Saratoga News

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Mollicone, who is well-known in opera circles, says the fact that he could also work as an accompanist helped during the slow times.

Opera Saratoga

Mollicone composes, teaches and conducts

By Mary Ann Cook

Forget those stereotypes of tortured, intense, long-haired composers when you think of Henry Mollicone. He's a happily married, low-key (pun intended), seemingly laid-back composer who runs, swims, walks his dogs, does all those things ordinary mortals do. Except that he composes operas as well.

"It's very easy for me; I've been improvising since I was very young," says Mollicone, who began taking piano lessons at age 7. "I knew from a very early age I was going to be a composer."

Besides composing, he conducts the Santa Clara University orchestra and teaches classes there part time: orchestration, 20th-century music and piano. He's been an artist in residence at the university since 1985 and holds the Frank Sinatra chair.

Mollicone, a Rhode Island native with a decided East Coast accent, worked in Los Angeles, composing scores for films and television, before coming to SCU. His music introduced such TV shows as Barnaby Jones, and Fantasy Island and is heard in the '76 movie thriller Premonition, which sometimes shows up on TV.

He's been composing opera since 1977, and opera's what he's best known for. His one-act, The Face on the Barroom Floor, is one of the most frequently produced contemporary operas. It was commissioned by the Central City Opera in Colorado, which wanted a small-scale piece with three singers and three musicians that could be performed at the Teller House, where there really is a face on the barroom floor.

"It's an old Western bar in Central City, and they've performed [the opera] there every year since. It's my signature piece, my calling card," Mollicone says, adding that it's been produced countless times by countless groups. That's why, though he doesn't consider himself a well-known composer, he concedes, "I'm well-known in opera circles."

Face won the American Composer's Alliance Recording Award and has been produced in Europe and throughout the U.S. Other mini-operas of Mollicone's are Emperor Norton, Starbird and The Mask of Evil, all commissioned by opera companies in various cities. His three-act opera Hotel Eden premiered at Opera San José in 1989 and was also performed at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore in 1992.

Though he may not consider himself well-known, Mollicone has collaborated with the famous. He's currently working on an opera called Coyote Tales, based on Indian legends. His lyricist is Sheldon Harnick, who wrote the lyrics for Fiddler on the Roof.

Working with a collaborator is a series of working, rewriting and polishing. "I feel that we're on the same wavelength, and he's such a good writer," Mollicone says of Harnick. Currently he is traveling back and forth to Logan, Utah, to coach the singers in a workshop for this opera, so that the creators can begin to hear how it will sound and learn where to make their revisions and so the performers can get acquainted with the piece.

Another collaborator/lyricist of Mollicone's is William Luce, who wrote The Belle of Amherst. Together, Mollicone and Luce wrote a piece called A Rat's Tale: The Pied Piper Revisited. An update, of course, of the Pied Piper of Hamlin legend, this one is from the viewpoint of the only surviving rat in Hamlin.

"I like my work to have some fantasy in it," Mollicone says with characteristic understatement. The El Camino Youth Symphony premiered this piece.

Another famous person he's worked with is Leonard Bernstein. Mollicone was musical assistant for Bernstein's bicentennial show, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. "Unfortunately, it was a flop, played for a week on Broadway," Mollicone says.

There were problems which weren't ironed out on the road. But it was recently revived at a university and may have a reincarnation, particularly if the weak spots in the book can be strengthened. "Lots of musicals that were flops have wonderful music. You see it happen over and over again."

A graduate of the New England Conservatory, Mollicone says he lucked into his first job out of college. New York City Opera needed an additional coach, and while he says he was the weakest of the coaches, "I was a good pianist." He was there four years before Mr. Bernstein beckoned. Then it was on to L.A., then Santa Clara University and calling Saratoga home.

Mollicone says the biggest thrill for him as a composer is performing his own work for an appreciative audience. "To reveal what's inside you, that's the whole point of us [composers]. If the music communicates, if it's affecting somebody, then I feel I've done my job."

His latest work is evidently affecting: when he was playing it at the Utah workshop recently, he thought one of his listeners had an allergy because she was sniffling so much. Turned out she was so moved by his music that she was crying.

"Whatever's the newest" is his favorite of his compositions, but he enjoys renewing acquaintance with his older work, too. When he conducts Face on the Barroom Floor at Wartburg, a small college in Waverly, Iowa, which he's done for several summers, he says, "it still thrills you."

The hardest part of composing is probably the "tough love" you have to exhibit if you know something isn't working and it has to be lopped off. Young composers in particular have a hard time performing this surgery, deleting something they've worked so hard on and are so attached to.

His friend and fellow composer Los Gatan Craig Bohmler says of Mollicone, "Henry is an intensely serious composer who tries to reflect the state of his soul in his music. He pores over every note. When he hands me a score he's written, he'll put a happy face or a sad face on his music depending on the mood of his soul when he wrote it."

It's a tough life, finding a job as a musician. Though he's been successful, Mollicone wouldn't recommend it for others. "There's so much rejection involved."

If you're an accompanist, he says, you stand a much better chance at finding employment. Mollicone himself was a cocktail lounge pianist in Rhode Island in his younger days.

He spotted his future wife at a rehearsal of the San Jose Civic Light Opera. Across a crowded room? "No, fortunately, the room wasn't crowded, or I might have been too shy to cross it and talk to her." She was one of the singers, and he asked her out a few days later. He doesn't remember the name of the musical she was singing in, but he does remember that he got the girl.

He and Kathy have been married for eight years. She's a legal secretary for a Campbell company and has sung with the Saratoga Drama Group. Added bonus: Mollicone now has two grandchildren, preschoolers Taylor and Garrett Heinen, who live in San Jose with parents Mark and Carol. "I skipped the hard part--being a parent," Mollicone grins.

His procreation efforts are those on sheets of music, "baring his soul," as he calls it. Recent orchestral works include The Adventures of Alice, a ballet commissioned by the San Jose Dance Theater; Celestial Dance, commissioned by the Long Beach Symphony; and Behind Me Dips Eternity, composed for the California Music Educator's Association. Then there's Flight Through the Stars, an oratorio commissioned by the San Jose Symphonic Choir and Kathy's White Knight, commissioned by the Santa Cruz Symphony and the Fremont Symphony orchestras. And those are only the recent ones.

"He's a wonderful musician with a great sense of humor," says Kerstin Stone, who played violin in the Santa Clara Orchestra until buying the Sue Shannnon School of Music. "Every time I see him, he says 'I'm saving your seat for you.' "

The orchestra is looking for string players, and Mollicone urges those who are reading this with a bow in their hands to audition. The number to call is 554-4429.

"We'll be performing Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 with the Santa Clara chorus," he adds as an inducement. " 'Ode to Joy' is one of his greatest, most powerful works."

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