Six Characters in Search of an Author (1959)
Weisgall/Johnston (based on the play by Pirandello)

You’ve heard of “breaking the fourth wall,” now shatter it into dust and try to put it back together again. That’s the aim of Hugo Weisgall and Denis Johnston’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, a faithful adaptation of the play by Luigi Pirandello. This is an opera for those who love the theatre and all its potential, who have ever dared to ask “What if…?”. On one level, the work illustrates what happens to our favorite stories and characters once we close the book or close the curtain. On another level, the work challenges our understanding of theatre and storytelling. What if you didn’t have to suspend your disbelief in order to believe in the characters on stage? On an even deeper level, the work blurs the lines of reality and art to question the nature of our own existence. Which is more real: our own lives or the lives of the characters we create? Which will last longer? If we artists are not the conduits of our own creations, then what are we? Where does that leave us?

This metatheatrical piece can be thought of as having two simultaneous casts. One cast is an opera company: singers, a director, an accompanist, and others rehearsing a new Weisgall opera. The other cast is a group of Characters from an unfinished piece, a dysfunctional family of six who usurp the rehearsal with an urgent need to finish playing out their own story. Since it’s a union house, the company insists that the singers must play the family members, but the singers are nearly laughed off the stage by the family. The Characters end up playing their own roles, and they take their lives into their own hands (in more ways than one). By the end of Six Characters, the Company Members, equally trying to follow along and get involved in this new production, is unsure whether the events unfolding before them are the Characters’ present or their past, happening in real time or simply a stage act – or maybe even completely imagined by the creatives themselves.

It sounds dark and mysterious – and perhaps a bit befuddling – but the piece is also filled with comedy, at least in its premiere by New York City Opera. Day Thorpe, music critic of D.C.’s Evening Star newspaper, particularly appreciated the piece’s stereotyping of all the personalities involved in producing opera. He wrote, “One of the great beauties of the opera… is that the comic spirit pervades everything, even the introspective tragedies of the Characters.” As for the score, Thorpe called it “the finest brand of theater music, the driving force of what is happening onstage, often inconspicuous but never inconsequential, and at times rising to great eloquence.” Some thirty years later, Thorpe’s assessment seemingly held up. In his liner notes for the 1990 Chicago cast recording, Samuel Lipman wrote, “What is so remarkable about Weisgall as an operatic composer is his ability to write music that impresses solely as music and at the same time mirrors the stage in a consistently uncanny way.” But Lipman also noted that Weisgall’s music is “a difficult style, harmonically knotty, even though always clearly scored.”

Though the opera starts with the six Characters looking for an author to finish their story, by the end of the piece the Characters come into their own, carrying out their own destinies. And the creatives surrounding them find ways to make room for these Characters, then are left wondering if they ever existed at all. Questions of authorship are an increasing concern in our lives today, particularly with the development of artificial intelligence. The Writers Guild of America went on strike for an unprecedented 148 days in 2023, one major reason being the use of AI in the writer’s room. The Screen Actors Guild had a concurrent strike in 2023 in which it also fought for protection from AI, afraid that studios will use and profit from an actor’s likeness without their consent. In higher education, colleges and universities are addressing the use of AI in their academic honesty policies, recognizing AI-generated content as a potential form of plagiarism. But even without technology, Six Characters illustrates that the worlds we build are just as real as, well, “reality.” Perhaps we ourselves are our most convincing authors.

“The Weisgall opera as presented here by the New York City Center Opera was an astounding, perfectly overwhelming piece, always subtle and powerful, funny, tragic, lyrical, bombastic, melodramatic, and poetic by turn. Above all, it was marvelously gripping theater.

“I am afraid we are not used to thinking of opera in terms of genuine theater. As a consequence, ‘Six Characters’ (which added a new dimension of eloquence to Pirandello) took many by surprise. Instead of the expected pretty tunes, general brainlessness, and labored contrivance of the genre, the observer discovered a new world – the scintillating play of idea enhanced by the magic of music as dramatic catalyst.

“This opera established the fact that a really important American composer had come of age, perhaps the most original and daring man of opera our country had yet produced had arrived.” 

–Irving Lowens, Evening Star (D.C.)

“I first encountered a Weisgall opera in the spring of 1960, ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author,’ based on the famous Pirandello play. The City Opera had given the premiere a year earlier. The power of the opera, the performance and the production knocked me flat. The play’s tense conflict arises when the blasé members of a professional theater troupe (changed here to an opera company) actually confront the six emotionally scarred characters of the dysfunctional family they are impersonating. 

“Weisgall’s score, an astonishingly original manipulation of traditional opera techniques, seizes on this explosive situation in a carefully structured linear music-theater piece that takes full advantage of a composer’s right to interpret and reimagine the drama through purely musical means. The City Opera was putting on a festival of new American opera during that 1959-60 season, but compared with the theatrically sophisticated ‘Six Characters,’ the pleasantly tuneful offerings of Douglas Moore, Gian Carlo Menotti, Carlisle Floyd, Robert Ward and Norman Dello Joio seemed cozy and flat.” –Peter G. Davis, New York Times