Anna Moody 3
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.