I spent an hour with Tim Dean, head of Opera at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I wanted to know more about the relationship between lyrics and music, and to get a better understanding of exposition: how much of a story to explain in the music and how much to show by other means.
Tim talked about the role of Recitative in opera, a kind of spoken-song which in a sense performs the role of a narrative, taking the audience through important elements of a story so that the songs themselves don't need to do too much narrative work.
It made me consider how the role of a narrator might take a lot of the pressure away from this musical in terms of effectively and simply staging it: we could, for example, treat it almost as a radio play, carrying whole segments of story with that narrative. A lot of musicals do - either with a real Narrator (Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat) or conversations between characters (a kind of recitative) to inform us of the story.
I asked Tim about the relationship between words and music in opera. We talked about the relationship between composers and their librettists - Mozart and his librettists and Verdi with his most renowned librettists Piave. Understanding the theatre of a piece was of crucial importance to Verdi - and to this end he was demanding of his Librettists. It made me think of my working relationship with my main collaborator Alastair and how understanding the drama of each song/scene was crucial to how we were going to approach it.
Tim also discussed how characters could undertake an emotional journey even within the timeline of a song - again something I hadn't thought of before and looked to explore more in songs like There he lies and Oh how we loved, where Burns and Nancy each find themselves at a moment of transition and opportunity.
Here's Tim talking about how the differences between Operas and musical may not be as big as we think.
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