TT: Gentlemen, start your engines

Paul Moravec and I are now at work on our second opera–but don’t call it that!
The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, which gets underway on April 1, 2011, is a citywide venture that will encompass the premieres of thirty-one works intended to capture “the inventive, no-holds-barred spirit of Paris: 1910-1920, the inspiration and theme of the 25-day festival.” Center City Opera Theater is contributing to the festivities with a program that will pair Renard, a rarely produced one-act chamber opera composed in 1916 by Igor Stravinsky, with a new work written for the same performing forces as Renard, four male singers (two tenors, a baritone, and a bass-baritone) and a small instrumental ensemble.
Andrew Kurtz, who runs Center City Opera, invited Paul and me to write a companion piece to Renard. I came up with the idea of a backstage farce about the creation of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The title is Danse Russe. The four characters, whose real-life models are pictured above, are:
• Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, who commissioned The Rite of Spring
• Vaslav Nijinsky, Diaghilev’s lover and star dancer, who choreographed the ballet
• Pierre Monteux, who conducted the first performance
• Stravinsky himself
Unlike The Letter, our previous collaboration, Danse Russe is a knockabout comedy with spoken dialogue. We’re calling it a “vaudeville,” and we expect it to play more like a musical than an opera. I finished the first draft of the libretto three weeks ago, and Paul started writing the music last week.
We open in Philadelphia on April 15–and yes, I’ll be blogging with steadily increasing frequency about the making of Danse Russe between now and then.
More as it happens.