In the summer of 2001, an intriguing artistic collaboration began to take shape, initiated by a conversation between composer Kevin Puts and poet Fleda Brown. Puts, commissioned by Kevin Noe for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, envisioned a vocal piece set to Brown’s poetry. This idea resonated deeply with both artists, marking the genesis of a unique project. Puts and Brown had collaborated before, notably on Fishing With Blood and Arch and Kitty Hawk, but this new venture promised a deeper, more integrated partnership from the outset.
Fleda Brown, then the poet laureate of Delaware, was known for her poetry collections featuring historical figures – painters, artists, writers, and more. Her subjects ranged from O’Keefe to Elvis Presley, each rendered with humor, poignancy, and lyrical beauty. Puts was curious to see what would emerge if Brown chose a subject seemingly at odds with her characteristic voice. He suggested Einstein, keeping in mind that baritone Timothy Jones was already slated for the vocal performance. Initially, Einstein didn’t immediately capture Brown’s imagination.
Puts then departed for the American Academy in Rome. Weeks later, he learned that Brown, after delving into Einstein’s biographies, was well into drafting a manuscript. They discussed the project’s overall direction, and Puts decided to give Brown complete creative freedom. He wanted her poems to stand alone, publishable in journals or future collections, unconstrained by musical considerations of rhythm and pacing. His only guidance was a desire for a large-scale narrative arc and a sense of operatic completeness by the work’s conclusion.
A few months later, Brown delivered a set of nine poems. Puts, after experimenting with the text, felt that a traditional song cycle format wouldn’t do justice to the work. He was drawn to broader, more expansive musical forms, believing Einstein on Mercer Street lent itself to a three-part structure. The first poem felt introductory, yet he wanted a seamless musical flow into the second. He envisioned poems merging into one another, with only two distinct breaks: after Poem II and after Poem IV, which he saw as the piece’s climax. Poems V and VII were intended to be spoken. An additional poem, originally between poems V and VI, was eventually removed to create a more direct flow from “and in Germany, Hitler rose up” to “I note the universe goes from order to disorder,” a decision Brown ultimately concurred with for her manuscript as well.
To reflect the collaborative process and instances where Puts rearranged or slightly altered the text for musical reasons, Brown’s original manuscript is presented below. This provides a glimpse into the raw poetic material that inspired the musical composition Einstein on Mercer Street.
−Kevin Puts
Einstein on Mercer Street
While a student at the famous Polytechnic at Zurich, Albert Einstein fell in love with the only woman in his class, a Serbian named Mileva Maric, who at first was able to keep up with his mind. They talked physics and declared they’d never settle for a bourgeois life. Their first child, Lieserl, was born before Albert decided they could marry. They either gave her away or she died. Nothing is known about her.
They had two other children before their divorce. By this time, Mileva had given up her career and had sunk into a severe depression. A few years later, Einstein won the Nobel Prize and—even though he was married by then to his cousin Elsa—he sent Mileva all the prize money. Twenty-three years later, after Einstein had become a U.S. citizen and a professor at Princeton University, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. Einstein had nothing to do directly with the development of the bomb.
I.
Ah, Mileva, it’s always you I turn to in my thoughts, on my walks down Mercer Street,
lone old lump inside my gray raincoat,
the parabola of my felt hat. They keep me like a Kubla Khan
at Princeton. My floating hair they talk of:
His floating hair. Beware! Beware! Weave a circle round him thrice.
Reporters flash in my face. Even the bomb,
they claim, was my idea. One marketable God of the Intellect, they want.
But what they catch—each shot’s a different man.
Put them together, flip quickly, and I’m still, I swear, the man you once
thought: a motion picture, a wave, a music,
a disturbance in something else. In you, maybe, as you are in me. As if I’d never
left you. A man never loses the woman
he has children with. Even dead. It’s the hope—what we thought we could be—that hangs like a moon
over the field of my losses. Oh my Dollie, my schnoxel, this is your
Jonzerel-silly-names, fastened to you
by my nerve-endings. We were going to fly so far outside the gravity of the bourgeoise,
we would remain all thought, wit, music—
eternal students, the “we” of significant work, ein Stein, one stone.
Then it all felt like stone. Now I talk to myself.
II.
Still, somewhere inside the so-called ether, I feel you listening—dark, peevish
as always, your intelligence rasping like wire
against mine. Somewhere I’m still playing Mozart—in spite of you—half the night,
a fool for him, and Bach, their harmonies,
their unfailing return after infinite variations as if the starting point were all time sucked inward,
or some anthropomorphic God were calling
eternity back into this intersection with friends. Three Divertimenti: clarinet, piano, me on violin,
the children asleep, you my angry Mileva
curled in shadows, what we each called love, I guess, the mathematics we made of our marriage,
against the emptiness.
III.
It appears that the universe bends toward itself, a geodesic dome,
two hands, fingertips touching like a person
in thought. If I moved faster than light, I could draw the bow back
into the music’s mouth, rewind data.
Never allow, for instance, that monstrous nuclear heartbreak, not my invention—it was the math that got pushed so far
off the edge of reason. Where were you? Turning back, giving up
your books, no longer able to follow me.
IV.
Rewinding: Up through swirls of snow, switchback turns, precipices, up to Splügen Pass.
You brought opera glasses
and my blue nightshirt. Heads touching as one, we studied a snowflake, fractal,
circular. At dawn we sent snowballs down the slopes,
imagined the village below, avalanched. Always we had to oppose, to disturb!
The disturbance of pregnancy, then:
our atoms inexorably carrying on. I withdrew, as I do, to follow a thought.
Even then I guessed the extremes things could come to:
the snowball chain of split nuclei that can start forking through Plutonium,
doubling, quadrupling from one generation
to the next in millionths of a second, releasing matter back to vast, primordial energy
you can never put your hands on again.
V.
I thought I was a pacifist. Good work needs a certain peace. Ah, then Lieserl—we agreed, didn’t we, what to do
when she was born? So as not to undo the future. (Who knew then if we’d ever
marry?) “How do you have her registered?”
I had to know that, at least. To be a Jew— another strike against her. You think
it’s peace you’ve won, but sometimes
it’s only quiet, while the violence grows, a snowball chain where you can’t see.
After the boys were born,
Lieserl would knot and twist in my troubled stomach: this cramp.
Every day it feels as if I’m giving birth.
The doctors say drink milk and more milk. I wanted peace, so I could think.
This is what I get.
And in Germany, Hitler rose up like all my dreams of deformed children,
children sinking in the waves, children lost.
VI.
I note the universe goes from order to disorder, yet it remains. With my own eye
I saw a man fall from a building
into a rubbish heap and live. The man said he felt no downward pull,
which made me guess that we ride along
inside our own frame, you in your truth, me in mine. Why did I have to wear socks,
then, to please you? Because of a universal
fact: mass can’t help but bend toward mass. I like only shoes, these two boats
that keep me pretty much afloat
by themselves, an elegant sequence, like notes. Take Mozart: his perfect symmetry
that gets where it’s going. But there has to be
someone outside the music, to listen, for it to break the heart with joy.
Who else is left to listen to me, old enemy?
VII.
Since Elsa died, I’m down to
Chico the dog, Tinef my sailboat—worthless thing, but a pleasure—
and this fame. If I could do it again,
I swear I’d become a plumber. The mind can’t stand too much pure thought.
It oppresses. You oppress me still, my dear, forever brooding.
Things ought not be all probability. This
will make you mad: I told Elsa once, “If you (meaning her, of course)
were to recite the most beautiful poem,
it would not come close to the mushrooms and goose cracklings you cook
for me.” Plain things, like sailing.
I can sail now like a swan. I like to be carried along, making calculations,
but I admit, truth’s not ordinary:
it disappears as soon as you look. It’s like catching the wind,
trying to make it bend to fit your mind.
VIII.
When I was a schoolboy in the Alps in the rain
at the razor-edge of a cliff,
among small black birds, when I slipped
in my poor shoes and was barely
caught by a classmate— what do you think
would be the mathematics of this?
Since a person freely falling could go on forever,
and it’s only the sudden embrace
that holds you here, or there, how does one
show up at the coordinates
on time? Were we at the right place, or wrong,
my little veranda, my Dollie,
my little street urchin? We did save each other once, I think,
and once is all there is.
— Fleda Brown
from Breathing In, Breathing Out, Anhinga Press, 2003.
Reprinted with permission by the publisher.
