The Opera Group
VARJAK PAW
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.
If there was a moment when it felt like we had really begun, it was our development week in October 2007 when a group of actors, singers and musicians gathered to improvise the world of Varjak Paw and workshop its colourful collection of characters. Although not a note of the score had been committed to paper as yet, Kit had produced first draft fragments of the libretto and we were able to mock up scenes and action sequences as a way of exploring the implications of lifting characters from the page into a theatrical reality.
Amazingly, this was the first time that I had enjoyed the luxury of proper development time for an opera and it proved a valuable opportunity to “play”, to improvise musical material, to gain experience first-hand of SF Said’s characters singing their way through his stories. Normally as composers we can become very tied to our own notation and although going into a studio space with highly experienced performers and no material was a profoundly scary experience, it gave me a refreshing flexibility. Should the music be like this here, or like that? How operatic is this character? What will the reality of the action sequences feel like? As nothing had been pre-composed, it was striking how free the company felt to contribute to the developing world of Varjak’s music.
Of course there were comedy moments when an improvisation felt like an operatic parody but even this was instructive. It reminded me how easily a new opera can fall into lazy, stock formulae without ever establishing a distinctive language. For Varjak Paw the opera, we were able to establish that our cast should be a mixture of actors and opera singers, that while the young Varjak was an actor, his enemy Sally Bones should be a steely coloratura soprano and his great ancestor, Jalal the Paw, should be a counter-tenor. All through this process, the Varjak creative team were getting to know each other and establishing a good working rapport. Kit and I were able to discuss the minutiae of the libretto, Patrick and I could discuss options for the instrumental band while most exciting of all, John was putting chunks of Varjak Paw the opera on its feet for the first time.