1990
1990 134 27 january 1990 George, dear friend, [ … ] I am faced with the decision-to-be-made of embarking on writing a new 3-act opera. But let me backtrack a little. I don’t know if I told you of the theme of this opera. In any case I would prefer not to get into this since I need to build up an inner pressure in this respect. But I can and wish to tell you about some side aspects. I feel that I have a very interesting theme. After having written dramatic works about a Catholic woman (La Tourangelle), a Protestant/Puritan male (Winthrop) I was looking for a Jewish protagonist with whom I could identify. He (it turned out to be a ‘he’) had to have a kind of secular Jewishness which I know about from the inside (that is, my inside). This man also is a scientist, who made a great impact on society through his professional accomplishments. He is also a tragic figure, having been tossed down from some heights under unsavory circumstances which were characteristic of the terror of that time of history. The man has a strong mythical quality about him, which I should bring out in an eventual work.1 Now where am I with all this? First as to substance. During a total of ca. 6 month-long on-again, off-again work on it, involving a modest amount of ‘primary’ research of sources (archival, personal acquaintances, relatives still around) and a sizeable amount of secondary material (books, articles, papers, etc.) I was at a point ca. the middle of November to face the question: what’s next with the libretto? No new data was on the horizon. Am I to start writing the libretto with whatever I had? While knowing that what I had, then, did not allow me to get really close to the protagonist. What I felt was a kind| 237 of hesitation brought about by a double barrier: (1) I must be historically accurate, (2) I am reluctant to invent the missing material. This added up to quite a bind. I felt inwardly near immobile. So much so that one day in a burst of will I cut the Gordian Knot and started putting words on paper in two manner[s]: (1) synthesizing situations with the historical documentary stuff I had then, and by (2) writing fantasy texts: isolated words, word-pairs, lines, rhymes, etc. that came to mind as I pretended to hear my protagonists uttering. Within ca. 3–5 weeks I had a long text (based on the plan of an earlier outline of the plot) which was much too long, wordy, so much so that I called it a pre-libretto. I persuaded myself that this pre-libretto contains the libretto itself. I only have to pare it down, polish it, etc. Well, it didn’t quite go this way. I did manage to reduce it and arrive at something which I called libretto (version 1). After having typed it out, the thing talked back to me as a surfeit of dialogues , interspersed by much too few introspective (aria, arioso) passages . Not good yet, although ‘on the way,’ I thought. At that point I felt I must demolish, consciously, my two barriers. I had to get away from the illusion of historical accuracy, and develop, instead, dramatically tight dialogues that will not do insult/injury to the essence of a truth, but would present this very truth in a garb which befits the medium. (After all, I wasn’t writing a treatise!) The other barrier (shying away from generating intimately, candidly, introspective texts) was more difficult to kick out of the way completely. But after a few tries, one day the gates were swept away by a stream of poetry, the kind of which I never wrote; a kind (or rather kinds) which sounded authentic/plausible/believable coming from the mouths of complex characters. In short order, my inhibitions were lifted and soon enough I had over a dozen aria texts and ca. 10–12 arioso texts and some for lyrical duets. All this together came as Version 2. Versions 3 & 4 are the results of polishing/balancing work & making the dialogues colloquial instead of pedantically correct. Presently, a person is putting all this into a word-processor for subsequent stages of polishing. But I now feel I have an exciting and self-stimulating text, that says exactly what I set out to find in the...
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