Com­pos­er Ricky Ian Gordon’s can­did auto­bi­og­ra­phy, See­ing Through: A Chron­i­cle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera, reveals how a gift­ed young man from Long Island became a cel­e­brat­ed com­pos­er of song and opera. Bob Gold­farb spoke with him about his ear­ly influ­ences, fate, and the Jew­ish­ness per­me­at­ing his works.

Bob Gold­farb: What led you to write a memoir?

Ricky Ian Gor­don: I start­ed a writ­ing group with writ­ers I real­ly admire. I was exper­i­ment­ing with how deeply I want­ed to be known. And in the end, I do believe See­ing Through is a real­is­tic depic­tion of the very messy life of one artist.

BG: A lot of your work is inter­est­ed in Jew­ish life and Jew­ish peo­ple, such as the operas The Gar­den of the Finzi Con­ti­nis and Morn­ing Star. 

RIG: My moth­er spoke Yid­dish! It per­me­ates me. It’s very strong inside me. 

BG: You’ve col­lab­o­rat­ed with a lot of Jews. And your work is often com­pared with the music of Leonard Bern­stein and Stephen Sondheim.

RIG: My opera Inti­mate Appar­el, which I wrote with Lynn Not­tage, has an incred­i­ble char­ac­ter: a Jew­ish tai­lor from Roma­nia! I com­plete­ly poured myself into that role. I have a need to express my Jew­ish­ness in my work.

BG: The sub­ti­tle of your book men­tions ​“sex, drugs, and opera,” which also seems part of the project of mak­ing your­self known.

RIG: I told my edi­tor, Jonathan Galas­si, that he prob­a­bly didn’t need anoth­er com­pos­er mem­oir, ana­lyz­ing music! If there’s any­thing beau­ti­ful in my music, it comes from my life experience. 

BG: Weren’t you already think­ing of writ­ing about your life over thir­ty years ago?

RIG: That was in the late 1980s, and it became a musi­cal called Sycamore Trees. Believe it or not, a record­ing of a per­for­mance from 2010 was just dis­cov­ered, and it will be issued in August!

BG: In the book you talk about a dilem­ma: whether you want­ed to focus on being a com­pos­er, or if you’d rather lead a prof­li­gate life. It seems like you did both.

RIG: As I say at the end of the book, I had to ​“feed both wolves.” But I couldn’t do both with alco­hol and drugs.

BG: Your artis­tic curios­i­ty seems to have start­ed ear­ly. Even when you were very young, you were already engag­ing with com­plex, chal­leng­ing works like Ing­mar Bergman movies.

RIG: All I am is every­thing I have been irre­press­ibly drawn to. I know now that, even as a lit­tle boy, I was cul­ti­vat­ing ways of telling sto­ries. I was in pain, and I need­ed to tell my sto­ry with all the inten­si­ty of the artists I admire — in film, paint­ings, literature.

BG: You wrote at one point that it’s impor­tant for you to be ​“naked” in your work. It seems as though that impulse was always there, and that you nev­er want­ed to dis­guise it.

RIG: It’s Bergmanesque! Bergman was my favorite artist grow­ing up. Think about The Pas­sion of Anna. At var­i­ous points the actors stop act­ing and start talk­ing about play­ing their char­ac­ters. And when they express their agony, and they are not act­ing. It changed me.

BG: One piece of music which caught your atten­tion when you were young was by Dmitri Kabalevsky, and you men­tion that your favorite opera is Alban Berg’s Lulu! What attract­ed you to them?

RIG: The Kabalevsky sonati­na has poly­tonal­i­ty! Crunchy chords. So it makes sense that that would lead to Alban Berg, who found a way to make seri­al­ism exquis­ite­ly beau­ti­ful. And Lulu, of all the operas I know, is the one most like a for­eign film: a deep inves­ti­ga­tion of char­ac­ter. It has a lev­el of com­plex­i­ty at every lay­er which nev­er stops reveal­ing itself, and that’s what I appre­ci­ate about it.

BG: You’ve talked about fate, ​“where God comes in.” Writ­ing about your late lover Jef­frey, you describe a sequence of events that seem uncan­ni­ly pre­des­tined. The last opera that you had seen togeth­er was Death in Venice, an opera about some­one dying in a plague. Soon after, he died of AIDS.

RIG: And there was the key­chain I saw on a side­walk, which said ​“I am with you always.” And then, the day of his funer­al, find­ing his T‑shirt which read ​“Still Here.” There’s a say­ing in Alco­holics Anony­mous: after the first mir­a­cle, it’s vul­gar to doubt. I have a sense of ​“the world behind the world.” I know there’s more hap­pen­ing than just this. It makes sense that Stravin­sky final­ly got God.

BG: You’ve com­posed musi­cal set­tings of prose and poet­ry by many writ­ers of daunt­ing stature, includ­ing Proust, Stein­beck, and poets such as E. E. Cum­mings, Frank O’Hara, Paul Celan, Frank Bidart, Langston Hugh­es, Dorothy Park­er, John Ash­bery, W. S. Mer­win, Sylvia Plath, and Gwen­dolyn Brooks. It must take a kind of brav­ery to ​“col­lab­o­rate” with such great artists.

RIG: Brav­ery is the word! With Grapes of Wrath I was ter­ri­fied. And what was real­ly scary was set­ting Ellen West—this tow­er­ing, mon­u­men­tal text — because Frank Bidart is still liv­ing. But I don’t want to work with words that I don’t think are great.

BG: Do you have any new projects tak­ing shape?

RIG: Lynn Not­tage and I, as well as her daugh­ter, Ruby, were com­mis­sioned to write an opera, This House, for the fifti­eth anniver­sary of Opera The­ater of St. Louis which will pre­miere next spring. And I real­ly hope The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera will do a full pro­duc­tion of Grapes of Wrath—there have been enough con­cert ver­sions! But I’m real­ly lucky that I’m pub­lished, record­ed, and per­formed. And I make my liv­ing as a com­pos­er. That’s a lot more than most com­posers can say, so I can’t kvetch too much!