Opera News

Brian Kellow - March 2004

"On The Beat"

When I look at the opera commissions that are awarded these days – A Streetcar Named Desire, Dead Man Walking, An American Tragedy, etc. – I sometimes wonder whether the American composer has forgotten that there’s a genre known as comedy. The talented JOHN MUSTO apparently was thinking along the same lines. When Wolf Trap Opera invited him to compose an opera, he insisted that it be a comedy. The result, Volpone, an “unfaithful adaptation” of the Ben Jonson work, with a libretto by MARK CAMPBELL, opens March 10 for a three-performance run at The Barns at Wolf Trap.

Why Volpone? Why not something more contemporary? “Well,” says Musto, “this piece is about greed and lust and deceit and a farcical public trial. You’ve got loads of that going on now.” There was another, more practical reason: Volpone was in the public domain. “I have had so much trouble with song texts,” says Musto, “ that I don’t ever want to set another one again, because I don’t want to deal with anyone’s publishers. They’re all a bunch of suits who don’t know anything about music. You say, ‘I want to set this to music,’ and they’re scratching their heads and saying, ‘Can you explain what you mean by that?’”

Musto stipulated that Campbell’s libretto had to be highly structured and tightly rhymed. “That tends to enhance the comedy,” he says. “In The Marriage of Figaro, even the recits are carefully rhymed. When you save the joke for the rhymed word, it sticks in your mind. It enhances the rhythm of the music and forward motion. I want it to be all champagne bubbles.”