El Sidd and the Healers (Opera Review/Interview)

Translator

    I had the opportunity to preview El Sidd and the Healers, a new opera by composer Joseph Martin Waters, set to premiere at The Cutting Room in New York City on May 31, 2025, as part of Composers Concordance’s 13th Annual CompCord Festival. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the demo that Joe shared with me of this exciting, eclectic, and dramatic work. The opera is inspired by one of my favorite books, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, but reimagines the story in the hippie 1960s, at the height of the cultural revolution—when Hesse’s Siddhartha gained widespread popularity. The music is engaging, drawing from various rock styles of the era while showcasing Joe’s distinctive compositional voice.
    Some very interesting and colorful compositions occur between the arias, depicting action with vibrant orchestration. Even just listening to the demo (featuring mostly MIDI instruments but real voices singing), you can still hear the well-orchestrated and thoughtfully crafted musical ideas. I keep using the word opera to describe this piece, but it is really more of a rock opera or musical, in the vein of Tommy by The Who or The Wall by Pink Floyd. Musically and structurally, I find it closer to those compositions than to an opera by Puccini or even Philip Glass. However, I make these comparisons only for clarification, because what truly draws me to this piece is its uniqueness and strong artistic voice—qualities that are essential for me to consider a piece of music good and worthy of being heard.
    Joe Waters also wrote the words and story for El Sidd and the Healers. It is an engaging narrative that holds your interest throughout and is an impressive achievement from a dramatic standpoint. In an email, Joe mentioned that the story is also personal, drawing from his own experiences as a youth. So, to begin my interview with him, my first question was about how his personal experiences influenced the writing of this story.

Here is my interview with Joe—see you all at the opera in May!

- Gene Pritsker

1. You mentioned that ‘El Sidd and the Healers’ is based on personal experiences, can you elaborate on that.?
For more see my authors note:  https://www.healers.love/authors-note/

As you probably know, ‘El Sidd and the Healers’ is a reframing of Herman Hesse’s  Siddhartha, set in 1969 (the summer of Woodstock), a couple years after 1967's  famous Summer of Love. By 1969  the whole counter culture experiment was getting overripe and starting to fall into decay, but people couldn't see that  from the inside.

I was one of those people. That’s my generation and I was on the young side.  I took Timothy Leary‘s dictum to “Turn on Tune in and Drop out“ seriously. I needed to escape from my Catholic background and this was about addressing the deep questions that I needed answers to.

I started dropping LSD when I was 14 years old.

Like tens of thousands of other kids, I ran away with a pal from a comfortable middle class Midwestern home in Madison, Wisconsin, and hitchhiked to discover what it was all about out to southern California,  on January 1, with 20° below zero temperature, $.37 in my pocket and only a sleeping bag and a pair of ice skates.

I didn’t worry about whether or not I would eat or find a place to sleep or freeze to death. At that time in the culture, there was a sense that everybody needed to take care of each other. People were living in communes, trying to reinvent the social fabric completely, and it was a very optimistic and yet incredibly naïve time that didn’t last too long.

The trip was life-changing for me, culminating in a rainy night in Big Sur, a huge, beautiful national park south of San Francisco with high cliffs that fall right into the ocean and deep forest. It’s where the Grateful Dead had their community.  It is a historical religious place among indigenous people.

My friend  and I had been dropped off in the middle of the night. It was raining, and we had no shelter and no place to go and we were in the middle of this giant park so we decided to take a hit of acid, which had been gifted to us by someone up in San Francisco.  Turned out to be the strongest LSD I had ever taken, and the result was that instead of getting stuck in this net of fear as one starts to lose control, I was blasted straight through it and became part of the universe. This sounds like Babel and is impossible to describe to somebody who hasn’t experienced it, but it is what the mystics talk about when they talk about God consciousness.

One merges with everything, and realizes that everything is alive and conscious. It’s not an intellectual conclusion, but rather a gut level, overwhelmingly complex and complete experience.

I spent the night in the rain wandering in and out of the ocean, it’s amazing that I didn’t get swept out to sea, merging into the state of oneness, and then stepping back for a moment, able to observe what was going on and then dissolving again.

That night changed my life.  I have spent the last 5 decades working to reconcile that precious gift of connection with the reality of being a person in the world, making a life, raising children, finding a community and a way to make a living.

At some point it occurred to me that this was not only my story, but a story shared by thousands at that period, and as an artist it is my privilege and responsibility to apply my craft as composer and storyteller to pull those experiences into a work that could contribute to our understanding of this pivotal time.

We tend to see the 60's through rose colored glasses, but I was there, I know it in my bones.  Like all times it was fraught with layers of contradictions, dreamers dreaming and grifters scheming.

Like the protagonist Sidd, I was and still am a dreamer, bruised and scarred and calloused and ready finally to tell this story. I had to wait until I was old enough (I’m 72)  to have the gravitas. Nobody takes 17 year olds seriously - but they should!

I wrote many drafts of the opera, trying to recall that trip, and then I realized at a certain point that the individual events,  all the individual places I stayed in, the people I met,  though very compelling to me personally, were by themselves not the stuff from which an opera is made.

Then I remembered another vision quest, the story of Siddhartha, which I had read when I was about that age. So I went back and reread the book and realized that the way forward was to merge my story with that story of another young man, thousands of years ago, seeking enlightenment, and the saints and scoundrels of the hippie movement.  The result is a work of fiction, weaving Siddhartha (a fictional recreation of a seeker in the time of The Buddha) - and what I realized while re-reading it, was a recounting of Hesse's personal vision quest (he was raised in India) told through a fictional character contemporary with the Buddha, whose name was Siddhartha Gautama.  The underlying story of "El Sidd & The healers" is true in a psychological and metaphorical sense.  Someone said "Good fiction is more real than reality".  A good story can get to the bedrock of life.


2. Listening to El Sidd and the Healers, one feels that it skirts the boundaries of what some might consider a musical, yet you refer to this piece as an opera. How important is it to you to classify this theatrical work as one or the other?

It’s important depending on who I’m talking to about the work. So whatever label works best is the one I tend to use. It’s in the cracks between Music and Opera. And my model for this was Bernstein‘s "West Side Story."  In the late 1950s, he was at the top of the classical world and had the connections in both Opera and Music theater to get a work fully produced. He chose musical theater, and I’ve always been very impressed with that decision, and as a result, he created a work that draws from both genres and has reached a huge audience, much bigger than if he had called it an Opera. My other inspiration is all of the works of Stephen Sondheim, another classically trained composer, who chose to work in musical theater. I am interested in getting my work out to the world. The maximum number of people possible and that means musical theater, but like both  Bernstein and Sondheim, my work is really in the cracks somewhere.  I actually most often refer to it as a Musical-Opera.  I'm interested in addressing the big questions in my work, and the best musicals and operas do this IMO, so I would be very happy for "El Sidd & The Healers" to find footing in either world or both.

3. Musically, the opera (we will call it an opera here) is mostly tonal and seems to draw inspiration from various rock idioms. What musical boundaries are you trying to expand here? And in general, how did you approach the music to fit this story?

In all my work I am interested in obliterating boundaries. And it goes to the heart of my experience that night in Big Sur when I was 17.  Many boundaries are superficial and used to create exclusive groups and enable power players and manipulate audiences. In general, the human preoccupation with creating boundaries is one of the biggest problems in the world. Whether they are about religion, politics, country, type of music you like, the sports team that you follow. Name it. They cause problems.

And the period of “El Sidd & The Healers” was one of curiosity, experimentation and boundary crossing. Luciano Berio went to hear The Beatles and George, Paul, John and Ringo went to hear Berio. George Harrison played sitar. Backward tape loops and backward guitar solos and drumming were in pop tunes on the radio. I drew from the music of that period for “El Sidd & The Healers”. The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Bob Dylan Highway 61, The Byrds, Mamas & The Papas, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Jimi Hendrix, Wonderful inspiring stuff - the soundtrack of my youth.

Did you know that Charles Manson wrote songs, and aspired first and foremost to be a music icon like the Beatles?  One of his songs was recorded by The Beach Boys! I looked into that very closely because I wanted to get into the dark underbelly of the counterculture. Where it started to go wrong and why. That song is about manipulation, it is about a person who is skilled at manipulating others to do their bidding. That’s fascinating to me and it connects with our current politics.

I’m  interested in exploring musical syntax and languages that require as little expert learning as possible. I’m interested in those gems that manage to become woven into our cultural tapestry, tunes that everybody loves, which are deep and meaningful, and musically inventive. Those were the tunes that I can learn from.

I’m trying to create an integrated musical genre that's between everything! With elements of rock, pop, classical, jazz, all flowing around in our culture and fusing together into something that speaks to all of those things.

And it’s not artificial or contrived. It’s about making music that I really love, and that I find interesting first and foremost., and having the self-confidence to bring this music unapologetically out to the world.  It's one of the gifts of being in my 70's.  I love it. Obviously, I hope someone else might too!

4. Are some of the vocal parts written for specific singers in a way that influenced how you composed the music?

Yes, definitely, Karen Garcia, Julia Waters, Charles Coleman and Phili Gomaz are singers. I’ve worked with for years and were in my previous opera “The Magic Hummingbird“.. I know their voices well and I know them as people and we all are part of a team and a community. We all love working together, so it’s natural to want to write for them. We are also introducing a couple new voices - we are in auditions now for the main character Sidd and his frenemy Carl.  Musical Director Richard Morrison and Director Desha Crownover are esteemed stars of the So.California musical theater community - and they are pulling from the best talent in the area - so that's exciting!!

5. If there were one aria/song from ‘El Sidd and the Healers’ that could be considered a single, which one would it be? Tell us why you think so.

Wow!  I hadn't thought about that but I love the idea, and the first thought that goes through my head is, what do you think?  I'm still orchestrating the 25 songs/arias as I write this and tend to be in love with the one I'm currently working on, (4. Journey To Oaxaca) a neo-classical duet between Charon, the mystical border guard, and Sidd ... but just casting it out there,  maybe "Buzzing"?

6. List some of your most interesting and important performances

That's difficult.  My work has never achieved great notoriety, (The Metropolitan Opera is not knocking on my door, though I hope they will!) - and I tend to be focused on what's coming up.  And I stay busy!  That said, maybe the fully staged performance of "The Magic Hummingbird" by Opera Tijuana in June 2023 - it was enormously challenging to pull it off, because of the size of the production: about 80 people involved (actors, musicians, dance company, choir, set designer and builders, lighting designer and crew, costume designers, 10 makeup artists, video crew and sound reinforcement) and the challenges of doing this across the busiest border crossing in the world, in two languages, bringing 20 people across the Tijuana/San Diego border every day.  Exhausting and every day there was a grenade going off somewhere... but after it was all over I wanted to get up and do it again!  And the piece is more relevant than ever - it's about refugees trying to get across the border - with magical-realistic overtones ... so

But thinking back - being guest composer at the Moscow Conservatory in 1998 was an amazing experience.  I had written a piece for Koto and live electronics (they had a Koto virtuoso on the faculty! - We tend here to not realize that the east side of Russia is in Asia).  It was that brief period before Putin took over where Russia was open and reaching out to the west - but was spurned - but the infrastructure of the Soviet Union was still largely in place ... the economy was in shambles - they could not  keep the lights on in the conservatory and faculty were getting paid $20/month - but the music kept happening at a very high level - the Russian people were so impressive: brilliant, strong, inquisitive and idealistic.

I really have been fortunate to have many performances all over the planet when I think back - it would be a book - but not that interesting to anybody but me!!  So better to keep focused on "El Sidd & The Healers" and making that as good as in can be!

7. What do you regard as your greatest achievement? What musical achievements are you most proud of?

I think my current works, the musical operas "The Magic Hummingbird" and "El Sidd & The Healers" are certainly the biggest, most complex projects I've undertaken, and writing the book and lyrics, as well as the composing & arranging the music is really challenging - but super fun!  But as I said I tend to be in love with whatever piece I am working on... but again thinking back - "Surf" a double concerto for sax and violin, leaps into my head - the commission from Orchestra Nova was to create a piece inspired by the ocean - and specifically Southern California ocean, (not La Mer - which I love). Here surfing is deeply ingrained in the culture (I live in San Diego, CA).  I spent months observing surfers, and I ended up researching surf music, an early 1960's genre of instrumental pop music, and settled on the drum solo from "Wipeout" a one hit wonder by The Surfaris, as the purest expression of being a teenager (the Surfaris were 16 when they made the record) and the thrill of standing on the edge of a surfboard and barrelling across the ocean on the edge of a massive wall of water ... and used that rhythm as the foundation
- here's an excerpt: https://youtu.be/j-OksFmqMW8?si=oNpTC1cY7kMfCDaZ
The Surfaris came down from LA for the premiere!

8. Who are your favorite composers / musicians?

So many: I love them all and stand in awe of their abilities and work ethic, but a quick pattial list: first of all, me (I love my works I and listen to them all the time - the world is very fickle so if you dedicate you life to this you better enjoy what you create!): but I adore J.S. Bach, Mozart, Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Debussy, Gershwin, Berstein, Mahler, The Beatles (IMO their best stuff is the result of each contributing their own special sauce) - they blow me away!  The more I think about it the longer the list grows - there's SO much!  and the list keeps growing!

9. Describe your most "unusual" or "humorous" performance situation?

The recurring nightware where I get onstage and realize that I forgot to put on my pants...  since I was a kid - I think we all have this? But it's still scary - and ridiculous!

10. What musical advice do you have for aspiring composers - especially those who want to write an opera.

Listen to your inner voice. Don't be pushed around by cultural bullies - they are always out there trying to make the world safer for themselves by telling everyone in a very loud voice that whatever they think or do is the correct way.  It's bullshit - you have to find your own way, as a composer and as a human. And be Humble. We are all part of something bigger than ourselves, and have no existence whatsoever, except as part of that fabric. Try to find that reality and live it every day.