House of Creations

The composer Bernard Foccroulle

"This morning, Wednesday 28 December 2022, I sent the publisher Ricordi the orchestral score for my opera Cassandra. Four hundred carefully etched pages, which I’ve attentively proofread and corrected. By doing so, I wrapped up a job I started in spring 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, in close collaboration with Matthew Jocelyn, author of the libretto and Louis Geisler, the dramaturge. Over time, the team has been enhanced by the involvement of stage director Marie-Eve Signeyrole and conductor Kazushi Ono, as well as the singers who I’ve talked to in person or remotely. I’ve sent them excerpts of the score and gradually, I’ve tried to adapt the score as closely as possible to their vocal qualities.

The pandemic and lockdown enabled me to dedicate myself immediately to the project’s development, and to start composing from summer 2020. Six months later, I had a first fruitful work session with Katarina Bradic, who is playing Cassandra. I had already seen and heard her at work during my tenure as Director of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, where Katarina sung the role of Bradamante magnificently in our 2015 production of Alcina.

These workshops during composition are extremely useful, because they enable you to make more in-depth contact with the performers, to check certain aspects of the vocal writing, in a nutshell, to start making the essentially solitary work of musical composition concrete."

Howard Moody – The composer’s journal
 

#4 Writing music for the first chorus workshop

The first pressing deadline for Solar was the delivery of some chorus music for the first workshop/rehearsal at the end of June. This involved the Children’s Choir of La Monnaie (who play ‘The Sun’) and the Youth Chorus (who play the Apprentices).

The challenge was to give each group a couple of contrasting choruses from the opening of the opera in order to capture their imaginations and help them internalise the story through singing and movement. The dramatic choruses of scene 1 which frame the murder of Talus offered a great starting point. These could then be contrasted with the Sun’s magical transformation of Talus into a bird and then the Apprentice’s mourning of his death in scene 2. This Lacrimosa offered an opportunity for me to write music in four parts for the older Youth Chorus, maximising their ability to sing long sustained vocal lines in harmony.

I initially had six weeks to deliver the score for this rehearsal. It was important for me to be able to show my music to Benoit Giaux before it was printed. Our mutual understanding of what makes a project work for his choirs is a special connection. He had already told me exactly what range fits each group best, the amount of rehearsal that they would be likely to have and the numbers of voices involved. He is brilliant at his job and so precise and demanding when required. It was important for me to deliver a perfectly edited and accurate score, especially since it is difficult for young voices to re-learn music with changes in it later on in the process. They learn so fast and ultimately by ear, so once a melody in inside them, it stays for ever! I managed to get the scores to Benoit ten days in advance, enabling him to do some work on the music before I arrived.

My role as conductor as well as composer involves me in two completely different processes. The most important part of taking on both roles is that I have to own every single note as a composer. If I write something too challenging, voiced in an awkward way or not naturally “vocal”, then I have to face that head-on in rehearsal and also in performance! Sometimes I have been in situations as a conductor where a new piece has been given to singers with no awareness of what is possible. This causes rehearsals to become miserable (even if in the end an unusual effect may be achieved).

But the commission of Solar is a fantastic opportunity for me to write for voices and groups that I know so well from writing previous operas for La Monnaie. One of the singers took the lead role at the beginning of The Brussels Requiem in 2010, others have sung all the other operas for La Monnaie since 2014, including Sindbad, Orfeo and Majnun and Push. Therefore, the workshop day in June felt like a unique moment in a continuum of work and it was thrilling when the young La Monnaie chorusses immediately internalised both the music and the drama from the music that I had written.

I hope my experience of these voices will ensure that Solar becomes a piece ideally suited to other similarly trained groups who are attached to big opera houses. There is so much scope for a new body of work for these voices - all of whom have so much to express on stage, especially about the environmental issues that Solar exposes.

Within a short time, Karine Girard (the choreographer) created a wonderful atmosphere with her movement work. Circles and high energy diagonal movements showed the burning, raging sun. In contrast, still but strong movement defined the Apprentices’ grief. This was all facilitated by Benoît De Leersnyder (the director) who is a master of drawing everyone into the deep significance of an opera’s metaphor. We had the dream team: buoyant, happy, focussed and serious all at the same time.

The day finished with the Apprentices learning the lachrymose song that mourns the death of Talus. It sounded completely beautiful and touching after some real work on sound and balance. After they had sung it from memory, one of the young singers asked me how I had written it. Having heard my music sung with such commitment, I had to answer only with utter honesty. I admitted how a few blobs of ink on paper doesn’t look like much when you are given it as a performer but that feeling certain enough to deliver it as a composer is the product of extremely hard work.

I described how I have ideas that I sketch, perhaps over many days (like Beethoven’s sketch books) but that musical fragments have to form with a true dramatic intensity. Making my own theatre in my head is very much part of that. I then showed them how the chorus was constructed over a ground bass, with each of the voice parts building up with their unique melodies that weave amongst the harmony, completely independent of each other.

There was a magic in the air when everyone sang the piece again. The request to sing quieter was no longer an instruction but something that everyone could understand as necessary to bring out different melodic lines and emotions.

I returned home feeling absolutely ready to complete all the solo music of Scenes 1 and 2. I haven’t met the extremely fine soloists yet but I have heard them on recordings and I know the sound world of the choruses that they will be joining. It was always the idea to put the voice of the next generation into the centre of Solar and I am confident that their urgent voice for change will be heard.

Anna Moody - The Librettist’s Process

#3 From script to stage: the librettist’s relationship with the director

The trust and respect that I have for Benoît De Leersnyder as a director gave me so much confidence and excitement when writing Solar and I had his creative style in mind as I wrote. I have seen one of his directed productions before and we had also worked together previously as he translated another libretto of mine (Les Rêveurs de la Lune) into French for an upcoming performance in Avignon. Our discussions about Les Rêveurs as a story, a script, and also in performance in Strasbourg (March 2022), told me that this was a director who truly understands my writing on a deep level.

It is a big moment to hand over a script to a production team so that it becomes reshaped and expanded by so many other creative minds. Any mental image of staging that I might have had during the writing process will disappear and the story becomes bigger than I could have imagined.

With Benoît steering the ship of this Solar production, the handover process has been a productive one that has involved detailed discussions together about the text and the characters. Benoît and I have had FaceTime calls together about the piece, and recently spent a morning just unpacking the meaning of individual words together! It is a joy to work with an opera director who is so in touch with the libretto and so dedicated to the details that it contains.

When I had first finished the libretto, it was important to me to present it to Howard and Benoît first before sending it out to the rest of the team. We had a three-way zoom call and I read it out loud to them. At the end of each scene we paused to discuss the action and I explained my various influences and concepts behind it. Benoît has a sharp radar for the audience’s experience and the realities of performance and so his suggestions are always useful. From advice about contrasting the endings of scenes to the need for characters to use each other’s names so that the audience knows who is who, Benoît’s perspective enabled me to polish the text ready for the production team to take on.

A librettist can often feel ghosted once the text is handed over, and indeed might be as new to a production as the audience when it comes to the premiere! However, being quick to spot moments of ambiguity and eager to understand a writer’s intention, Benoît facilitates a transition from text to stage that is dynamic, communicative, and unique.

On November 21, La Monnaie is launching a series of conference-debates dedicated to the questions raised by the climate case. The first of these evenings will combine a screening of the documentary Sœurs de Combat – which recently won the Audience Award at the FIFF Film Festival of Namur – with a debate about activism led by RTBF-journalist Gwenaëlle Dekegeleer. What is the place of activism in our society? How effective can it be in the face of climate issues? Does it have the potential to inspire our leaders and lawmakers? The film’s director Henri de Gerlache, climatologist Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, Thérèse Snoy (Grands-Parents pour le Climat) and Adélaïde Charlier, the French-speaking coordinator of the Youth for Climate movement in Belgium, will try to answer all these questions.

Benoît Mernier on how he finished the score

"'Merde !', now that's a word I haven't often had to put to music." Composer Benoît Mernier faced the artistically and emotionally demanding task of finishing the last score of his mentor and friend Philippe Boesmans. He tells you all about it in this article and also during his musical lecture Inside the Music on 1 December.

Howard Moody – The composer’s journal
 

#3 Receiving the libretto

Historically, trust between a composer and a librettist has not always been a happy tale! The process requires intense communication and understanding of each other’s creative processes. This is one of the reasons why I have often written the libretto myself. However, over the course of writing three pieces together, Anna and I have developed a direct flow of communication and a deep understanding of each other’s style. This means that we can write to each other’s strengths. It also makes it possible to work fast and meet short deadlines for commissions such as Solar.

I always find that I cannot start writing the music until the libretto is complete. This gives me a picture of the whole drama from which to develop musical ideas. But to keep me in the loop throughout the writing process, Anna likes to show me sections of the script as she goes. This means that I can expect an excited phone call from Anna at any point during her process in which she will announce having completed a scene or wanting to tell me her latest idea.

About 10 days into Anna’s writing process for Solar back in April, we met for breakfast and Anna read me scenes 1 and 2. I didn’t want to read the words off a page but preferred to hear Anna read them out loud, knowing that she would have written something with an incredible sense of verbal rhythm, internal rhymes and dramatic force.

I was knocked out by the power with which her work grabbed my attention from the opening. It was like hearing the start of Verdi’s Otello for the first time. Verdi / Boito started with a storm. Anna begins Solar with Daedalus holding his nephew Talus over a cliff, burning with envy. Brilliant. I remember listening to it and immediately saying “don’t change a word”. Our discussions about the piece that followed, propelled both of us onto the next stage of the process and we were buzzing with excitement.

Hearing any lyrics or a libretto spoken is always the test of whether it has real poetic quality or just a prosaic style. Anna has a unique way of writing that allows a director, choreographer and designer plenty of space to tell the story through their nonverbal disciplines. Above all, she trusts the power of music to expand the meaning and intention of her words. The rhythms, sounds and dramatic momentum of her text are so captivating for a singer, who can then use them as the core of their performance. Hearing her read Solar for the first time reassured me that she had found an intensity of style that would make my task of composing the music exciting and challenging.

It was very convenient that Anna was able to take the whole of April off from her job as a lawyer in order to write the script. The deadline for delivery was quick, so it needed the focus of a whole month of really hard work and total immersion. We were trying to ensure that I would be able to go to Brussels at the end of June with musical material for each of the main chorus groups (‘The Sun’ and ‘The Apprentices). I was immediately confident from the first two scenes alone, that I would be able to give the young singers music that would capture their imaginations and inspire their dramatic involvement in the production.

The artisan craft of composition and writing is too easily glamorised - it is actually all about really committed and focussed hard work - so I was so impressed that Anna, true to the language of a lawyer’s responsibility to deliver on time, sent me the whole libretto at 5pm at the end of the last working day of April. This reminded me of Bach having to start his next Cantata on a Monday and deliver it for performance the following Sunday!

When I start writing, I often ask Anna to give me adjectives to describe her intention of feeling in every dramatic moment. I will scribble these down in the margins of my script to refer to as I go. This means that I can be clear about the difference between moments of “desperation” or “mourning”, of “liberation” or “magical transformation”.

The next time Anna hears her words will be from my attempt to show what I have written by playing it on a piano and singing along. This is light years away from a professional orchestra, large chorus and international soloists performing it on stage, in the same way that reading a libretto is so different from the final musical version. And once the words and music come together and are delivered on paper, we both have to let go of what we have written whilst it gets interpreted and hopefully understood by the production team.

It was a thrilling moment to receive the final script. I read it and re-read it so many times before I felt that I could approach the piece musically. The June workshop was coming up fast and there’s nothing like a deadline to get a composer started. Now I had the complete libretto, I had no excuse!

On purge bébé ! is taking shape! A behind-the-scenes look at the first scenic rehearsals in our Malibran Room. In this scene, Bastien Follavoine (Jean-Sébastien Bou) receives a French army official, Aristide Chouilloux (Denzil Delaere), who can help him bring in a large order for porcelain chamber pots. His wife Julie Follavoine (Jodie Devos), however, has other priorities...

Anna Moody - The Librettist’s Process

#2 The libretto form

What is a libretto? This is the first question I often get asked. My short answer is that it’s the script which is set to music. But if I had more time, there would be a lot more to unpack.

A libretto is such a hybrid literary form, combining drama, poetry and lyric. You could say that it’s like a play written in song lyrics. But two traditional operatic constructs offer more nuance here. Firstly, there is the aria form. This invites the action to stand still for a moment whilst a character gives voice to their emotions. Secondly, there is recitative which is the dialogue between characters. Whereas an aria invites something closer to poetry, recit calls for rhythms that are closer to speech.

Libretti traditionally move between these two forms, balancing the dramatic momentum of character interactions, with moments of stillness that open up heartfelt song by one or several characters. In a piece such as Solar, there is also another type of text required for the dramatic interaction, commentary and intervention of the young choruses.

Crucially, and throughout the whole libretto, less words is more. The music will expand the time it takes to express everything and superfluous words are just restricting and clunky. So, when writing a libretto, I have to have a sharp radar for concision and make sure that every line is extremely distilled and direct.

What I find really curious about the libretto form is that it is so rarely studied or read on its own unless you are the composer or the director. I studied literature as an undergraduate and as a masters student, and in all four years I never encountered a lecture on the libretto. This is because the sheer power of the operatic voice is seen to overwhelm the text. And yes, it is probably rare that you’ve listened to an opera and understood the words.

This idea of language giving way to sound invites dismissive accounts of the libretto as just a passive offering to the composer. In fact, the poet W. H. Auden, who wrote his own libretti as well as essays on the libretto form, went as far as to claim that the words for opera must ‘efface themselves and cease to care what happens to them.’

Having taken on the project of studying the form as well as writing three of my own, I am keen to prove Auden wrong. I was inspired during a conversation with an opera singer whose work I greatly admire. He described a particular moment, whilst singing, of feeling the audience listening to the text rather than just admiring vocal sound and the singer’s virtuosic technique. He acknowledged how an audience is too often distanced by a barrier created by vocal virtuosity which distracts from or overpowers what is being expressed. For him, what overcomes this in performance is when there is enough textual presence and interest. I wondered what ‘textual presence and interest’ actually meant and realised that here lay my challenge.

And so, when writing a libretto, I must create concise and highly rhythmic poetic lyrics that carry their own power and presence. Where the words are dynamic, bold, active, rhythmical and direct, the music can elevate rather than overwhelm them.

This requires a careful process of editing. For example, at the end of scene 2 of Solar, Icarus mourns the death of Talus who his father has murdered. When I read my first draft of the aria, I just knew that it wasn’t strong enough. I had described feelings of grief but I hadn’t been brave enough to directly capture the physical feeling of heartbreak. This meant that although the words were nicely poetic, they would certainly get lost. I immediately deleted them, closed my eyes, and took a moment to let myself really feel it.

The shock stage of grief is like a ripping feeling inside you. It is as though someone is pulling apart your organs. “Tearing” filled my head.

Little else was needed, and I started to write again. In its finished form, Icarus begins his aria with a very simple line: ‘my world splits’. The first verse then closes with that single word on repeat: ‘tearing, tearing, tearing’.

The other day I heard Howard’s music for this section. The harmony exactly captures a tortured, tearing sensation of being ripped apart. And when Icarus’s vocal line soars above it, you can hear that magical meeting of textual voice and musical voice as two powerful forces. It is this meeting that truly elevates the drama and breaks down the barrier between text and listener so that an audience might be drawn into that feeling themselves.