In 2012  Transition and Lightmap are teaming up with the Aldeburgh Festival, the Barbican, London, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic to create multimedia performances of Oliver Knussen and Maurice Sendak’s amazing operas Where The Wild Things Are and Higglety Pigglety Pop!

This is a behind-the-scenes diary of ideas, inspirations and work in progress leading up to the performances in June, October and November 2012. Keep reading…

“he sailed off through night and day,
and in and out of weeks,
and almost over a year,
to where the wild things are.”
Where The Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak

“it’s a matter of reading between the lines”
Maurice Sendak

“a true picture book is a visual poem”
Maurice Sendak

“I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more.”
Maurice Sendak

“clinch with, and collaborate with”
Maurice Sendak

2-10 Where the Wild Things Are, op.20 – Fantasy opera in Nine Scenes – The Wild Rumpus_ _Now stop!_ (Max, Wild Things)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Knussen-Where-Things-Higglety-Pigglety/dp/B00005A83C/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1336211409&sr=8-2

“It is my involvement with this inescapable fact of childhood – the awful vulnerability of children and their struggle to make themselves King of all Wild Things – that gives my work whatever truth and passion it may have.”
Maurice Sendak

“I spent hundreds of hours sitting at my window, sketching neighbourhood children at play” 
Maurice Sendak

“they (the wild things) were meant not to terrify – they don’t terrify children… they did terrify grownups but then grownups are so easily terrified…where do you begin? Or end?”
Maurice Sendak

“my own family… all these dreadful people I’d known all my life… people I could never get revenge on ever… but now. And so they indeed became the things. They were all my Jewish relatives. And actually they’re quite flattering portraits”
Maurice Sendak

“Since I was 16 or so Mozart has been my saviour, and the Magic Flute is my favourite of all his perfect operas. It has everything I wish my own work had a scrap of; beauty of shape and design, a comic, low-down vaudeville vitality blended with dark serious truth-telling, depth of soul, and a generous, unjudgmental view of humankind”
Maurice Sendak

“Max was a little beast, and we’re all little beasts. That was what was so novel.”
Maurice Sendak

“Children who fight back, children who are full of excitement are the kind of children I like.”
Maurice Sendak

“Words are left out, but the picture says it. Pictures are left out—but the word says it.”  
Maurice Sendak

“I was developing a child who I recognized as myself as a child, from my observations of other children around me in Brooklyn. We were wild creatures. We did things that were objectionable.”
Maurice Sendak

“I spent a lot of time being sick, as I recollect, and there is the happy memory, actually, of being indoors and watching – the window became my movie camera, my television set.”
Maurice Sendak

“I seem to have been blessed and cursed with total recall of childhood”
Maurice Sendak

“My own fears were very peculiar. I was terrified of the vacuum cleaner, you know, untraditionally…when my mother plugged the vacuum cleaner in, and it was those old-fashioned Hoovers, you know, the thing blew up visibly, and the sight of that bag swelling used to just drive me right up the wall, literally. I had to get out of the house, and I was sent to the neighbors until she was all done.”
Maurice Sendak

“The point of my books has always been to ask how children cope with a monumental problem that happened instantly and changed their lives forever, but they have to go on living. And they cannot discuss this with anyone. No one will take the time. Parents are embarrassed so they’ll shush them up.” 
Maurice Sendak

“I wanted the writing to be as terse and as tough as Jennie was, almost acidic – to contain nothing sentimental or romantic”
Maurice Sendak

“Being a kid is hard, but if they’re smart and clever and determined and egocentric they will survive”
Maurice Sendak

“I don’t believe in things literally for children. That’s a reduction.”
Maurice Sendak

“children are the only reasonably sane audience”
Maurice Sendak

“You must never illustrate exactly what is written. You must find a space in the text so that the pictures can do the work”
Maurice Sendak

“Childhood is a tricky business. Usually, something goes wrong.”

Maurice Sendak

“I have been doodling with ink and watercolor on paper all my life. It’s my way of stirring up my imagination to see what I find hidden in my head. I call the results dream pictures, fantasy sketches, and even brain-sharpening exercises.”

Maurice Sendak

“A picture book is not what most people think it is – an easy thing, with a lot of pictures in it, to read to small children. For me, it is a damned difficult thing to do, like working in a complicated and challenging poetic form. It demands so much that you have to be on top of the situation all the time, finally to achieve something so simple and so put together – so seamless – that it looks as if you knocked it off in no time. One stitch showing and you’ve lost the game”

Maurice Sendak

“I recommend doodling as an excellent exercise in stirring up the unconscious, just as you would stir up some mysterious soup all the while hoping it tastes good”
Maurice Sendak

12 Music for a Puppet Court, Op. 11_ II. Toyshop Music after _Tris_

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Knussen-Conducts-Oliver/dp/B000001GRY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326795717&sr=8-1

“none of my books come about through ‘ideas’ or by thinking of a particular subject and exclaiming, ‘Gee, that’s terrific; I’ll just put it down!’ They never happen quite that way. They well up. Just as dreams come to us at night, feelings come to me,and I rush to put them down. But these fantasies have to be given a physical form, so I build a kind of house around them – the story – and the painting of the house is the picture-making. Essentially however, it’s a dream or fantasy”.
Maurice Sendak

“I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we’re not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young.”
Maurice Sendak

“When you hide another story in a story, that’s the story I am telling the children.”
Maurice Sendak

k

In December
I will be
a baubled bangled
Christmas tree
with soup bowls hanging over me
Merry once
merry twice
merry chicken soup
with rice.

Chicken Soup With Rice, Maurice Sendak

01 – Oliver Knussen_ Three Little Fantasies_ I. – II. – III.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oliver-Knussen-Three-Little-Fantasies/dp/B002RAKQA0/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1324402666&sr=8-3

“Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do. “
Maurice Sendak

“there is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality”
Maurice Sendak

“Kids are very brave little creatures. They are people who don’t lie, who aren’t hypocrites.”
Maurice Sendak

03 The Way to Castle Yonder, Op. 21a_ II. Kleine Trauermusik

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Way-Castle-Yonder-op-21a-Trauermusik/dp/B0047HFL74/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322395735&sr=8-1

“Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy… If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.”
Maurice Sendak

“its those occasions in a childs life where he or she has to make the decisions all by themselves, without the help of an adult… it doesn’t mean their parent doesn’t love them, but at that moment they are caught… they use their primitive logic, which is all a kid has, to solve the moment… they do get through those moments”
Maurice Sendak

“people come on Sunday and wait to get fed, uncles and aunts… and they all say the same dumb things, ‘how big you are! how fat you’ve got!…you look so good we can eat you up!’ and in fact we knew they would. The only entertainment was watching their bloodshot eyes, how bad their teeth were…huge nose and the hair curling out of the nose, the weird mole on the side of the head”
Maurice Sendak

http://www.amazon.com/Are-All-Dumps-Jack-Guy/dp/0062050141

“These are difficult times for children. Children have to be brave to survive what the world does to them. And this world is scrungier and rougher and dangerouser than it ever was before.”
Maurice Sendak

19 …Upon One Note (Fantazia after Purcell)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001N2QAAS/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=103612307&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B000001GRY&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_r=1MYN03W3XB3XXK8J94PK

“Children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions. Fear and anxiety are part of their everyday lives”
Maurice Sendak

07 Horn Concerto, Op. 28_ I. Intrada

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Knussen-Horn-concerto-Oliver/dp/B0000D7Z62/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1319913638&sr=1-1

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it… I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received… He saw it he loved it he ate it.”
Maurice Sendak

“…Max blew up, and his Mama blew up…it was a Mt St Helens… on an ordinary Tuesday…”

Maurice Sendak

02 The Way to Castle Yonder, Op. 21a_ I. The Journey to The Big White House

www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001N2OONI/ref=dm_sp_alb

“Mickey’s face was the personification of joy – the whiteness of his skin, the blackness of his ears, the redness of his tongue, the roundness of his face, was a strange joy”

Maurice Sendak

10 June 1928 Maurice Sendak is born
18 November 1928 Mickey Mouse is born

01 – Where the Wild Things Are – A Fantasy Opera in One Act, Op. 20_ I. Overture

www.amazon.co.uk/Knussen-Things-Fantasy-Maurice-Sendak/dp/B001GNKRWG/ref=sr_shvl_album_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1318681151&sr=301-3

“Getting through the day is like crossing a minefield. Children know that. They work to protect their parents from the harshness of childhood, from anything that might frighten them”
Maurice Sendak