Music Credits: Berceuse for Violin and piano Op. 16 , composed by  G. Fauré - Augmented sheet music, performance from The Trial of Oscar Wilde. Excerpt from The Young Arthur Rubenstein. Both productions of the Ensemble of the Romantic Century. “I’ve always thought of myself as a musical instrument, neither violin nor piano, simply the essence of music. I never walk or wake or dream or go to sleep without having music in my head. Pablo Picasso once told me that he painted with his stomach, with his gut. That is one must feel the music.” <music> Jo Reed: That was an excerpt from The Young Arthur Rubinstein, a performance piece created by the Ensemble for the Romantic Century. And this is Art Works the weekly podcast produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Imagine walking into an intimate performance space, the stage designed and lit for a period theatrical piece and it’s shared by fully costumed actors and musicians.  What unfolds is a merger of dramatic and fully staged scripts with music. Not excerpts of music, not music to heighten the drama, but full sonatas, concertos, and quartets.  This artistic hybrid was created by the Ensemble of the Romantic Century. ERC productions are typically based on a major cultural figure, often a musician.  The scripts are drawn from historical material which includes letters, diaries, newspaper articles, poetry, literature that work in intricate counterpoint to the musical program, neither dominating nor in the service to other; but, music and drama as equals on the stage. Now in its 15^th year, the Ensemble for the Romantic Century, has produced some 40 productions and performed at festivals and in venues around the world.  Last season, I had the opportunity see their production of The Trial of Oscar Wilde, and it was an unexpected and moving evening of theater. ERC’s director of theatrical productions, Don Sanders wasn’t surprised by my response. Don Sanders: Ensemble for the Romantic Century combine the pleasures of theatre, acting, we have always wonderful actors, and of music, wonderful musicians playing fantastic music, and, also, its fully designed with costumes and sets and with wonderful lighting. And, I think it’s a very wonderful and unique form. Jo Reed: What’s the origins of ERC, who began it? Don Sanders: Eve Wolf, who is a pianist, a classical pianist, Max Barros, also a classical pianist, and James Melo, who’s a musicologist and a brilliant musicologist.  The origins of ERC, getting back to your original question, were that Eve was working at the 92nd Street Y and it was that period when people got really excited about going to pre-concert lectures.  And people would go, as they still do, Jo Reed: Mm-hm. Don Sanders: Go to pre-concert lectures.  And people would give all this wonderful information.  And then you’d have the concert.  And she thought, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to integrate the actual material?” material about either the composer or the period, et cetera, actually into the sensual, theatrical experience.  And so that was really the origin of it. So the idea is to, people say, “Well, what is this?  Is it a concert? “Is it a play?” it’s both.  It’s drama, it’s a play and it is a concert.  I also think of it as a little movie.  I mean, that’s the way I think about it when I’m directing it.  You know, I try to erase what isn’t necessary so that we focus on what is happening in whatever particular scene, whether it’s the acting scene or it’s the music.  Jo Reed: Don, you’ve been at this for a while, what do you think takes place when you combine these art forms? Don Sanders: A kind of performance art piece takes place, because it’s like a collage in a certain way.  The actual words of somebody like Oscar Wilde or of Tchaikovsky, his letters, and the response to his letters. So you hear these very beautiful, heartfelt letters and its wonderful exercise for the actors.  It’s very filmic, in a certain way, although they have to have all the histrionic skills of live acting.  It’s like becoming these very important cultural figures.  And so there’s that part.  Then the music, it’s not used programmatically.  I’ve learned all these.  I’m not a professional musician.  I’m an appreciator.  I’m strictly a theater person.  The music isn’t used programmatically.  It’s not background music.  We integrate actions where it’s appropriate with the music.  But the pieces of music, all the pieces are played straight through in whether it’s a movement or a sonata or a song or whatever.  And this is due to the wonderful skills of the founders of ERC. So they think of themes or ideas, characters, figures, such as Peggy Guggenheim or Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky, as I said.  And they put a piece together, and it takes a lot of time for them to figure out which pieces of music will act as a resonance. Jo Reed: And you’re the director. Don Sanders: And I’m the director.  I’m the director of theatrical production.  Eve Wolf is the executive artistic director, and then Max and James are co-artistic directors.  And I’m the director of theatrical production.  So we all work very collaboratively.  But I’m a Johnny-come-lately on the scene.  I mean, they began the ERC 14 years ago.  And I’m now, I think, coming into my ninth year in my position.  And I love it.  Jo Reed: How often do you mount productions? Don Sanders: We usually do three to four concerts and theatrical presentations a year. Jo Reed: Tell me how you begin to put this all together and how you begin to stage the work. Don Sanders:  We have a first reading.  And at the first reading, the set and costume designer, who has been Vanessa James, is there and she thinks about what it could look like and what the costumes, which are usually always very authentic from the period, whatever period it is.  Beverly Emmons is our lighting designer and she’s a painter with light.  Beverly was the first woman to win a Tony Award on Broadway for her lighting of Amadeus.  And she also did the Einstein at the Beach, the first performance of it, at Lincoln Center, at The Met.  We’re kind of like, a unit and we bring our things to it at this first reading.  We listen to the piece and we make suggestions, whether dramaturgically.  I don’t ever make suggestions musically because I don’t have that, you know, wealth of knowledge about it, but I could say, “Maybe this would sound better there after that particular,” Jo Reed: I was going to ask you that.  Yeah. Don Sanders: Yeah.  So there’s a lot of collaboration. Jo Reed: Now, and it’s, I guess I just want to emphasize, because it’s the music and the spoken word are equal on that stage. Don Sanders: Yes, they are.  They are.  And it’s very interesting.  And it’s interesting to put those two tones or idioms or mediums together, it’s why I love this forum.  I mean, I felt like I fell into something that for me personally as an artist is, has an aesthetic spiritual and just an emotional and historical structure and intrigue that I wouldn’t necessarily find.  I mean, I direct regular plays, so to speak, and have, but I’ve always been interested in new theater.  And this is, although it may seem, from the 19^th Century and into the Early 20^th Century, it’s an idiom, that I think is really rather new. Jo Reed: And then in the case of the Tchaikovsky, you also brought another medium in, which is you had dancers. Don Sanders: Yes, we did.  We had dancers, and that was extraordinary.  And again, we do these pieces, we put something on it’s ready to be seen, but they do change if we decide to do them again.  We refine them.  And in the case of the Tchaikovsky we thought to ourselves, “Hey, wait a minute. He’s so associated with dancing, with ballet, why not add ballet?”  Once we made that decision that that would be wonderful to do, we worked with ABT, American Ballet Theatre, and we were able to have a wonderful young dancer come and be in the piece and I think it was just absolutely great.  And I think that we would do more of that.  The same way with the piece that we just finished about Oscar Wilde.  It occurred to u, that most of the theatrical part was about what was said at his trials or what he wrote to Bosie, his lover, really personal material.  And then I suddenly thought, “Well, Oscar Wilde was one of the greatest playwrights ever.  We ought to give a little, a little piece, a little taste of, one of, a piece from one of his plays.”  So in this time that we did the performances we added an excerpt from, The Importance of Being Earnest.  And I think it was really wonderful. Jo Reed: As I was sitting there, and the first half is often very, very funny and very, very witty.  And as I’m getting ready for act two I was thinking, “Well, I think it’s going to be a lot more serious and, you know, very heartbreaking from here on in,” and I really did appreciate, The Importance of Being Earnest.  I thought it worked in very nicely. Don Sanders: Thank you.  Thank you.  I’m so glad.  Jo Reed: With the Oscar Wilde and with the Tchaikovsky, you really were.  The company was looking at the issue, the challenges, that gay artists faced. Don Sanders: Yes, yes, absolutely.  And it becomes even more, I think, obviously, this season, the piece about Tchaikovsky where he was grappling with his homosexuality, we, was, a conscious decision on the part of Eve and Max and James to do two pieces that really addressed gay empowerment.  Although there’s been tremendous, you know, progress, I feel like in my lifetime, the big issues that I grew up facing were civil rights, then, we looked at women’s rights, gay rights, and now I think there have been the issues of transgender.  I mean, all of that.  And it’s hard, I think, for maybe current audiences to remember just how verboten, under the table you know? I still think that all of those issues are always in a precarious state and we can’t say too much about them and we can’t say too much about how there is a history and a past and people can’t ever lose track of what happened to Oscar Wilde.  That was a terrible tragedy, and it was really politically generated.  I mean, there’s no question.  And he was destroyed for something which he said was natural.  It’s not unnatural.  And I think more and more people now know that.  And with the gay marriage and everything, we’re making progress, but it’s still, these are still, very important issues.  Jo Reed: Let’s talk about the music. How was it chosen? Don Sanders: The music that James chose, Chausson, who I think that music is so, you know, dazzling.  You know, I consider myself reasonably alert to music.  I was not aware of Chausson’s music, and his dates are exactly the same as Oscar Wilde’s.  And we know that Oscar Wilde knew about his music, he was very oriented to French culture, and so he knew the works of Chausson and Fauré.  And so therefore, Jo Reed: The Fauré was… Don Sanders: Was beautiful.  I know. Jo Reed: Unbelievably gorgeous. <music> Don Sanders: Yeah, yeah.  And then there were the two British pieces, which the Vaughan Williams and the Elgar. Jo Reed: From what I’ve read, your pieces usually do take place in a very intimate setting, which means those, that’s a lot going on on a stage. Don Sanders: Yes, it is.  It is.  It is. It’s a lot going on.  On that little stage. Jo Reed: Yeah. Don Sanders: I mean, I can’t tell you. We did a piece, Van Gogh in Montreal, and it was also in a much larger theater.  I think there were 800 seats also.  It was big.  That was very exciting the first time to be in a large space and to hear the actors use their really histrionic ability, which they have, and the actor there who’s French-Canadian, Simon Fortin, he’s a trained actor.  And so, of course, the people come and they say, “Okay.  We’re going to wire you for the little, you know, thing.”  He said, “No, no.  I can speak.” And it’s similar to the music: concert musicians never are mic’ed.  I mean, they don’t have a mic on their piano or on their violin or whatever.  And that becomes another kind of resonance. Jo Reed: Yeah.  It was very interesting.  When I went to see the Oscar Wilde, I had done my research and I read about it and I honestly did not know what to expect and that is a nice thing. But. I also can see how that would be a challenge for you in trying to explain to potential audiences what’s going to happen. Don Sanders: It is.  And we’ve thought about it.  I mean, there’s a pre-concert lecture, usually, and… But we don’t address the kind of, the event, the theatrical event.  The nature of the animal that people are going to see.  And it’s also because, you know, it’s sort of hard because you tend to think, “Okay.”  You’re going to have to tell them, “It’s not a conventional dialogue,” It’s not a concert where the lights are, you know, et cetera.  So it seems that we always have to talk about a lot of nots and rather talk about what it is.  It’s this kind of, I think of it, as kind of a very symbolist and a beautiful unfolding.  It’s always interesting when the actors first hear the live musicians. Jo Reed: I was going to ask you that too. Don Sanders: It’s astonishing. Jo Reed: Yeah. Don Sanders: And particularly for actors who we have not worked with before. The musicians and the actors rehearsed separately and then we blend, put the thing together.  You know, there’s always those normal kinds of logistical issues, and then suddenly this atmosphere takes over, you know, where the actors start listening to the whole piece.  They become more confident of what they’re doing, and the same thing happens with the musicians.  And the musicians start listening to what the actors are saying and what the context is of how they are appearing, because they also are used to only appearing in concert circumstances where there may be program notes, et cetera, but they’re not in an empathetic relationship to other people onstage. I really feel that when the atmosphere is successful, that’s what the audience feels as well.  That when I talk about kind of an erasure of the barriers. Jo Reed: Yeah, the genres. Don Sanders: You sort of sink into it, you know.  When the audience also realizes, “I’m listening to this whole piece of music.”  It isn’t necessarily related to the plot, but it is, it might be emotionally, it begins to have a resonance.  And another sensual.  That’s, I can say, a sensual experience. Jo Reed: Mm-hm.  Well, what’s so interesting is that it affects a different part of one, I think.  Because there’s a linearity to theater. Don Sanders: Mm-hm. Jo Reed: And music is a way of, Don Sanders: Yes.  It’s what can’t be said. Jo Reed: --accessing what can’t be said. Don Sanders: Exactly.  What can’t be said.  Exactly. Jo Reed: Yeah.  Accessing that. Don Sanders: Exactly. Jo Reed: And it also made me think of what we lose when we silo the arts. Don Sanders: Yes.  Yes.  I agree. Jo Reed: And that had to have been a thought for all of you-- Don Sanders: Absolutely. Jo Reed: --involved in ERC. Don Sanders: Absolutely.  Absolutely.  Jo Reed: Do you have a company of musicians? Don Sanders: We have developed a company, and it’s not the same company each time, but it’s wonderful.  We have a called the ERC family.  And that’s another element which I want to talk about is the musicians.  Max and Eve are absolutely extraordinary at identifying really wonderful musicians.  And it’s not about an age thing.  We’re not ageists in any way whatsoever, but so many young musicians love this kind of work.  And they don’t have an opportunity to do it. In general, we try to use people, again, if the music, you know, if the music is right for what they play.  If the repertoire is right for what they play. And the same with actors.  Jo Reed: What was the first piece you directed? Don Sanders: The first piece I directed was a piece about the relationship between Frédéric Chopin and George Sand.  And it was based on the winter in Mallorca.  And, I’ll tell you what happened is that Eve Wolf’s children went to the United Nations school and our son was at the United Nations school.  And we lived close by and so at one point Eve said, “Would you ever be willing to carpool?”  And so my wife said, “Absolutely.”  So, you know, kids talk.  So, in the car, my son talked about what I do and so I got a phone call and Eve said, “I’d love you to come to one of the concerts.”  Vanessa and I went to the concert and we loved it.  I mean, it was utterly wonderful.  Several months went by and I got a call from Eve.  And she said, “Don, I don’t know.  I hate to ask you.  Could you really help me?  Because we’re trying to put on this piece about George Sand, and we have an actress,”  A wonderful actress.  “And she’s really having a hard time with this format.”  And she said, “You don’t have a stage manager.  You don’t have a director.  You don’t have anything having to do with the theater.  Everything is about the music,” et cetera. I had the afternoon off and I said, “Okay.  I’ll come down,” it was like a scene from a screwball comedy from a 1930s movie.  As soon as I went in the Kosciuszko I could hear the screams upstairs, the whole thing. Jo Reed: Could you really? Don Sanders: Yeah, I really could. And I went up the stairs and immediately the actress said, “Who are you?”  And I said, “Well, I’ve been to an ERC concert and I’m a theater director.”  I said, “Well, Eve asked me to come in and see, because she wants this to be good and I can tell you that it’s really something worth doing.”  She was playing, George Sand, and so I just talked about the things that theater people talk about, about how you need relax.  And also the trying to make the musicians understand that actors have a different working process.  You know, some actors do come in with all the lines learned and absolutely how they’re going to do it.  That doesn’t happen so much anymore.  It really doesn’t.  So that was something that had to be made clear to the musicians. The theatre has its world of dos and don’ts and musicians, of course, are astonishing because, of course, unlike actors, they come to a rehearsal with everything known. You know, the singers, people coming in doing lead or whatever, they got the whole thing there, you know. Boom, it’s a different process. So that was the first thing I did. Jo Reed: How long is the rehearsal period? Don Sanders: The rehearsal period is remarkably short, actually.  It’s usually, between one and two weeks. Jo Reed: Are you kidding? Don Sanders: But we have readings.  And, of course, the musicians rehearse separately.  And I rehearse separately with the actors and then we put them together.  But, it’s also because people’s schedules are very difficult.  It’s very hard to get people for a long rehearsal time for, quite frankly, the rather modest fees that we pay, although they’re good fees.  But for example, when we redid the Chopin piece, which was in Italy at the Festival del Sole, Jeremy Irons played the role.  So, I mean, I was faced with Jeremy Irons and his wife, Sinéad Cusack.  And we had two days to do the show. Jo Reed: How did that go? Don Sanders: It was wonderful.  See, it was absolutely wonderful.  There’s something about it when actors really get this and go with it, they really go with it.  And Jeremy said to me, you know, “Don, this is like,” when he was at the Bristol Old Vic, where I also went. And he says, “You had to put things together in one day,” to show the teachers. You know, I can remember you got up at six o’clock in the morning, go to these unheated rehearsal places, and then by the time you had to show it at seven o’clock at night it had to be all there. If they have that rigorous background, they can do it. Also the musicians are used to that kind of time.  They’re not used to the sort of eight hour involved kind of theater rehearsals. Jo Reed: Interesting.  How did you get involved in theater? Don Sanders: Well, well, I went originally to University of Pennsylvania to study architecture because the late Louis Kahn was there.  And they had a kind of a double thing where I could do literature and architecture.  And University of Pennsylvania had the first really knock-down, drag-out exhibition of Andy Warhol in 1964. And when Warhol came to Penn, he was in the midst of doing his films and starting to be interested in it with the superstars, et cetera.  And when you saw this wild building by Frank Furness, nutsy 19^th Century American architect who was very not that well-known, but it’s incredible building.  He wanted to do happenings around.  And so because of, I was fortunate enough to go to some of the Allan Kaprow happenings in New York City, people said, “Well, you’ll know how to make these.”  And I said, “Well, no. I don’t know anything really.  I just…” So, and it was in those days there were no theater departments in a lot of the major academic institutions.  There were clubs and there was something called the Penn Players, which was a club.  And after the head of the Penn Players saw some of these events, Miss Quinn was her name.  I’ll never forget her.  I thank you, Miss Quinn. And she said, “Could we get you to do something for the club?” And I said, “I don’t know anything about it.”  You know, “I really don’t know anything about it.  And if I did I’d have to do something that used my friends from the art school.  It wouldn’t be like a conventional theater piece.”  She kept nagging me, and finally I did the first production I can say I directed, was Krapp’s Last Tape of Beckett, because that was what I felt was modernist literature.  We did a film.  A film was made by some of my friends from the art school, and the film was shown and, you know, I had an epiphany.  I say this to people because I was lucky enough to have one.  I just loved doing it.  I loved putting together the whole thing.  I just had an instinct, thought, “I’m going to be a director. And that’s what I want to do.” And so I did a piece at the Experimental Theater there, a production of The Chairs, Ionesco.  And then I, from Penn, I won a fellowship to go to study in England, which it was a fellowship given usually for highly academic or science issues.  And I think I was the first person to be given it in the arts.  And so when they said, “Well, you want to go to Oxford or Cambridge and study?” I said, “No.  I would like to go and find out how to do theater.”  I mean, I didn’t know anything about it.  I hadn’t had any professional training.  So I went to Bristol and that was a phenomenal experience.  By that time I was off and running and-- Jo Reed: Yeah. Don Sanders: --only wanted to be a director and be as good a director as I could be. Jo Reed: That’s wonderful.  Do you know what you’re doing next season for ERC? Don Sanders: Yeah.  Well, there’s talk about doing a Kafka piece.  And there’s also talk about the possibility of bringing the Tchaikovsky back in as a double bill, or double not on the same night, with the Beethoven.  The Tchaikovsky’s already kind of established itself, and that would be an interesting match.  There are, like, almost 40 productions that are there waiting to be tapped.  I mean, it’s like I love all my children.  When we sit down and talk about it, if we’re bringing something back, it’s hard to decide which is the one.  I sort of leave that to Eve and Max and James. Don Sanders: So I don’t know. When we know you’ll be the first to know. Jo Reed: You’ll let me know. Don Sanders: Absolutely. Jo Reed: Okay.  Well, it was a pleasure.  And Oscar Wilde was a revelation.  And I was so happy to be there in that theater. Don Sanders: Oh, I’m so glad.  Jo Reed: Well, Don, thank you so much.  I appreciate it. Don Sanders: Thank you.  Thank you.  It was a pleasure. Jo Reed: Thank you.  That’s Don Sanders. He’s director of theatrical productions for the Ensemble for the Romantic Century. You can see their production of Van Gogh’s Ear from August 20-30 at the Clark Museum in Williamstown, Ma. You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.   To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAarts on Twitter.  For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.