THE WILD, EXPANSIVE WORLD OF MAURICE SENDAK’S OPERA SETS

Wallace Ludel

Maurice Sendak, Diorama of Moishe scrim and flower proscenium (Where the Wild Things Are), 1979-1983. © The Maurice Sendak Foundation. Courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum, bequest of Maurice Sendak. Photo by Graham Haber.

Maurice Sendak liked to say that he didn’t write for children; rather, he just wrote. “I do not believe I’ve ever written a children’s book, I don’t know how,” he said in a 2011 interview with the Tate, at age 82. He did, however, have a great reverence for children; he believed in the particular bits of knowledge that they alone possess. “The magic of childhood is the strangeness of childhood,” he said in the same interview, “the uniqueness that makes [children] see things that other people don’t see.”

Sendak often told the story of a young girl who witnessed the towers collapse on September 11th, then told her father that she had seen butterflies falling from them as they came down. Later, she admitted that she had lied to her parents so as not to upset them—she knew they weren’t butterflies, but people. The instinct to shield oneself from suffering by layering it with absurdity and beauty is often unique to children, but was Sendak’s most acute gift of all.

This sensibility is perhaps most apparent in the illustrator’s lesser-known career as an opera set and costume designer, as opera is an art in which all action is at once supremely beautiful and inextricably heartbreaking. Sendak designed about a dozen operas in his lifetime, and a show of nearly 150 objects, drawings, and paintings from them will be on view at the Morgan Library in New York from June 14th to October 6th.

By 1981, at age 53, Sendak was working on the sets of four different operas. His first two had been produced the previous year: A one-act adaptation of his beloved 1963 book Where the Wild Things Are began its run at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels in November and, two weeks earlier, his design for Mozart’s The Magic Flute, led by director Frank Corsaro, debuted at Houston Grand Opera in Texas.

One highlight at the Morgan is a watercolor and graphite study for the costume of Moishe, the beast from Where the Wild Things Are who was an avatar for Sendak himself. In the drawing, a young boy wears the costume, with Sendak’s hand-written notes detailing requirements like “Eyes must move!” (Early versions of these costumes were unsuccessful; performers reported being unable to breathe while wearing them, and one Wild Thing even fell off the stage due to a lack of peripheral vision.) Another treat is a depiction of the backdrop for the finale of The Magic Flute. In it, animals, mystical and otherwise, crowd the scene as the composition is split in half between night and day, a rainbow bridging the two.

Corsaro, who was already an established opera director at the time, admired Sendak’s range of ability, particularly after seeing his Brother’s Grimm illustrations. The Magic Flute was the perfect beginning to their professional relationship: It’s an opera that offsets vaudevillian absurdity and allegory with heavy, substantial undercurrents; and Sendak, unbeknownst to Corsaro at the time, was what one might call a Mozart super-fan. (Decades later, on PBS’s American Masters, he referred to Mozart as “a god I could really respect.”)

While Mozart reigned supreme for Sendak, he had strong associations with various composers. In a 1966 interview, he said he always worked with music playing. “All composers have different colors, as all artists do, and I pick up the right color from either Haydn or Mozart or Wagner while I’m working,” he explained. “And very often I will switch recordings endlessly until I get the right color or the right note or the right sound.”………………

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