The Royal Society of Edinburgh Discussion Forum A Question of Chemistry: The Role of the Composer and Librettist in the

Creation of Opera
19 April 2010 In his opening remarks, Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, said it was unusual for the Society to have an event focusing exclusively on the arts. Nevertheless, the word chemistry in the title would reassure any of the Societys members who feared it might be straying too far from the sciences. He said the choice of subject illustrated the Societys desire in contrast to its London counterpart to cover the whole waterfront of intellectual life in Scotland. Lord Wilson introduced Alex Reedijk, General Director of Scottish Opera, who was to chair the discussion panel. He pointed out that Mr Reedijks previous experience as head of NBR New Zealand Opera, Executive Director of the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts and the first promoter of the Edinburgh Tattoo outside Scotland had amply equipped him for the task of finding new ways to put across opera. Alex Reedijk After welcoming onto the stage his three fellow panellists the composer Stuart MacRae, the author Louise Welsh and the Financial Times music critic Andrew Clark Mr Reedijk said that when he took up his post with Scottish Opera in 2007, he faced the challenge of defining its attitude to operatic creation in the 21st Century. The company had developed a strong tradition of representing the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries in opera. It was emerging from a difficult period in its history, but had yet to formulate a policy on new opera. Full-length operas could take up to five years from germination to performance; Scottish Opera could not wait that long. In his talks with composers and writers, Mr Reedijk had sensed a groundswell of enthusiasm for opera and a desire to be involved in creating new operatic works. His task was to find a way of tapping this enthusiasm. The template he devised was Five:15 an evening of five operas, each written by a new composer-writer partnership and lasting 15 minutes. The purpose of the 15-minute format was to get works on stage as quickly as possible. It minimised the risk of failure, for the audience as much as for the creative teams. The first Five:15 duly took place in 2008. It was such a success that the process was repeated in 2009 and is about to go into its third year. There is another good reason for working in the short opera format: contemporary opera in the UK has focused extensively on the composer. There has not been enough focus on the librettist, on the narrative, on the idea behind the opera. To help to shift the focus, each creative partnership in Five:15 starts by providing a one-page summary of their proposal. It is Mr Reedijks experience that when it comes to fleshing out the proposals, the partnerships that work best are those where the two partners are honest with each other, recognising when material had to be cut, either because it is not good enough or does not fit the scenario as it develops. Mr Reedijk defined opera as a judicious blend of music and theatre a form of story-telling with music. He said the 15-minute format is not an end in itself. It is a muscle-building process which should enable Scottish Opera to produce a full-length work every two-to-three years. There is another, equally important dimension to Five:15. It has enjoyed an international viral spread. Cape Town Opera has adopted Scottish Operas idea and is hoping to perform a Five:15 work from Scotland later this year, alongside others made in South Africa. Scottish

Opera has also developed a partnership with a privately-funded project in Canada, the Tapestry New Work Studio Company. Tapestry has paired three alumni of Five:15 with three North American counterparts to produce another batch of new works, one of which has since been performed in the Russian city of Rostov and a Rostov-based composer is contributing to the latest Five:15 in Scotland. The Royal Opera House in London is also introducing various manifestations of short new operas. I am quietly pleased that what started off as a small idea in Scotland has spread around the world, said Mr Reedijk. Five:15 has been financed entirely from private sources: that shows a willingness of people in Scotland to get behind new and good ideas. Looking to the future, Mr Reedijk announced that Stuart MacRae and Louise Welsh, whose opera Remembrance Day had enjoyed a success at the 2009 Five:15, have been commissioned to write a 4560 minute piece for performance by Scottish Opera in 2012. Andrew Clark To understand operatic creation today, and especially the changing relationship between composer and librettist, some sort of context is needed: how has opera evolved over the centuries, and what is going on elsewhere in the opera world today? Picking up this theme, Mr Clark reminded the audience that operas roots lie in 17th-Century Italy. It grew out of popular entertainments involving all the arts music, song, story-telling, drama, poetry, movement, design. By the 18th Century it had established itself in the form we recognise today, but it was an art form for the privileged. The composer worked on a by-your-leave from his patron either an aristocratic public as in Handels London, or a ruling monarch, as at Versailles and Saint Petersburg. The libretto was little more than a peg on which the composer could hang his music. It often followed a plot that, by implication, underlined the wisdom of the ruler who had commissioned it. As the 18th Century progressed, so did opera. It started to reflect the society around it. Mozarts The Marriage of Figaro spoke of social change under the shadow of the French Revolution. Beethovens Fidelio, written shortly afterwards, treated the themes of tyranny and injustice. As the Romantic era dawned, Webers Der Freischtz hinted at all sorts of psychological complexities and social taboos. During the 19th Century, operas popularity grew in harness with the rise of the bourgeoisie. The composer was lionised: he had to entertain, but he also had to respond to the romantic ideal of art as something edifying and uplifting. Like his predecessors, he was invariably a practising musician and often an opera conductor, as Wagner was, and later Strauss and Zemlinsky. He was still subject to the censorship rules of the day, but his genius was the driving force. Librettists were there to do the composers bidding. Verdi, for example, frequently bullied his librettists and substituted his words for theirs. The problem with opera in the 20th Century, Mr Clark argued, was that it lost touch with its popular roots. Post-1945 Modernism rejected opera in its traditional guise. While Pierre Boulez famously called for opera houses to be blown up, Karlheinz Stockhausen concocted wild and wacky visions, as lengthy as they were impractical. Luciano Berio, at heart a lyrical composer, renounced traditional story-telling in favour of what he called musical action a collage of ideas with no coherent narrative. Thanks to the enormous influence of these and other leaders of the avant-garde, composers lost touch with the opera house. They retreated into academia, wrote instrumental and electronic music and favoured spaces and forces that lay beyond conventional resources. Opera was dismissed as an outdated art form. The same period witnessed the rise of popular culture. Film and television supplanted opera as the medium for communicating stories about life, love and the human experience, absorbing much of the available creative talent. By the late 20th Century, opera had become an interpretative art, not a creative one. The creativity was to be found in directing finding new meaning for old-established tales. The opera house became a museum. The art of libretto-writing fell by the wayside.

Since the 1990s, opera has fought back. While composers and authors often lack practical experience in the medium of opera, Five:15 demonstrates they still have enthusiasm for it. That is a marked change from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Some attempts to revive the art form elsewhere suggest many would-be composers and writers are intent on reinventing the wheel: in their enthusiasm for experiment, they have made elementary mistakes. Some have not even visited an opera house to learn from tradition. In continental Europe, established composers are still writing large-scale stage works mostly to a formula that tries to fuse operas vocal and dramatic essence with the musical and intellectual legacy of post-war Modernism. Hardly any of these works have joined the repertory. North America is producing full-length works, usually to an old-fashioned formula. Most are triumphs of marketing over substance. Their selling point is the fame or notoriety of the plays or novels on which they are based. One type of American opera that has aroused interest elsewhere is the documentary opera, based on the lives of public individuals of the recent past. Mr Clark cited John Adamss Nixon in China as the best-known. Whether these works have enough intrinsic value to appeal beyond their immediate historical context is an open question. Mr Clark reminded the audience that for every successful opera in todays repertory, there are hundreds that had fallen by the wayside. He said that if the art form is to survive, composers and librettists today need opportunities, such as Five:15, to give their ideas practical shape. They also have to be allowed to make mistakes. The legacy for future generations should be a corpus of operas reflecting the problems and preoccupations and artistic priorities of our time just as composers and librettists of the past have done. Stuart MacRae and Louise Welsh The two creative members of the panel made their presentation as a double act, taking turns to pursue their argument and react to the others comments. In his initial remarks, Mr MacRae recalled that he had spent much of his early career writing for orchestra and ensemble, and that opera represented a step into the unknown: it made different demands. Outlining the history of his working partnership with Ms Welsh, Mr MacRae said they had become friends and admirers of each others work before they ever thought of collaborating on an opera. During preliminary discussions with Mr Reedijk about Five:15, Mr MacRae had recognised that narrative was not his best suit, while telling stories was one of Ms Welshs great gifts. On that basis, it seemed a logical step to invite her to collaborate. Ms Welsh said she needed no persuading: she had felt envious of the writers selected for the first Five:15 in 2008. Writers spend a lot of time on their own, and so the opportunity to collaborate, especially with someone she knew and trusted, was too good to miss. Friendship did not mean they never disagree, but they do so with courtesy. Their advantage is that they do not have to go through the formalities of getting to know each other, as many collaborators do, before being able to say Thats rubbish!. Ms Welsh has been an opera goer but does not consider herself a knowledgeable one. The chance to learn is something new. She is not being called upon to adapt someone elses play or short story, but to engage with a particular art form and write specially for that. For a writer that is very satisfying, she said. Mr MacRae said one of the most positive aspects of the Five:15 commission is that it takes the form of a developing process, in which the creative team discusses ideas with Mr Reedijk and the stage director Michael McCarthy, and benefit from their practical advice and guidance. What is missing from the education of modern composers is the opportunity to write dramatic music, a genre that goes far beyond the process of working out how to put words and music together. Composers today are accustomed to developing relationships with orchestras, ensembles and singers, but not opera houses. They will readily dissect any opera they hear, but their analysis rarely goes beyond the music. It is necessary to relate the music intrinsically to everything else, and when you start getting involved with the medium as we have, you see it in a totally different way, Mr MacRae said. He added that most operas in the repertory have good music, but what really makes an opera work is the way all the elements speak to each other and form a unit. Having the right words is an essential starting point. In that context, it is

important to let the librettist take an idea forward and not let the composerly side get in the way. Describing their modus operandi, Ms Welsh said the germ of Remembrance Day the initial spark and vision had come not from her but from Mr MacRae. They began by meeting in a caf for a lengthy chat. Each would then mull things over on their own and reconvene a week or so later. She said Mr Reedijk and Mr McCarthy had put us through our paces. When finally the time came to write the libretto, more changes took place, because a structure and a plan are not the piece, and as soon as you begin to write it, things become apparent that werent apparent when you started. Mr MacRae said the only problem about their initial conversations was that they generated so many ideas: a lot of the creative process involved honing down the material to what was absolutely necessary. In the end each had to go off and do their part of the work. Ms Welsh would make a first draft of the libretto, and after a bit of shuffling around with what she proposed, he would then get to work on the music. Ms Welsh said she regards Mr MacRae as the senior partner. She will ask him about structure, timing and words; they will also discuss voices and instruments. She said it is useful to have a tight remit, even down to the number of words she can use. Mr MacRae explained the relevance of a word-count: singing words takes longer than speaking them. It is necessary to maintain subtleties and subplots and keep the piece working on various levels, while using the minimum number of words; in that context, the composer needs to keep the librettist informed of places where the music could cover ground that might occupy several paragraphs in a novel. Mr MacRae said that once he had grasped these lessons and adapted his techniques to the 15-minute format, Remembrance Day became easier to write. The challenge now, writing a 45-minute piece for 2012, is to hold the audiences attention over a longer span, while letting the piece breathe, because you cant be at the threshold of intensity for 45 minutes. Ms Welsh concurred, adding that one of the challenges of a longer piece is not to be frightened of it. It is important for the librettist to trust the skill of collaborators, including singers and orchestra, and not to overwrite. What they had learned was that there is no right way to create an opera: each of the Five:15 partnerships has found its own individual way. Mr MacRae pointed out that, while he would not dare to compare himself with Puccini or Verdi, their work is what we are competing with for stage time. Unlike in Handels day, composers and librettists of the 21st Century were not writing three or four operas a year. An opera company might produce one full-length piece every three or four years, and that increases the burden of expectation. Being part of a team helps to ease the pressure. Invited to comment on what Mr MacRae and Ms Welsh had said, Mr Clark observed that it is easy to forget that until the late 19th Century, almost everything an opera company produced was new, not a revival of existing works. What Five:15 proves is that opera is alive and well, and is still changing and developing. It cannot not repeat the past; it has to come up with new solutions to old problems.

Questions and Answers The question of design was raised: how did it figure in the creation of a new opera? Mr Reedijk replied that it had not been the intention of Five:15 to get bogged down in the artifice of opera, scenery, props etc, but to focus instead on the truthfulness of the story-telling. A clear, open set, perhaps with a small bench, encourages everyone to use their imagination. A design issue specific to Five:15 is the positioning of the orchestra: for practical purposes it had been decided to place it behind rather than in front of the playing area, in order to maximise audibility of the words. For the longer piece now being developed, a more traditional configuration will be used and there will be a greater role for stage design. Another questioner asked how writing for the voice compares to writing for the page. Ms Welsh said she is accustomed to thinking about the voice: even while writing novels she reads each sentence aloud, a good way of pointing up whats wrong. While writing a libretto, she thinks in terms of rhythms and tunes, even if she refrains from sharing her tunes with Mr MacRae who said he is glad Ms Welsh feels able to tell him when she imagines a repeating rhythm in the background of a certain section, as it may save me from having to work it out for myself. Did libretto-writing involve a degree of poetic writing? Ms Welsh said she sees the libretto as offering more scope for poetic turns of phrase than a novel, but it cannot function properly without music. Mr MacRae added that the libretto Ms Welsh has provided for Remembrance Day has many poetic turns of phrase without manifesting itself as poetry. Ms Welsh said that what they are aiming at is an idea of speech, involving half-rhymes and rhythms, rather than actual speech. Before starting to write, one of her techniques is to draw up a vocabulary list relevant to the subject. Did the composer need to be aware of the sound of vowels at the top of the voice and when writing each role, did he have specific voices in mind? Mr MacRae said he has learned not to use certain vowels on high notes. He has also learned to be sensitive to this during the rehearsal process, making small changes where necessary. Similarly, if a line of the libretto proves unsympathetic to musical development in terms of rhythm or length, he has had no qualms about asking Ms Welsh to make changes, perhaps by lengthening the line to suit a musical climax. One of the great pleasures of working with singers is discovering the character of their voices and how tailoring the music to suit can improve the result. Ms Welsh added that in any creative work, be it science, literature or opera, it is the solving of problems that usually gives most satisfaction. Did Ms Welsh have a view about singers diction? And should the audience be given a copy of the libretto in advance? Her reply suggested the responsibility for verbal clarity lies as much with librettist as singer: part of her task is to write words and phrases that allow clear diction. I have the ego of any other creative artist: I dont want my genius to be lost. [laughter] As to the audience being told the story beforehand, Ms Welsh said she likes to have a copy of the libretto of the opera she is seeing, but usually leaves the reading of it till afterwards. As far as her own narratives are concerned, she prefers not to give away her surprises to the audience in advance. How does a composer control the musical/lyrical narrative within the overall shape of the work? Mr MacRae said that once the composition process is underway, it is like juggling: you have several balls in motion at any given time, and with every bar and syllable, the composer has to judge how it relates to the character who is singing, the other characters on stage, its place in the overall timescale and its relationship to the words before and after. The pacing is partly dictated by shifts in the libretto and the changing moods of each character. During the composition of Remembrance Day, it had been useful to keep a notebook following the mood of each character, and trying to find the patterns and threads within that a technique designed to make the opera multi-layered and multi-textured. At the same time it is easy to overcomplicate the whole process. Getting the pacing right the sense of a drama moving forward is the hardest task of all.
Opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the RSE, nor of its Fellows
The Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotlands National Academy, is Scottish Charity No. SC000470