Mean librettists have been mean to me
Generally, I am not a fan of airing grievances online, whether on social media or in a blog. I’ve seen people do it plenty of times, and even when I am inclined to agree that the person venting was indeed grievously wronged, the said ventor (did I just coin this word?) rarely comes off looking good. But I suppose I may be showing one of my many privileges here—the last time I felt wronged to the extent that I wanted to shout about it from the proverbial rooftops, the social media was in its infancy. If I were on Facebook by then, I may have had much harder time staying silent about it.
Anyway, this long streak is broken now as I believe I have been grievously wronged recently by my now former collaborators and I want to vent. A few weeks ago we had a complete draft of a two-hour opera that was generating a buzz among potential performers following the performances of its several fragments, and I was in process of arranging a workshop for it. My collaborators and I were in agreement that the draft had some significant flaws alongside its many strengths, but we disagreed regarding what those flaws were and how to address them. I was confident that we’d be able to work out our differences, but what happened instead was that they withdrew from this collaboration, and so they now have a complete libretto ready to be set by someone else, while I have two hours of raw musical material with no text or story attached to it, with much of that material useless separate of their libretto.
I am still not entirely past the anger stage of the grieving process. To be clear, not having those people in my life anymore is a relief, as I’ve been aware for some time that ours was a toxic relationship. In retrospect, there has been an abundance of red flags about them I ignored. Fairly early in the process my wife told me after accidentally overhearing a bit of our Zoom meeting: “I don’t like this guy, and I don’t like the way he talks to you.” It was hard for me to disagree with her impression even then, but I did try to convince her (and myself) that the person in question did have things going for him that made this collaboration worthwhile for me. A year later all I could tell her was “You told me so.” Also, note to self—next time you come across someone prone to making extremist-sounding statements, don’t tell yourself “they’re just being eccentric/having fun,” but take them at their word.
Yes, not having those people in my life anymore is a reason to celebrate. However, there still is a loss and a reason to grieve—I am grieving the loss of the characters we created. When I conducted an opera for the first time, I found that all the study and the emotional investment that comes with it cause the characters to become real to me—I feel that I know them, care about them, and miss them when the production is over. This attachment is so much more powerful when I take part in creating the characters and now they’ve been taken away from me, never to return. That extinct draft represents over a year of my exclusive work and there’s a big void in my life where that opera used to be.
I am determined to fill that void and write an opera set in the same milieu that will use the vacant emotional charge and perhaps even some of the musical material I’ve written for that now extinct project. Stay tuned for more news regarding that. In the meantime, I thought I’d finish this post with something fun and what’s more fun than obscure insults. So here are some lines from my final email to my former collaborators (which I did not send and don’t intend to send):
“Having an Abbot Varesco as your librettist is not so bad in itself; the problem arises when he thinks he’s Da Ponte and acts like he is Metastasio.”
“I promised myself not to include any references to the now proverbial Russian warship or its pending destination in this email, so please don’t think of any part of this email as such reference—there really is none, and if there were any, they would definitely, decisively not be directed at the two of you.”
“Go bless your hearts.”