The world premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s Dream Requiem in Paris earlier this year, with narrator Meryl Streep, was inspired by the juxtaposition of the COVID pandemic and the California wildfires in 2020. The text combines the Latin Requiem with Lord Byron’s apocalyptic poem Darkness, which was written after an 1815 volcanic eruption and the subsequent global ash cloud that caused the “Year Without Summer.”
More and more big names from the worlds of rock, pop, and country music are appearing with symphony orchestras these days, performing arrangements of their music for significantly larger forces.
On paper, some of the matchups may seem surprising, at least at first, such as Lyle Lovett’s appearance with the Santa Fe Symphony last fall at the Santa Fe Opera. In practice, the event was so successful that the symphony has another top-tier headliner — singer-songwriter-composer Rufus Wainwright — heading to town for a joint concert on Monday, September 9.
If you’re familiar with Wainwright’s music, you’ll know that a symphonic quality pervades much of his work, which ranges widely across genres, with aspects of show tunes, rock opera, Baroque pop, folk, and more that all are part of his sonic palette.
His performance here is titled Want Symphonic, referencing his third album, Want One, from 2002 and his fourth, Want Two, released a year later. (They were conceived of as one project and were re-released in 2005 as a double album, Want.)
Both Want albums received reviews most singers can only dream about. Rolling Stone’s David Fricke praised Want One’s “breathtaking, eccentric opulence” and its “sumptuous honesty.” Want Two earned comments such as “Demanding and artful, [Wainwright] just may be this generation’s Joni Mitchell,” (The Los Angeles Times), “Another broadsheet rock critic waxing rhapsodic may be the last thing Wainwright needs, but here goes: Want Two is a stunning album,” (The Guardian), and “More, and even better, of the same — one of the dead-certain Albums Of The Year,” (Uncut).
Two decades later, Wainwright commissioned expanded versions of their orchestrations for Want Symphonic, which premiered at The Proms in London in September 2023.
Scotland’s The Herald gave Want Symphonic four-and-a-half stars in its subsequent Glasgow performance and was very impressed with the new orchestrations, writing: “From the opening overture … the musicians were always given interesting music to play, including unusual sonic effects from the front desk of the violins, fine solos from the winds, and some marvelous big band and oompah brass. The way the orchestral percussion and timpani combined with Wainwright’s kit-drum associate Matt Johnson was unusually effective.” (Johnson will be performing with Wainwright in Santa Fe.)
“The Want albums were my greatest triumph, especially in Europe, and they really launched my international career,” Wainwright tells Pasatiempo. “They were also the first albums where I could unleash my classical leanings, so to play them with an orchestra makes a lot of sense. It’s a reality deferred, maybe the way they should always have been performed.”
And has he discovered new aspects of the songs when revisiting them now? “If anything, I’m relieved that the songs still say something,” he says. “They were written at a very intense time of my life, when I was getting sober and battling my addiction demons. It was also a time when I was excited about showing off my voice and challenging myself vocally, and I’m happy that I can still do that.”
While Wainwright’s songs are deeply emotional and highly personal, they also reflect his wide-ranging musical and cultural interests. Here are just a few of the touch points in songs from Want One:
“Oh, What a World” references The Wizard of Oz (it’s what the Wicked Witch of the West screams as she’s melting) and includes a musical quotation from Maurice Ravel’s Bolero.
“I Don’t Know What It Is” mentions the television sitcom Three’s Company and “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” from The Harvey Girls (1946), which featured Judy Garland. One of Wainwright’s most famous live performances and subsequent album was Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall, a complete re-creation of Garland’s legendary 1961 concert at the same venue.
Listeners will find a musical reference to Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in “Vicious World,” to the mythological character Medusa in “Go or Go Ahead,” (“But, oh, Medusa kiss me and crucify/This unholy notion of the mythic power of love”), and to “Ring Around the Rosie” and the September 11 attacks in “11:11.”
All this may read as precious or like showing off, but it doesn’t come across that way in performances, thanks to Wainwright’s skill at weaving the references into the emotional fabric of his songs.
Wainwright has superb DNA, at least where music is concerned. His father is singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III and his mother is the late Kate McGarrigle, who had an extensive folk-music career as half of a duo act with her older sister Anna.
The DNA strands unraveled when it came to interfamily relationships, however. His parents divorced when he was young, and Wainwright was raised in Montreal by his mother. Both his parents had difficulty with his early realization that he was gay, although he remained much closer to his mother than his father, with whom he had an especially prickly relationship.
Wainwright and his younger sister, Martha, also a talented singer and songwriter, have explored many of the dark aspects of life with Loudon in their songs. One of the best, by Rufus, is the ironically titled “Dinner at Eight,” the final track on Want One.
After a photo shoot for Rolling Stone, Wainwright and his father had what was intended to be a celebratory dinner. It went off the tracks when the son jokingly suggested his father should be grateful for getting Loudon back in the magazine after a long absence, and a legendary fight ensued.
Later that night, Rufus penned “Dinner at Eight,” portraying a David-and-Goliath relationship in which Rufus/David sings, “No matter how strong, I’m gonna take you down/With one little stone, I’m gonna break you down/And see what you’re worth, what you’re really worth to me.”
Loudon has composed autobiographical songs that depict shocking attitudes and actions on his part. “I’d Rather Be Lonely,” which Martha assumed was about an ex-girlfriend, was actually about how much he disliked having his daughter live with him for a year when she 14. “Hitting You” was about striking Martha when she was a child. “There was an interesting song there,” Loudon told the online journal the A.V. Club.
“For most of my childhood Loudon talked to me in songs [and] he always makes himself come across as funny and charming while the rest of us seem like whining victims,” Martha told The Guardian in a 2005 interview. ”As a result he has a daughter who smokes and drinks too much and writes songs with titles like ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole.’”
Despite their difficulties, Wainwright credits his parents with providing him with “a diverse musical environment” growing up. “They had wide-ranging tastes,” he says, but they didn’t quite extend to opera, which became one of his true passions. “When I started to gravitate toward it at age 13, they listened to The Rolling Stones and I put on Wagner and Verdi.”
Wainwright has composed two full-fledged operas, Prima Donna, which premiered at the Manchester [U.K.] International Festival in 2009, and Hadrian, which had a first production in 2018 at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto.
He’s also written a musical based on John Cassavetes’ 1977 movie Opening Night, which had a brief run in London’s West End earlier this year, and an oratorio, Dream Requiem, which premiered two months ago.
The world premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s Dream Requiem in Paris earlier this year, with narrator Meryl Streep, was inspired by the juxtaposition of the COVID pandemic and the California wildfires in 2020. The text combines the Latin Requiem with Lord Byron’s apocalyptic poem Darkness, which was written after an 1815 volcanic eruption and the subsequent global ash cloud that caused the “Year Without Summer.”
Christophe Abramowitz for Radio France.
The latter “was a huge hit in Paris,” he says, with what sounded like a mixture of pride and relief. “There was a huge standing ovation and many curtain calls, which is very rare there and very exciting.”
Dream Requiem, in his typical fashion, has some unique juxtapositions, such as a narrator as well as a soprano soloist (in Paris, the narrator was Meryl Streep), and a text that combines the traditional Requiem with an apocalyptic poem by Lord Byron.
In addition to Radio France, the commissioning partners include the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Netherlands Philharmonic, both of which will perform it in 2025, as well as the Royal Ballet, the Palau de la Musica Catalana Barcelona, and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.
In most photographs Wainwright appears pensive or thoughtful, sometimes completely neutral, but that’s not what he aspires to onstage. “I’m very cognizant and respectful of the fact that people spend a lot of money to go to a show now,” he says, “and I want them to be able to travel with me. I try to be as charming as possible. To be a consummate showman is one of my goals.”
He played the Santa Fe Opera once before, a 1999 concert to benefit the fight against AIDS. The event was emceed by Bea Arthur and their interaction led to one of his most famous anecdotes. I won’t spoil the punchline by repeating it here, in case he wants to include it as part of the upcoming evening, but the video is online at sfnm.co/RufusBea.
Wainwright’s Want Symphonic performance here also has a benefit component. Ticket buyers can support the Santa Fe Human Rights Alliance by adding an optional pre-show reception to their purchase.
Mark Tiarks writes frequently about music and opera for Pasatiempo.
