TT: Men at work (II)

Published: August 13, 2007, 1:00 am

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I'm still hard at work on The Letter, the musical version of Somerset Maugham's play that Paul Moravec and I are writing for Santa Fe Opera. Paul is writing the music, I the words, and I knocked off a huge chunk of the latter while I was up in Connecticut last month. In fact, I finished the first complete draft of the entire eight-scene libretto. Paul and I are both pleased with it, though we'll put it through the wringer of revision several more times before we're done. Nevertheless, I believe we've got ourselves a libretto, and it sounds like a libretto, by which I mean that it reads like an opera, not a straight play. An opera libretto resembles a play at first glance, but the differences are bigger than you might realize. To begin with, a libretto is shorter than a play, since it takes longer to sing words than to speak them. For the record, the first draft of The Letter is 8,700 words long, and I expect it will shrink still further before it reaches its final form. (By contrast,

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