The Opera Group
VARJAK PAW
Production Blog
Directorial pressure is exerted
This far into the working process on Varjak Paw, I’ve rather luxuriated in having time to ponder the central aesthetic, dramatic and musical challenges it presents however there’s nothing like a call from the director (John Fuljames) to jolt you into the painful realisation that time is limited and each day important deadlines move ever closer. Our next focal point is two days of development work on the piece, funded by the Genesis Opera Development Programme. This is happening at the end of March when the creative team, eight singers, a conductor and pianist will gather to work through whatever material I’ve managed to complete.
Grappling with Act 1
True to my last blog entry, detailed work on Act 1 of Varjak Paw has begun with a central episode where Varjak and his kitten siblings hunt a mouse – a good starting point for a cat opera, I guess! It’s perhaps the lightest and most playful sequence in the act – very scherzando with lots of interplay between Varjak and the kittens. One thing I was immediately confronted with was the detailed characterisation of the three kittens. Kit has given me wonderfully witty and fizzy kitten text and I was largely free to decide on how to allocate it. So kitten 1 (high soprano) turned out to be rather brainless, kitten 3 (mezzo) more sensible and grown-up and kitten 2 (counter-tenor) somewhere in the middle. This also mapped on to voice types well – though of course I’m not implying that all high sopranos are air-heads and all mezzos sensible! But this kind of decision about character has informed how I’ve realised each of the kittens’ lines even though often they operate as a comic trio in close harmony.
In The Composing Bunker
When you’re on the brink of starting to compose in earnest, you go through this strange period when you become a hypothetical composer: all talk, all hypothetical creativity. Then there comes a moment when the not-writing the opera becomes a kind of psychological pain and as the terror of deadlines start to kick in, the composing desk starts to beckon like a warm bath.
A Trip to Deepest Norfolk
It soon became clear in the aftermath of the Varjak Paw development week, that John, Kit and I would need some focussed time to reflect on the detailed structure of the opera. Our initial story-boarding had soon established that we would need to weave the plots of both Varjak novels together – the first Varjak Paw novel had not quite enough story and the second fleshed out Varjak’s enemy Sally Bones with a final denoument that was simply too good to leave out.
Getting Started
The idea of creating an opera out of SF Said’s two Varjak Paw novels came out of extended conversations between director John Fulljames, conductor Patrick Bailey and myself around the idea of creating a second family opera to build on the success of Jonathan Dove’s The Enchanted Pig. Between us we read a host of novels and stories for young people when out of the blue, Varjak leapt into view and with SF Said’s blessing and Kit Hesketh-Harvey on board as librettist, we were off.