The first thing you notice, when delving into the thousands of letters that artist Georgia O’Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz exchanged over three decades, is how many of them read like poetry. So much so, in fact, that when composer Kevin Puts determined to write songs for Renée Fleming drawn from the O’Keeffe letters, the beauty of the language fairly jumped off the page. 

“How I understand every pulse beat of yours,” Stieglitz wrote, expressing his growing love for O’Keeffe and his enthusiasm for her work. “The story of those drawings — your children — I their guardian. A Woman’s Soul laid bare in all its beauty, crying out into the starlight night.”

Or as O’Keeffe wrote, recalling an experience she had as a nine-month-old in Wisconsin: “My first memory is of the brightness of light — light all around.” (This appreciation of light she would later utilize, famously, in her extensive paintings of the American Southwest.) 

“It’s just the kind of language that I respond to,” said Kevin, a St. Louis native who during the last two decades has grown into one of the most important figures in American music. “It’s not complex,” he added, comparing it to Hemingway. “It’s simple language that says something poetic and beautiful.” 

Kevin and Renée came together through a twist of fate. Both had studied at the Eastman School of Music, and when Eastman determined to commission a work for its student orchestra tour — a piece to be both composed by, and performed by, Eastman alumni — thus began a great meeting of musical minds. 

Initially the couple forged a cycle of five songs called Letters from Georgia, which had its premiere in 2016 in Rochester and at New York’s Alice Tully Hall, with Renée and the Eastman Philharmonia. 

The most famous living soprano “immediately began to think of herself as Georgia: ‘Yeah, I can be this character,’ ” Kevin said with a laugh. “It really changed my life, changed the course of my career in a major way — that commission, and meeting Renée, who just fully embraced my music.” (In 2022 Kevin’s opera The Hours, which featured Renée, Joyce DiDonato, and Kelli O’Hara, became one of the most successful premieres in recent Metropolitan Opera history.) 

When Renée put forward the idea of expanding the cycle to include letters from Stieglitz, “she wanted to keep all the music from the Georgia songs,” Kevin said, “so I needed to figure out a way to retain those.”

Singer and composer had great fun delving into these letters, the first half of which were published in 2011 by Yale University Press as My Faraway One, a volume the size of a cinderblock edited and annotated by curator and Stieglitz scholar Sarah Greenough. (Volume 2 is still forthcoming.) 

Part of the challenge was in joining the original songs with new material: At times, passages from Alfred’s letters have been embedded into existing music. “Setting letters was something I hadn’t done before,” Kevin said. “It was very rewarding getting to read all these and trying to fashion a libretto out of them.” 

The result, The Brightness of Light, was a huge hit at its Tanglewood premiere in July 2019, with Renée as Georgia and baritone Rod Gilfry as Alfred. Kansas City audiences can hear both singers perform the cycle this September 27th and 29th, as the Lyric Opera opens its season with a semi-staged production featuring fully integrated projection designs. 

“These letters are so evocative and so interesting, and they’re real,” Renée said recently in a YouTube interview. “This is what they wrote to each other over many, many years. And their relationship is so fascinating, and so unique. It’s a privilege to be able to inhabit, briefly, the life of Georgia O’Keeffe.” 

Renée was captivated by Kevin’s skills not only with orchestration but with setting texts to gorgeous, flowing melodic lines: something that, ironically, is seldom found among today’s opera composers. (Kevin’s very first opera, Silent Night, which the Lyric presented in 2015, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.) 

The special privilege of The Brightness of Light is that it places the orchestra onstage, which allows the composer a broader, more subtle color palette than that available when the band is buried. “A lot of detail can be lost when the orchestra is in the pit,” Kevin said. “When it’s onstage, you can hear everything with great clarity.”

The “orchestral song-cycle” does not have a long history. Except for scattered examples by Berlioz and Liszt, the genre really began in the 20th century with works by Ravel, Chausson, Strauss, and Mahler. 

The Brightness of Light features a brilliant series of images created by America’s leading projection designer, Wendall K. Harrington, who has been called “the godmother of modern projection design.” It includes art from O’Keeffe’s seven-decade career and photographs from Stieglitz’ vast collection of images, which represent the beginnings of photography as an art form.

The cycle traces a line from the couple’s first encounter, through their passionate love affair and marriage, and concluding with the long period after O’Keeffe fled New York for New Mexico. For nearly four decades after Stieglitz’ death in 1949, O’Keeffe established herself as of the most significant artists of modern times. 

Condensing thousands of letters into a 45-minute song cycle was no small task: Kevin found himself excerpting letters to create a narrative arc that, understandably, simplifies the couple’s history. “The text needs to be the kind of poetry that you can craft musical structure around,” he said. Yet the central story of love, betrayal, and lifelong friendship remains. “It was a complicated relationship … and I wanted to use only words that they had written to each other.”

Lyric Opera of Kansas City performs The Brightness of Light on September 27th and 29th at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, with the Kansas City Symphony onstage conducted by Robert Moody. The program includes a second half of Broadway hits specially selected by the singers. Call 816-471-7344 or go to kcopera.org.

— By Paul Horsley

To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send an email to paul@kcindependent.com or find him on Facebook (paul.horsley.501) or Twitter/Instagram (@phorsleycritic).