Monday was the first session of American Lyric Theatre’s composer-librettist development program, which was, for me, a kind of heaven: three hours talking with an octet of bright composers and writers eager to learn all they can about how best to sing our lives. Last night was allegedly devoted just to solo writing, but, as always in opera, anything is only itself except when, simultaneously, it’s something else. An avalanche of questions: Which is the more minimalist composition, Bizet/Meilhac/Halévy’s Habanera or Adams/Goodman’s “I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung?” How, in two solo numbers that rely so heavily on repetition, does one composer-librettist team use the device to embody a woman incandescent with tension, another to draw the very aural image of ease? If the Adams aria were transposed down a fifth, and the Bizet up a fifth, and all else remained the same, would those women remain the same characters? Why?
More: Is there any structural difference between the “Soliloquy” from Carousel and “Ah, for’s e lui/Sempre libera” from La Traviata? Between the Verdi/Piave and “They are always with me” from The Ghosts of Versailles? Is Sondheim/Furth’s “Another Hundred People” an updated Habanera (two women tell you all we need to know of them while singing about other things: Manhattan, l’amour?) Or does it mirror “It is an axiom among kings,” sung by Female Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia—a number commenting on the main narrative in the traditional choral manner, despite being scored just for solo singer? As Violetta answers an offstage Alfredo merely with wordless scales, is she recusing herself from the conflict, or recasting it as one between a concerto soloist versus an actor singing speech? Does Corigliano’s orchestral texture fulfill the same function in his Marie Antoinette scena that the lyric-vs.-coloratura vocal texture does in the Verdi?
Bliss. The hours flew. Two weeks from tonight, the ensemble.
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