Thinking Big: David Del Tredici, A Conversation in 13 parts
4. Being Practical and Impractical
DAVID DEL TREDICI: Well of course my problem is that my pieces are so long. Nobody commissions an hour-long piece. I would get a normal-sized commission and then beg, or not tell them, lie… [laughs]. They’d say, “Oh it is? It’s really an hour?” For example Final Alice, which was an hour long, Solti said, “We must cut it. We cannot do an hour long piece; it can be no longer than 45 minutes.” I was sure he was wrong, so I said, “Please maestro, let me play it for you.” So I played him the whole piece on the piano, and he said, “No, no. We still have to cut it.” I realized that if I didn’t cut it, the one who knew the piece, he would cut it. I made a huge cut out of it. (Well, I thought it was huge.) Then the premiere came and with the cut it came to exactly an hour. It was a big success! [laughs]
FRANK J. OTERI: The recording that was released of that Barbara Hendricks is incomplete.
DAVID DEL TREDICI: The score is published complete, but the recording is with the cut. Yeah, there it went.
FRANK J. OTERI: It would be really nice to get a complete recording of that.
DAVID DEL TREDICI: Leonard Slatkin did it complete.
FRANK J. OTERI: But it hasn’t been recorded.
DAVID DEL TREDICI: No. In fact, they never made a CD of it. It was at the end of the LP era, so I wish it would come back.
FRANK J. OTERI: And how long does that clock?
DAVID DEL TREDICI: Without the cut? Probably an hour and 15 minutes, or an hour and 10 minutes.
FRANK J. OTERI: So they only wiped out 10 minutes; that’s not too much time. They should have just done it.
DAVID DEL TREDICI: Yeah [laughs], I wish.