With APO project, T2's Robert Ford returns to first passion—music
Imagine yourself in the audience of a classical music performance. Thunderous swells of orchestral music, soaring crescendos, and sweet, heartbreaking melodies combine to inspire feelings of love, loss, joy, and sadness with great intensity and dramatic effect. What, you wonder, could have possibly inspired the composer to pour out their heart in this moving manner?
The Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra’s new performance, “Clara and Johannes at the Lake: An Original Love Story”, (7 pm, April 19) aims to merge theater and music in a way that answers that very question for its audiences—and they tapped TheatreSquared Artistic Director Robert Ford to accomplish just that.
“He has a very strong—and I can't overstate [it]—a very strong musical background,” notes Byess of Ford. “So he has an intricate understanding of the drama between these two people. He’s an author, as well, so he understands the mechanics of exploring personal relationships. But Bob's experience as a trained musician also helps him understand the relationships of musical themes as they might reflect the masculine and feminine qualities of Clara and Johannes.”
This background may come as a surprise to Ford’s fans who know him solely through his connection to TheatreSquared—but scratch the surface of the T2 co-founder and you’ll discover quite the Renaissance man. The history of T2 has been reported on frequently: Sometime around 2003, Ford and a small group of co-founders dreamed up the concept of a Fayetteville-based regional theater late one night around a dinner table. That same year, Ford’s first novel, The Student Conductor, was published to rave reviews, winding up on two 10 Best First Novel lists. It also received a starred review on Booklist, with the review noting that “Ford writes about the emotional essence of music with remarkable eloquence”; Publisher’s Weekly wrote that “his insights into the rarefied world of classical music are rich and often piercingly poignant.”
Riley Newsome as Johannes Brahams and Betsy Jilka in the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra’s production of “Clara and Johannes at the Lake: An Original Love Story” at 7 pm on April 19.
The reason the veracity of Ford’s prose about the world of classical musicians was unquestioned is simple—Ford, a lifelong musician, was pulling material from his own experiences in that world. Ford started playing the flute in high school and proved to have an instant talent for it.
“When I was in high school, I was the first chair in the New Jersey Allstate orchestra, and I won various competitions,” Ford remembers “I was already studying with the main flute teacher at Manhattan School of Music, and he encouraged me to apply for that program.”
But Ford heard the call of more than music: He was fascinated by—and adept at—theater and writing, as well, and he was lured mid-program to a liberal arts college, where he studied English and Journalism. He would return to music for his first graduate program—he studied music and composition at the Yale School of Music. This pendulum swing would continue throughout his life. Having a variety of interests is not uncommon, of course, but few have as many successful accomplishments in multiple areas of interest as Ford. In addition to co-founding a successful regional theater and writing The Student Conductor, Ford has also written six full-length plays and numerous short plays and one-acts. He has MFAs in both acting and playwriting, a Master’s of Music, and a list of awards as long as his arm.
But helping to run a successful theater company is a lot of work, and it’s difficult for Ford to exercise the other talents he’s developed over his life. He had been subbing for the Northwest Arkansas Symphony Orchestra (now called the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas) right around the time T2 was getting off the ground and, in fact, auditioned for a permanent role with the organization. The road in front of him forked when he was offered a position, and he had to make a tough decision: pursue what he calls his “original passion” or give this fledgling theater company, still in its infancy, a fighting chance. Obviously, theater won out, and that makes opportunities like the one extended from APO a valuable commodity for him. The fact that he had done extensive research on Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahams for his novel was the icing on the cake.
“There’s an unbelievable soap opera around Johannes, Clara, and Robert [Schumann],” says Ford. Clara Schumann was desperately in love with her husband, Robert, when the couple befriended Johannes, the next big thing to hit the German classical music scene. As Robert neared the end of his life, his health forced him into a sanitarium, separated from Clara, who leaned on Johannes in her grief. Soon, the pair were intimately involved in each other’s lives and, when Robert died, says Ford, friends of the couple assumed they would marry.
“They take a two week vacation together in Switzerland, on Lake Lucerne, accompanied by Johannes’ younger sister, as kind of a chaperone, and two of her boys. The understanding is that they're going to figure out whether they should get married or not. We don't really know what happened—we just know that at the other end of it, they had decided not to get married, even though there was this sense that they were madly in love with each other.”
That two-week vacation will be imagined by Ford in four scenes, performed by actors Betsy Jilka and Riles Newsome, under the direction of Steven Marzolf. Marzolf has grown adept at directing these plays-within-symphonies—he was at the helm of APO’s theater/symphony mash-up “Symphonie Fantastique.” That experience, says Byess, was an unmitigated success.
“It enhanced the performance of the work so greatly,” he says. “We thought and were hoping that it would be a success, but we were perhaps not prepared for the overwhelming success of it and how it connected with the community and our patrons.”
As far as Ford is concerned, his personal experience with “Clara and Johannes at the Lake: An Original Love Story” is already a success.
“It's actually incredibly special for me, even though I don't know whether it'll work,” he says with a laugh. “But I love that Steven Byess and the APO are willing to kind of take this chance and do this crossover piece that involves some of the richest music from the Romantic era of classical music. And this story, which very much lives as a piece of theater—how do those things mix? No matter what, it’s going to be super engaging, and there's an experimental aspect to it also.
“I’ve really had a blast.”