trina.

Bolcom, who also does his own orchestrations, began composing in earnest in the summer of 1990, had a first draft ready a year later and essentially finished the piece last April. Since rehearsals began earlier this month, he says, only a bit of “tailoring and tucks” has been needed.

The opera, which clocks in at about two hours and contains a cast of 22, begins at the novel’s ending, in the fiery desert of Death Valley, where McTeague has fled after killing his wife and stealing her money. From there, it flashes back to the beginning of the story and moves forward to its tragic ending. “A tight evening,” Bolcom calls it, with the novel’s story “cut to the bone” and with supertitles reproducing the English lyrics as an aid in clarifying the action.

Bolcom says he has been careful to avoid making “McTeague” a pastiche piece. “I haven’t gone into it with an archivist’s attitude,” he says. “Obviously I couldn’t include every character and incident in the book, but beyond that I wanted to transform the story into an opera statement, to match in musical terms the transition in the book’s writing style by beginning with simple melodies and then progressing toward very intense, dissonant music. I also hoped it would contain theatrical values that many operas do not have.”

Altman, the man responsible for providing those theatrical values, says he agreed to direct the opera in spite of the movie and the book.

“I had seen the Von Stroheim film only in pieces,” he acknowledges, “and I’m not thrilled with the kind of writing in the book.”

Why, then, did he accept the job? “Because of Bill’s work and reputation. And because I wanted the adventure of seeing what the story would look like through my set of eyes, which is why I do everything.” The look, in this instance, Altman says, will be “very impressionistic, through a glass darkly.”

Working within the framework of an opera repertory system, Altman said, he has not been able to do “just exactly what occurs to me.”

“There’s a constant pull of compromise in such things as lighting and spacing,” he says, “because you have to take into consideration the requirements of the other operas that are in the repertoire.”

But he works the same as always, he says. “Everything I do is part of the same thing.”

He finished shooting his latest movie, “Short Cuts,” based on 10 short stories by American minimalist writer Raymond Carver, one day before he was due to show up in Chicago for the start of rehearsals for “McTeague.” And two days after the opera’s opening, he will be in New York to begin editing the film.

Opera is all very well, according to Altman (who does not read music), “but it’s not what I do. It’s not my day job. I still work in the movies.”