By Alkis Karmpaliotis
Founder of AppreciateOpera.org
Gregg Kallor is an American composer and pianist whose works fuse the genres of jazz and classical music in a distinct musical genre. Boasting a wide array of musical styles, Kallor (pronounced KAY-ler) is perhaps best known for his adaptations of literary works, including Frankenstein and The Tell-Tale Heart.
Kallor grew up surrounded by music, with his grandparents being fans of classical music and opera. His maternal grandmother was a violinist, and his great-aunt was a cellist. In fact, the piano in their home was the very same one on which he learned to play. He recalls beginning to study music formally after begging his older brother’s piano instructor to take him on as a student and learning to improvise by playing simple melodies he’d heard and expanding upon them on the piano. “I was always improvising,” said Kallor, laughingly. “I was not a very disciplined student at all.”
He officially started lessons when he was six and quickly fell in love with jazz, specifically the music of Brad Mehldau, who had attended his high school. He continued with both classical and jazz lessons for years, and after graduating from college, he moved to New York City to pursue a career as a jazz pianist. Only when he made his Carnegie Hall debut, premiering a suite for piano, did he begin focusing on his own compositions. Kallor noted, “As much as I love Bach and Brahms and Ellington and Monk and always will, when I started really focusing on composing and performing my music, it felt like all the pieces had started to fit into place.”
Kallor stresses the importance of improvisation in the development of artistry and compositional technique. “If you think to our most beloved Western classical composers — Bach, Beethoven, Mozart — they were some of the greatest, by all accounts, improvisers of all time,” he remarked, “and you feel that in their music. There's a freedom to it — a sense of a sense of spontaneity.” Without that freedom, he added, the music runs the risk of coming out rigid.
Much of Kallor’s inspiration comes from literature and poetry. In fact, when he started composing songs for voice using literary texts, he found that his compositions became all the more distinct and meaningful. “With the songs, I was very focused on spending time with the text by itself and trying to understand what the poet was trying to communicate,” he said. “What’s great about literature is that there’s a self-contained universe within a poem, short story, or novel that I may be able to translate into music and provide a different experience of it.” In setting a text to music, he would study the way the author uses language, the rhythms and patterns of the verses, and the texture of the words, hoping to “translate [the text] into music in such a way as to really convey the essence of the poem… and helping to give it a musical cloud to sit on.” It was literature that inspired him to compose his one-act chamber opera The Tell-Tale Heart, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s horrifying short story of the same name, in 2016, as well as his most famous work to date, an operatic adaptation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
Determined to compose a full-scale opera but uncertain of the subject matter, Kallor was inspired to compose Frankenstein after director Sarah Meyers encouraged him to read the novel. “Not only did the story speak to me, but I just knew what to do with it,” he said. "It felt both epic and intimate at the same time." He remarks that many adaptations of Frankenstein miss the greater point of Mary Shelley’s story and that its “horror” aspect is not quite what many people think: “The horror is the abandonment of Victor Frankenstein’s creation. He brought it to life, and the second it came to life, he abandoned it. He thought it would die, but it survived, and it was abused, feared, and reviled by every human with whom it came into contact. What this story really is about is this idea that people who don’t look or talk or think like us are to be feared, shunned, and in some cases killed.” This message is more relevant than ever today, according to Kallor, as political, social, religious, economic, and racial divides are deeply embedded within society. “There is so much ‘othering’ of classes of people,” he said, “and if any story can speak to everyone, everywhere, it’s Frankenstein.”
Kallor went on to detail other examples of the story’s connections to human history. For example, the character of Victor Frankenstein has been frequently compared to Robert J. Oppenheimer, also referred to as a “Modern Prometheus,” while The Creature itself can be likened to the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, a human-made tool that may soon be out of our control.
Kallor wrote both the libretto and music for the opera, noting that this approach allowed him to think of melodies and themes while preparing the text, as well as unify the text with the music in a mutually complementary manner. “I had to know what the story was going to be and what the words were going to be,” he said. "I read the novel several times, just living with the story and taking notes. Next, I wrote the libretto and then the music — though I was already hearing the music while writing the libretto. The words and the music influenced each other." Frankenstein premiered in 2023 at Arizona Opera to great acclaim, with critics deeming it a triumph.
While the success of Tell-Tale Heart and Frankenstein has led many to believe that horror and gothic-style stories are Kallor's specialty, he says that they make up only a small portion of his artistic inspiration and that he intends to explore many different types of stories throughout his career, including romance and comedy.
Kallor often repurposes his own music in the process of composing new works — something that many classical composers would do. “I've always been really attracted to the idea of return, the return of themes, providing a line of continuity for the audience to connect to,” he said. This line of continuity and ‘full-circle’ approach to music applies not only to individual pieces but to his career as a whole.
My name is Alkis Karmpaliotis, and I'm a senior at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. I founded AppreciateOpera.org in 2019, and you can support my work by becoming a member and reading some of my other articles!