“What led you to write operas in the first place?”, you may ask. Well, I was just as surprised as my friends and family were that I had developed an interest in this form of art. After all, I never willingly listened to or attended operas. The closest I had been to opera was a high school field trip to see “The Marriage of Figaro”, and also listening to some CDs which my dad owned featuring Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera”. I wasn’t much into the latter work until a year or so after I had seen its live production on Broadway, which was shortly after I had begun writing my first opera. (My dad gave me the tickets to that show as a graduation present — a somewhat odd present since I wasn’t into “Phantom” back then.) I saw that show during a stopover in New York on my way to Israel to join a teaching tour led by my father.

The way my first opera came about is actually quite interesting. I did not have any formal musical training, beyond uninterestedly playing clarinet in my school’s band for two years in order to obtain some needed course credits. Plus, I wasn’t interested in opera. Yet, out of that nothingness sprang eight years of the hardest work I have ever put into anything in my life! So, how did this happen?

Well, I wrote a short and simple Ragtime song, just for fun. It was the first real attempt I had made at writing music. I had always loved Scott Joplin’s music, and I wanted to take a shot at writing a song which was at least in his genre of music, if not at his skill level. This first small attempt at writing music proved successful. I felt greatly encouraged, and began to think somewhat bigger. A few months later, I thought, “What about trying to write a small symphony?”

Sometime later, in the middle of the night (a time when I’ve often felt the most inspired), I got out of bed, and switched on my old computer, in which I had a very simple synthesizer program which allowed me to input musical notes with the mouse, and to hear them being played back in succession. (I had also used this program to write my Ragtime song.)

I began my attempt at a first symphony movement by forcing myself to come up with a few very simple, but serious-sounding 4- to 8-note motifs. Then, I expanded each of those, and embellished them. Finally, I thought up creative ways of connecting these expounded motifs together. It was all extemporaneous — I didn’t have any kind of layout, or plans for where the music would go. (Little did I know that this symphony movement was to become the “Hell scene” in my first opera! )

At last, it was complete: my first symphony movement. I was very excited to have ventured this deeply into the art of composition. The Ragtime song had been fun to do, but hardly as emotional and dramatically human as this latest work. (The movement had not yet been arranged for all the instruments in the orchestra, but the main melodic, harmonic, and bass lines were all there, as were my basic mental ideas for which instruments would play which parts. Thus the composition was essentially complete.)

What happened next was the greatest turning point in my musical focus. Laying in bed late at night, and playing back in my head the symphony movement I had just written, I imagined emotional lyrics sung to a certain part of the music. “What have we done?!”, I heard frightened women sing! It was such a short phrase, but poignant and potentially filled with meaning — and that challenged my creativity. I began to imagine that the women I heard in my head could refer to some horrible, dramatic event.

Immediately, I needed the symphony to become something more: a work of drama, which could tell the story of these desperate people whom I imagined singing those plaintive words. “An opera!”, I concluded. Though excited at this prospect, I felt completely overwhelmed by the task. I resolved that I would tell no one of my plan. And I didn’t!

After that night, I devoted myself to studying opera structure and technique in depth. My father still had several books from his music college days, two of which would come to be indispensable to me. The first was the “Harvard Dictionary of Music”, by Willi Apel, and the second was Walter Piston’s encyclopedia “Orchestration”, the latter providing me with deeply descriptive and incredibly well-crafted explanations of all the instruments in the typical orchestra. In addition to these comprehensive books, I, thankfully, also had my dad to question, a man who had pursued formal studies in music all the way through the doctoral level! And so, I was most grateful for the resources which were at my disposal to eventually make myself learned in opera composition. I buried myself in the books, and used my dad to ask questions which the books did not seem to address. Many of these were on specifically operatic issues, since the books I was using didn’t say much about opera, as that wasn’t their focus.

Writing these operas instantly became a driving force in me. I began the project early in my senior year of high school, and would frequently find myself pulling all-nighters — but not in order to cram for exams, or to rush through an essay that I had put off until the last minute. Rather, I would stay up straight through school nights in order to put down and organize the near-constant flood of musical and dramatic ideas flowing through my mind.

These all-nighters should have taxed my mind greatly, but oddly, I found myself more energized than ever the next mornings at school. I am not a morning person, by any stretch of the imagination, but finding this new, powerful, musical purpose in my life made me feel completely vital and fresh most of the time. I now felt Purpose to my life! Whenever I would feel the need for sleep, after consecutive nights spent awake working on the first opera, the feeling was a purely physical longing for rest — I remained mentally and emotionally excited about my newfound calling.

And that is just what this project has been to me: a calling which has become the only activity that I have ever pursued during which I felt 100% utilized. It’s simply what I was made to do.

The inspirations for these operas felt so powerful to me, that I actually noted the exact start and completion dates for my work on each opera. To those who may be interested:

“Project Eternity” — September 13, 1996 – August 25, 2003
“Vengeance” — June 25, 2003 – December 12/13*, 2004

*The reason for the “12/13″ finish date for my work on “Vengeance” is that the time was right around midnight the night of the 12th that I finished. I suppose, then, the date would technically be the 13th, in the first few minutes after 12am. That’s somewhat interesting, then… the start and ends days for the two operas are: 13, 25, 25, 13. Needless to say, the number 13 has not been unlucky for me!

So, the total composition work span for both operas together was precisely 8.25 years to the day.

Tags: avant-garde, classical music, inspiring, modern opera, new music, Ragtime