The Opera Group
VARJAK PAW
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.
By now, there’s been more toing and froing with the libretto between Kit, John and myself but for at least two out of our five acts, I have what I need and music is playing in my head louder and clearer than ever. And there are sequences I’m itching to write – the Mesopotamian Blues’ lament for their dead Contessa in Act 1, Varjak’s first encounter with his ancestor Jalal or his spiky first confrontations with scrawny street cats.
Each composer’s working method is different, reflective of both his/her creative personality and aesethetic position. For me, a new piece often begins with mapping out broad arcs of material in my head and this is often achieved by pacing out great tracts of my local Oxfordshire countryside. Indeed, the relationship between the notes and the physical realisation of them across landscape can become so close that a section can later remind me of a stretch of the Ridgeway, say, where a problem was solved or an idea presented itself.
So after taking long Varjak walks, I then embark on a detailed scrutinising of the libretto, laying out the intricate micro-structure that will govern each scene of the opera. To date I have achieved this for most of Acts 1 and 2, while Act 3 remains hazy and Acts 4 and 5 have yet to materialise as libretto. The next stage is creating a kind of skeleton sketch for the score, a sketch which is for the most part concerned with tempo, rhythm and the detailed implications of the text. For the past couple of years, I found it liberating to sketch just the gestures, pacing and timing of a scene, and defer its pitch content to a later stage. This means that for Act 1 of Varjak, I’ve identified its three main, interconnected tempi; established how Varjak, his brother Julius and Grandmother vocalise including the detailed rhythmicisation of their text; paced out the proportions of the entire act in terms of precise timings and identified the supporting instrumental textures at play. As I’ve now become superstitious about not starting at the beginning, I then flesh out the pitch content of a number of different sections and then weave the whole act together. With experience, I’ve learned that it is often better to confront the most challenging corners of a score first as solving thorny creative dilemmas releases an energy that can carry you through other aspects of the composition.
In broader aesthetic terms, I’ve also made a few crucial decisions. Firstly, that as the work has a rites-of-passage journey at its core, the opera should be very much concerned with how Varjak grows up and “finds his voice”. Early in Act 1, Varjak either sings very parlando or simply speaks – he hasn’t learned who he is as yet and thus can’t “sing”. However, once exiled from the decadent luxury of the Contessa’s house and lost in harsh urban landscapes, bitter experience gives him a vulnerability and hence, a “voice”. Early on this voice mostly entails his mimicking the singing characters he encounters, but by the end of the opera, Varjak should be singing his heart out and inspiring the gang of free cats that develops around him.
A second crucial decision relates to Varjak’s Mesopotamian ancestor, Jalal the Paw. Jalal appears to Varjak in dream sequences, evoking not only a warm and sultry Mesopotamia that collides dramatically with the brutal city Varjak finds himself in, but also delivering a set of “Seven Skills” that equip Varjak with the wisdom and knowledge he needs to survive. In SF Said’s books, these echoes from ancient Mesopotamia set up a wonderfully rich cross-cultural dialogue between the kind of Western city Varjak finds himself in and his own rich, non-Western heritage. The fact that Mesopotamia can be found in modern Iraq makes this all the more poignant, demanding from me both extraordinary cultural sensitivity and respect.
Although we’ve chosen to realise Jalal with a counter-tenor – which will allow his voice to sound both strangely youthful and quite “other” – it feels right to draw in elements of Arabic music. One senses that SF Said’s books are offering younger readers a way of understanding and respecting cultural difference and for me, his books have now inspired a detailed engagement with classical Arabic music – its intense and heightened lyrical style, its intricate rhythmic structures and the expressive richness of its over forty modes. Clearly in a post-colonnial world, simply appropriating non-Western material is fraught with difficulty, but at the very least I want to evoke a kind of Mesopotamian music that is built on the florid line, on supple rhythmic accompaniments and the texture of Arabic modes, with their plangent quarter tone inflections. At this stage, I’m hoping that Jalal’s “Seven Skills” will map onto seven modes whose unfolding gives the opera a kind of core structure that pulls the action together.