MATTHEW AUCOIN

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When the composer Matthew Aucoin picks up his baton to conduct his opera Crossing, based on the writings of Walt Whitman, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this October, it will be more than one hundred and fifty years since the Civil War it depicts, five since the work’s genesis, and two since its premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Boston. But in its depiction of a nation torn apart in a time of darkness, it will feel bracingly current. “It’s terrifying, I had no idea how relevant it would be,” Aucoin says. “I look back on it now and it’s uncanny. I wish it were less relevant. Whitman was most American in his stupid optimism in the face of everything. The country had split in half and was killing each other, yet Whitman stubbornly stuck to this vision that the better angels of America’s nature would win out. I wish I had that kind of stubborn optimism.”

Crossing is not, on its face, obviously political. The story is less about Lincoln and rebellion and slavery than it is about the relationship between Whitman and a wounded Confederate soldier in disguise he cares for and develops a deep relationship with while serving as a volunteer nurse. But 2017 has been a year when art has, both intentionally and not, boldly confronted the nation’s new societal landscape, from 1984 on Broadway to The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu, from the debunked liberal pieties of Get Out and the of-the-minute impressions on Saturday Night Live to the immigration allegory in War for the Planet of the Apes and the Russian espionage in The Americans.

And Whitman, often considered the most American of poets, is now a perfect lens through which to consider what it means to be American at all. “I have fixated on the figure of Walt Whitman, who is just the most operatic spirit in American history,” Aucoin explains, “just larger than life and so mysterious and such a chameleon and such a performer. What I really wanted to do in the opera was to show the tension between the face that he was showing the world and what was happening underneath. Why does anyone write a poem? Why does anyone write a song? Do they do it simply to express something that they know, or do they do it in order to create what they want to be?”

Crossing was Aucoin’s first opera, and it’s a testament to the 27-year-old’s rare talent that it was enough to convince the board of the Los Angeles Opera to create the position of artist-in-residence for him, which he has held since 2016. The home of Hollywood has long had a bad reputation—especially among New Yorkers—for its limited access to high culture, but the city has lately been an epicenter of innovation, thanks to Gustavo Dudamel’s leadership at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the opening of the Broad, and more nimble ensembles like Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project. “I find that LA right now is in a moment of volcanic change, which is really thrilling,” says Aucoin, a Massachusetts native and former New Yorker. “The LA Opera was only founded in the Eighties, whereas the Met was founded in the 1880s, so there are certain things that are much more entrenched and harder to change in a company with that kind of tradition. At LA Opera, there’s almost no tradition, so if we want to do something unconventional, there’s this wonderful feeling of, ‘Why not?’”

Much of Aucoin’s young life can been seen as a reflection of that same sentiment of exploration and audacity. He began playing piano—technically, a Casio keyboard—at the same time he learned to speak and started composing at the age of four. He wrote an opera at ten based on Brian Jacques’s Redwall novels about talking animals and was playing Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro by heart at eleven. “I have a memory of hearing Beethoven’s Ninth somewhere and the famous ‘Ode to Joy’ theme just lodged itself in there and wouldn’t leave,” he recalls. “I remember walking around the backyard and thinking, ‘How does this exist?’ and just feeling this sense of wonder. I had the feeling of being very at home in something, the way I’m sure some kids do when they play a sport or they jump in the water and notice they can swim. I jumped into music and found that I could swim.”

He took a detour into jazz and rock during his teenage years, but returned to classical music while studying poetry as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he won the Hoopes Prize recognizing “outstanding scholarly work or research” for a collection of poems he wrote. Music remained a through line during his college years, however, as he composed a number of pieces and practiced conducting student ensembles and opera companies. The mother of a musician who saw one of his performances recommended him for an audition for the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program just before graduating in 2012, and he was quickly hired as an assistant conductor.

Aucoin spent his first months at the Met helping the company rehearse for the upcoming premiere of The Tempest, a new opera based on the Shakespeare play composed by Thomas Adès, whom Aucoin calls “one of my favorite living composers” and a model for the sort of successful composer-conductor he aspires to be. “Working with Adès helped me see that it’s possible to live as a composer-conductor,” he explains. “It’s an extraordinarily high standard, but I thought to myself, ‘Yes, I can do this.’” A few months later, he was commissioned to write Crossing.

After four years in New York, Aucoin moved to Los Angeles last fall to take up his post at LA Opera, which he calls a “tailor-made suit” for its mixed job requirements of conducting, composing, and community outreach. He is currently at work on a co-commission for the Met and LA Opera, adapting with the playwright Sarah Ruhl her early play Eurydice, a spare and haunting reconsideration of the Orpheus myth. As an iconic symbol of music, Orpheus is no stranger to opera, but Aucoin’s interpretation approaches the story from a different, if not entirely surprising, perspective. “The way I’ve always understood the story, Orpheus is the ultimate narcissist,” he explains. “He doesn’t turn around just to make sure she’s there. He turns around because he knows that it’s better for his music if she dies again and he kind of wants that to happen.”

Perhaps wary of becoming similarly overly involved in his own work, Aucoin says he relishes his responsibility as LA Opera’s artist-in-residence to bring the company out to the sprawling neighborhoods of its hometown. The world of classical music has been in confusion for years with ticket sales diminishing as patrons die off without younger ones to replace them, but he insists that, even in our overstimulated world, the power of the genre will break through—even if it requires rethinking the format. “There was a moment in human history when opera was the grandest spectacle imaginable, with elephants onstage and a giant chorus and dancers. There was a moment when that was about as fancy and as large-scale as it got,” he says. “But today? Compare that to a Beyoncé show. There’s no comparison. There’s so many things that are bigger, louder, faster, more expensive, bigger business, but what we can do is we can be this alternative, underground experience which is more about intimacy than grandeur. We need to embrace the fact that we are a niche.”

In keeping with that shift, Aucoin recently established the American Modern Opera Company along with choreographer and dancer Zack Winokur, a small ensemble of instrumentalists, vocalists, and dancers meant to foster boundary-crossing interaction through the creation of innovative and intimate work. The emphasis at AMOC is on depth rather breadth, on establishing long-term connections rather than creating the latest, hottest thing. It is perhaps in this way that Aucoin most resembles Stravinsky, whom he cites as a “favorite composerly model” for his ability to cross genres and styles and who was deeply involved in Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, AMOC’s most famous predecessor in its interdisciplinary creative process.

Aucoin is bringing his emphasis on the small scale to LA Opera as well, where he instituted a free late-night series, called “After Hours,” that places performers in close proximity to the audience in a small room in the company’s home at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Downtown Los Angeles. A recent evening included music from both Schubert and Bob Dylan, while another mixed Benjamin Britten’s folk song arrangements with Joni Mitchell. This blurred boundary between classical and popular music is no longer surprising today, when Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood can score Paul Thomas Anderson films and Sufjan Stevens can compose for ballet while Nico Muhly performs alongside the National’s Bryce Dessner in Prospect Park. But Aucoin insists that while that cross-pollination can have promising results, they are still different beasts. “I think different kinds of music do activate different parts of our minds and our bodies,” he reasons. “The thing that I see as being special about classical music is the fact that it demands something of you as a listener. I’m not saying it’s intellectual, I’m just saying it’s about focus and immersion and being able to give yourself to this experience in a wholehearted way. There is a connection with the fact that a lot of this music is played unamplified, which limits the size of the audience, because you want to have this physical, intimate connection with the sound.”

A young man in a traditionally old man’s game—at seventy-six, the LA Opera’s general director and famed tenor Plácido Domingo is nearly three times his age—Aucoin is quick to push away any attempts to label him a “prodigy.” Without denying his own abilities, he is careful to stress that hard work, drive, and a little bit of luck have played important parts in his progress thus far as well. “It took a lot of people taking a chance on me and the only thing that I can definitely say that I had was the willingness to try,” he says about being commissioned for Crossing so soon after graduating from college. “I’m not sure I was ready from a technical perspective and I’m not sure I was the best person for the job, but I did have the willingness to go for it one hundred and fifty percent.”

Crossing premieres October 3 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.