Letting Narrative Take The Lead
As part of this season’s Experiments in Opera program, I was commissioned to write a new short opera based on ‘The Wallet,’ a short story by the author Andrew McCuaig. Jason Cady, Matthew Welch and I came up with this project in conversation with the artistic planning team at Symphony Space. It was a great opportunity to engage with the writers and thinkers that make up the Symphony Space community. We had been wanting to do a project with short stories for a while, but as I got into the writing phase of the work, I realized that we had bitten off a project with lots of implications for my own compositional approach and style. Struck with the realization that I was writing in new ways, I decided to explore more closely what exactly was happening as I adapted ‘The Wallet’ for the stage.
