It’s a challenge to take any book onto the stage: On stage, action is the priority over the long narrative eddies, which can be one of the great joys of curling up with a book. And novelist Salman Rushdie’s prose is especially dense and meandering, to put it mildly.
Given that, Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ commission of an opera of Rushdie’s 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown seems especially audacious.
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So this Saturday, Opera Theatre general director Timothy O’Leary, San Francisco-based project composer Jack Perla, and Rushdie himself will be on hand for a conversation at The Sheldon Concert Hall to explain the hows and whys of the piece, which premieres here in June. (Tickets to this weekend’s conversation are free, but you must reserve a space.)
The story (briefly and without spoilers) is about a lost idyll and a ruined love, followed by revenge. A small tale of a few characters illustrates much larger points about the state of the world.
Adaptation of any story into an opera first depends on the words, ahead of the music, Perla told SLM. The words determine the structure, timing, and pace of the work. “With a book, you can pick it up and put it down,” he says. “This is an art form where people are in their seats. Forward motion is key.”
Perla is full of praise for librettist Rajiv Joseph, calling him an ideal collaborator. “He’s one of those writers who was just born to write for the theater,” Perla says. “His work is so theatrical. A great opera libretto has very few adjectives and adverbs. The music adds those parts of speech.”
Perla called Joseph’s libretto compressed, distilling Rushdie’s florid prose into something spare and lean.“He repackages the beauty. Rajiv has his own kind of poetry,” says Perla. “It’s so deeply powerful. I was finding myself pestering him, ‘Can you add some more adjectives?’ He calmly held his ground. I think he’s able to get inside of his language, finding the emotional core with uncluttered language.”
After Joseph refined Rushdie’s prose for the stage, it fell to Perla to set the tale to music. The tale’s origins are in a Kashmiri village, which provided splendid source material. “That was a composer’s blessing, to have that music to dip into,” he says. “I’ve used some Kashmiri folk music. In the wedding scene, I used a very popular song that is a wedding song. It becomes a motif.”
Perla also made use of raga, a classical Indian form that prioritizes conveying mood. “It is used rather faithfully to the extent that a raga situated within an opera is faithful,” he said. Much consideration went into dovetailing specific ragas with the moods at play in the text.
Reena Hajat Carroll, executive director of the Diversity Awareness Partnership, will moderate Saturday’s discussion at The Sheldon Concert Hall, from 1 to 2:30 p.m. Click here to reserve your space.
