Librettists: Join Me in the FWO Green Room!

I’m so glad that Fort Worth Opera’s Frontiers new works development program has returned, COVID be golldarned. As I have detailed earlier, I applied to Frontiers for several years to no avail until 2018, when Companionship was finally accepted for a piano/vocal workshop of scenes. This opportunity led immediately to the world premiere production of Companionship by FWO last year. And now, in just a few weeks, Frontiers is back in a virtual format, focusing on librettists’ work this time; I’m proud to say I’ll be on the second of the two evenings’ panels offering feedback to the chosen writers.

If you’re peering in from outside the opera practitioners’ fishbowl, you may not be aware that training and development opportunities solely geared toward opera librettists have historically been few and far between, nowhere near the amount available to composers. Opera is theatre, plain and simple. (Wait, it’s actually neither plain nor simple, but you know what I mean.) Without the underpinnings of a strong story and theatrical experience (notice I didn’t say linear narrative—if it wants to survive as an art form, opera must remain a big tent!), what you have is a concert. Our nation’s constant binge-streaming video during this pandemic only proves that we are all hungry for a satisfying story, no matter the medium. Thank goodness the landscape for writers is changing, especially because, when an opera doesn’t “succeed” by whatever extremely subjective metrics exist, people are quick to blame the libretto first.

So let’s break this weird cycle and get some fantastic operatic stories one step closer to the spotlight! And if you’re an opera enthusiast who doesn’t happen to be a writer, you can still tune into the workshops and see how the theatrical sausage gets made—audience response is every bit as important as insider commentary. Either way, I’ll see you in quasi-real time in October!

Left: The faces of this year’s FWO Frontiers panel. Right: I wish I knew the origin of the Post-It on the right (an Internet find), but if you can’t attend, let’s face it—this is really all the writing advice any librettist needs!