The Opera Group
VARJAK PAW
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.
John is wondering how much I will have completed and seemed rather concerned that I was only intending to have finished act 1, chunks of act 2 and a few numbers from elsewhere in the opera. Once I put the phone down I found myself starting blankly at the diary in the hope that a thirteenth month in the year might miraculously materialise. In fact, diary meditation seems to be a regular practice – often on train journeys I’ll ponder the weeks ahead wondering how my productivity is going and there are always two perennial difficulties. One – it is impossible to know precisely how long it will take, and two – the process itself is infinite. I’m rather with Boulez on this one; artistic creation never ends. Even when a work is notionally complete – a completion perhaps forced by an imposed deadline – you could potentially carry on revising and rethinking forever, particularly in a form as hard to grapple with as opera.
So John’s call has sent me scurrying ahead in the Varjak Paw canvas to put down ideas for some of the opera’s other characteristic strands of material. I’ve decided to concentrate on two areas – the mysterious scenes in which Varjak meets his ancient ancestor Jalal the Paw and the rougher episodes in which he encounters a whole array of street cats, some scrawny, some sassy and sexy.
In a way, the tension between Jalal the Paw on one hand and the street cats on the other presents a familiar operatic dichotomy between the sacred and profane – Jalal’s haunting, elusive music versus the rougher and more vernacular strains of characters like Sally Bones’ heavies Razor and Luger or the glamorous Scratch Sisters. To my mind, it’s uncannily like Mozart’s The Magic Flute: Varjak and Holly map on to Tamino and Pamina, Jalal onto Sorastro, Sally Bones on to the Queen of the Night (both coloratura sopranos), the three Scratch Sisters onto the three Ladies and the street cats on to Papageno and Papagena. So in my own language, I have to find an exalted, Sarastro-like music for Jalal and a much more direct, popular language for the street cats. Mozart solves this by writing Sarastro’s music with breathtaking nobility and grandeur and Papageno’s with a fusion of the conventions of opera buffa and folksong. But what are my solutions? What kind of “popular music” will the street cats evoke?
The answer lies embedded in Kit’s libretto to a large extent, as much of the street cats’ text alludes more to cabaret, musical theatre or the blues than opera. Razor and Luger have a very slinky duet in Act 2 – When you want a real cat – and their metre and rhymes are heavily imbued with the traditions of the American musical; Luger’s aria in Act 5 – Here’s for fools who come along – feels like pure cabaret while the Scratch Sisters jump off the page as black soul divas, a kind of feline Supremes.
This notion of engaging with other musics and incorporating them into my own language is a familiar compositional concern – Rameau dances in my ballet Les Liaisons Dangereuses or Gluck, Monteverdi and Offenbach in a recent site-specific chamber opera for Glyndebourne. However, what’s emerging with Varjak Paw is a rather dizzying mix of opera, music theatre, cabaret and Arabic music. Obviously this emerges directly out of SF Said’s Varjak stories but there is also an aesthetic stance here – I believe profoundly that my music should meet the strange contradictions of our cultural life head-on rather than escaping into some kind of abstracted, pure compositional language.
However, the crucial question is how do I make a music theatre or a cabaret number belong? How do I register the familiar while simultaneously creating the unfamiliar? At heart of this creative challenge is the tension between pastiche and parody and in steering between these opposite poles I need to be conscious of my at times facile ability to mimic or take on the clothing of other music. The answer is not as simple as post-Stravinskian distortion or post-modern plethora, as I don’t want to reduce characters to mere grotesques or caricatures. All the street cats have tremendous comic potential and offer the possibility of lightening the musical texture but they should be well drawn as characters and have sufficient depth for Varjak’s emotional journey to hit home.