Part 2: Mary Finsterer talks about beginning her new opera and how she works with librettist, Tom Wright.

Part 2 of an interview between Troy Beer & Mary Finsterer about her new opera, Antarctica.

TB: How do these ideas relate to your current project, Antarctica? How do you begin?

MF: In the first instance, I like to get a sense of the broad-brush strokes.  What are the themes behind the storyline?  What are we going to see on stage?  Antarctica is a reference point for us all in the sense that it is in our consciousness as a huge entity representing many things.  It represents a universe on earth, an endless expanse of white nothingness. It represents the end of the earth,  a place that is uninhabitable for humans.  As a place that cannot sustain life, humans can only visit.  They cannot establish a civilisation.  Because of this, the Antarctic has a strange and other-worldly aspect about it; not unlike that of the idea of afterlife.  In this sense, it awe-inspiring.  It evokes fascination and fear.  And yet here it is, an entity on earth. It’s an intriguing, mysterious place. And I guess, that’s why it is used in literature, because of the rich symbolic and metaphorical associations it conjures.  

Having established a concept, I take these ideas to Tom and we can then begin building a structure for the libretto.  This is quite an intricate process; because if you’re going to write an opera, you can’t simply put on stage a concept –  a strange place at the bottom of the world that figures in our imagination.  What we need to experience a journey of some description.  The audience is there for a certain amount of time. What are they going to experience during that time? So, the idea of storytelling becomes very important in the realisation of the opera.  Having said that, it’s not necessarily about a sequence of events that unfold in chronological order. 

What we will see on the stage are characters.  From an audience perspective, what we want to see on stage are characters that represent for us in different ways our own humanity.  So, what does that mean? What is important is to put on stage those elements that define a human life; in terms of quest, searching, longing, desire, fear, achievement, loss, failure, struggle... All of those elements combine to give a sense of experience so that we can delve deeper into our own realisation of who we are.     

We have these ideas and elements are at the heart of the opera, but what we also need is a formal structure.  On that note, I always go back to those classical structures in music and story-telling where we have an exposition, a development and finally a conclusion.  That’s not to say that everything is resolved. What is important is create a structure that will support a large framework. The structure of an opera has to have a formality so that as an entity, it has a feeling of completeness, that we have ventured on a journey that has in some way revealed something to us. 

TB: What stage is the libretto at now?

MF: Tom and I have established the framework which is the synopsis. We have been careful to allow for this framework to have maximum flexibility for thematic and character development.