The Opera Group
VARJAK PAW
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.
This mouse-hunting episode is turning out to be only one of my starting points for act 1 – the working pattern that is emerging is a number of “beginnings” at different parts of the act that slowly grow together. So I’ve sketched the lament for the dead Contessa – Goodnight Contessa, This has been home forever, the creepy moment that Varjak spies the sinister shadow of the mysterious gentleman and the musical sequence that opens the entire opera.
Openings can often be tricky – sometimes one loads too much onto them out of a kind of suppressed anxiety about the process ahead. I’ve always had a clear sense of the atmosphere of how the opera begins – the musty world of a crumbling gothic house in which Varjak and his family are sleeping – and from early on I’ve heard slow, curling wisps of material that hypnotically suggest both the cats’ snoring and the timeless gloom of the house. But I’ve genuinely dreaded grappling with the notes for this until unexpectedly my research and preparation for the ancient Mesopotamian scenes cross-fertilised with this first act. I discovered that by juxtaposing the Arabic Shehnaz mode with the more familiar pentatonic mode, I could generate lines and harmony that suggests both the chromatic decadence of the gothic house in which Varjak’s family lives but also the cats’ aristocratic pedigree in ancient Mesopotamia. Those “curling wisps” of material turned out to be strange two-part chords while hidden behind much of the cats’ linear material are the half-remembered shapes of Arabic modal patterns.