Well, opening night of “Black September” is upon us- and both librettist Matt Boresi and I are feeling guardedly confident that we have created something that will have some impact on the people who are kind enough to come and experience it for themselves. But there have been plenty of moments of doubt – and as he said so astutely in our radio interview yesterday, he and I are way too close to this work to be able to rationally assess its worth and quality. We think it’s good. We hope it’s good.
I actually found my confidence in the piece rather badly battered the night before last – due to some well-meaning comments that were made by one of the first “outsiders” to hear the piece in its entirety. It was one of those moments where the ground beneath your feet seems to tremble, and I hardly knew what to do with my sudden misgivings about the piece. (I barely slept a wink- which is very rare for me.)
Fortunately, yesterday was a day of mental and emotional rebuilding- thanks to all kinds of different nice things. But one of the most important moments of affirmation and encouragement didn’t come from any of my colleagues – but rather from one of our students, Alexandra Kurkjian. She is singing the role of The Monitor (basically the head nun) in our production of Puccini’s Suor Angelica – and later in the spring, she will be Countess Almaviva in our production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. She is an exceptionally talented anddedicated voice student – and also one of our most experienced. She spent part of last summer singing in Italy with Brian Leeper’s marvelous opera program La Lirica, and she is a frequent visitor to the Lyric Opera. She knows opera much better than the typical undergraduate.
She is one of the chief caretakers of the supertitles that will be projected during our performances this weekend, and she is actually the person who will run the titles for “Black September” – which means she will be responsible for advancing each “slide” of the titles at the right moment so what appears on that screen corresponds correctly with what is being sung at the moment. We got together for the first of two sessions where I would play through the score while she followed along on her laptop with the titles – so she could get a sense of the rhythm and pace of the show. As she first walked into the room, Allie said that even without having heard a note of the music, she was already tremendously excited about the opera just from reading through the words she has captured in the titles. She already found it powerful and moving, even apart from the music. I can’t tell you how much it meant to hear Allie say that – and I could tell that it was something she really meant.
It very much reinforced in my mind what I already knew to be true- that I am so incredibly fortunate to have had a collaborator as sensitive and gifted as Matt to be my partner in this my first opera composition. And part of why I say that is because almost every new opera I have seen in the last ten or fifteen years has been undermined by a libretto that ranges somewhere between mediocre to rotten. It really underscores the very delicate challenge that is involved constructing a libretto. It is so much more than just trimming up a pre-existent play – or taking a good story and putting it in rhyming verse. Librettos must be crafted in such a way that the words cry out to be sung- and to be sung operatically. And yet, if it is a story set in the modern day, one must be really careful that the language doesn’t sound stilted or artificial. And both Matt and I believe firmly that the most effective operas include “numbers” – moments in which there is a sense of culmination: either arias or duets or ensembles. The vast majority of brand new operas seem to have almost none of that. It’s as though one is watching a play being sung- and more often than not the typical audience member (at least as far as I’m concerned) walks away sort of lost in a blizzard of notes, with no particular musical passages to take away with them. I so appreciate that Matt thinks the same way I do, and was able to craft a libretto in which there are these “numbers.”
But there is so much more than that to the libretto that Matt has so lovingly crafted. Once we had chosen this as the story we wanted to tell, Matt set to work on researching the 1972 incident – by reading everything he could get his hands on and by watching multiple documentaries on the topic. And once we had begun meeting in the first week of January, the students were assigned to do research work of their own, which so greatly enhanced their experience as well as the wealth of information which ultimately informed Matt’s work.
We knew we had eleven men, so one of our first choices was to decide which men involved in the real-life drama in 1972 would be portrayed in our opera. We finally decided on seven hostages and three terrorists, with one German official serving as something of a narrator – and I think those have proven to be numbers that really worked well for the telling of the story. Everyone’s real name was retained, but more important was how Matt has tried to shape each character as authentically as possible. For instance, the youngest of the Israeli hostages was an 18-year-old wrestler named Mark Slavin – and Matt made sure that his emotions veered rather drastically between naive hope and dark pessimism. Another wrestler, Eliezer, had been a political dissident, and Matt gave most of what he says a fiery sort of intensity. Two of the weightlifters, Ze’ev and David, were close friends- and we are shown that. One of the coaches was a Holocaust survivor and that legacy weighed heavily on him. And the fencing coach named Andre Spitzer was a great idealist when it came to the Olympic Games. A few days before this incident, he actually went out of his way to greet some competitors from Lebanon and ended up enjoying a cordial conversation with them. In the midst of the opera’s fiery final scene, Andre steps forward to sing about that moment- and it never fails to put a huge lump in my throat.
I hope I am adequately conveying just how highly I regard Matt Boresi’s libretto. I was privileged to have such beautifully crafted words to set to music – words that almost didn’t need music at all – but yet cried out to be set to music. I only hope that I have managed to do those words justice.