Sarah Urwin Jones Journalist, Writer, Broadcaster

How hard can it be to write an opera libretto, Sarah Urwin Jones wondered. Her first protagonist? A singing seaside pub landlady

It seemed like a good idea at the time. With composers falling over each other for opera commissions, one can’t help noticing that the strike rate is somewhat low. And on the first night the librettist is always first up against the wall, damned by the fact that whereas a poor libretto can ruin an opera, a good libretto can’t make one. I can see that a journalist muscling in and ripping the writing pad off the nearest qualified playwright may seem like the operatic equivalent of wrestling the power drill off your partner with a high-pitched, “Just let me do it!” But I feel that my quest is justified.

What better way to understand the problem than by broaching it oneself? Even if I do mess it up completely, at least I’ll know I’m in good company. The path to a good libretto is piled with literary bodies who thought that they “could” and then rapidly discovered that they really shouldn’t have. Even W. H. Auden, who peaked with The Rake’s Progress for Stravinsky, couldn’t flog his wordy Christmas Oratorio.

So where did it all go wrong? Some blame it on loquacious Wagner, while Meredith Oakes, librettist for Thomas Adãs on The Tempest (a rare contemporary success story), blames it on a 20th-century obsession with “a Beckettian sense of futility”. Everyone else blames Sophie’s Choice , the well-meaning but dramatically disastrous 2002 Royal Opera House adaptation of William Styron’s Auschwitz novel.

“What was Nicholas Maw thinking of, writing his own libretto?” asks Philip Hensher, novelist and librettist of Adãs’s first opera, Powder Her Face . “And how could the opera house let him? All we seem to get now is tiresome intervention from opera houses who want more input than they deserve.”

But the Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Libretto has not yet been written. While my early research suggests that the maxim “If in doubt, cut it out” is a good starting point, the exactitudes of writing text for music that you have not yet heard is a mental challenge that could lead to insanity. It is thus that I find myself, one sunny week in late March, at the back of a lecture hall in Suffolk, cherry-picking tips from the inaugural Jerwood Opera Writing Programme at Aldeburgh, overseen by its artistic director, Giorgio Battistelli.

Over three separate weeks in 2007, 20 established composers, writers and directors, (a pithy mix, from the Welsh playwright Gary Owen to the Hungarian composer Miroslav Srnka) will learn their new trade from the likes of Batistelli, Oakes and David Sawer, with the lure of a Jerwood Fellowship next year. The students have just been given their second task, a four-minute libretto on “modern myth”. Copies of Heat magazine litter the front row.

“There aren’t any rules to writing a libretto, but there are causes and effects,” Meredith Oakes says during the first seminar the next morning. A key element is the abandonment of the writerly ID — no one ever remembers who the librettist is anyway. “They just think you helped the composer out with the spelling,” says Hensher.

“Really good opera librettos look odd on page. A rhetorical device might look corny on paper, but it’s more useful to a composer than rhyme. You don’t want to create a too-complete music in the language.” I start to make snap decisions about what is and isn’t immediately useful for my “starter” libretto. Shorter words to release sounds? Check. Lists of consonants that a soprano should not be made sing at top C? Reject. I’ll write for a mezzo.

Subject matter is equally tricky. “Just think of something really whacky, then keep editing it down until you’ve got something really clever,” suggests Jack Underwood, a poet, who writes an amusing first libretto about a security guard falling in love with a giant squid. His main character, Ohido, comes from his Aldeburgh bathroom, tiled with the legend “Oh I do like to be beside the seaside”.

John Lloyd Davies, of Opera Genesis, the Royal Opera House’s ground-breaking workshop programme that brings together budding opera composers and librettists, is hugely helpful. We talk about repetition and the importance of signage, which, rather like in the schlockest of TV murder mysteries, is paramount. Schlock, I think excitedly. Now that’s something I can do.

I alight on my theme over a full English breakfast one morning in the Aldeburgh pub I’m staying in. The evocatively-named Barrel-Changing Aria is born — the sorry tale of a fiftysomething landlady who’s drifted, inadvertently, into life’s backwater. The scene is set “in the cellar of a squat Aldeburgh pub, not quite abutting the North Sea”. I intermingle a chorus of second-homers, roughly rhyming, and a jaded barman who may be the worn-down Italian love of the jaded landlady. He’s also called Giorgio, in honour of Battistelli, who would make a surprising presence behind a bar.

The most difficult aspect of writing the libretto is wanting to hear the music to “feel” the words. Hensher later tells me that writing that’s part way between prose and poetry is how he approached Powder Her Face .

I try to edit until my rhythms aren’t too potentially prescriptive — prose for the landlady, short pithy rhyming for the chorus — then realise that the minimal dramatic impetus will almost certainly be more problematic. Still, at least I got rhythm, I think cheerily. A sample of my labours: “It’s been a long night./ It’s been a long life./ I was just getting started;/ now I’m all washed up./ Brought in on a spring tide,/ dragged high up the beach./ Didn’t mean to wash up here./ I’ve got myself beached.”

Eventually, dissatisfied, I consign the librettic scrap to the critical attentions of a kindly composer, a dramatist and a director, and become almost sick with fear.

My first response is from Jenny Jackson, a talented composer currently completing a PhD at Sheffield University, who, paired with Jack Underwood for the “modern myth” project, now has in her musical canon the suggestive pianistic fouettes of an erotically-charged squid.

“Bravo!” she says, kindly. She seems to quite like it, or appreciate it, which is a different matter. In trying to imagine setting it, she spots a potential Peter Grimes -style canon in my chorus. Fantastic! I’d been subconsciously thinking of referencing Grimes .

“The changes of pace as the moods alter are appealing, but I think that the challenge would be how to combine the livelier chorus interjections with the more self-reflective ‘aria’.” John Lloyd Davies, of Opera Genesis, takes a brutally honest dramatist’s view, carefully prefacing his critical barrage with “not bad for a quick first attempt, but it’s overlong for what it achieves. You need to get on with the drama.” It’s a fair cop.

But he commends “a witty slick rhyme” in the chorus and gives a double tick for the “nice seaside language”, where I’ve tried to check off operatic repetition and juicy sounds.

He tells me I ought to look at the Peter Grimes tavern chorus for “good tavern scenarios” and suggests that I’ve let my own editorial prejudice colour my “second homer” chorus. I think this boils down to an overreliance on stereotype for humour.

It’s down, then, to my final judge, Jonathan Reekie, chief executive of Aldeburgh Music. “Actually, it looks as if it’s along the right lines,” he says cheerfully. “And it’s got emotional heart, which is crucial for music.” He suggests various cuts and what essentially boils down to avoiding the wrong kind of repetition — thematic not word. And he chuckles over Giorgio as a barman, my ideal audience.

I’m tempted to have another go, and try to work out dramatic structure. Strangely — and this is perhaps why librettists such as Oakes and Hensher are so open to the genre — the act of creating something that is merely an imprint for a composer to create a musical world, before you’ve even got to the stage design or the direction, is hugely addictive.

Not all collaborations can be as close as they are in Aldeburgh or with the Genesis project but perhaps in the future they could be. Maybe I won’t throw away the pencil just yet.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article1678353.ece