Fergus Johnston

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August 2008: Earl of Kildare

John McK wants a blog about this opera I'm writing. It's strange starting Blog about a project when you're in the middle of it. Things are in a confused state, and it's hard to know where to begin.

Some background first:

The Earl of Kildare has been an idea in my head for about twenty years. I asked Celia de Fréine to write me a libretto in the late 1980's, and she was much quicker than I in completing her end. It has taken me the interim period to create the mental, and physical space to take on such a project. Each time I started, some other paying project would interrupt the work, and the Earl would get shelved. My late professor, Dr. Brian Boydell, when I mentioned the project to him some time in the early 1990's, responded that I was very brave to take on an opera without being paid for it. This has proved to be a wise observation, except I would use the word foolhardy. Financial backing is everything, and even with a cnuas from the Arts Council, it wasn't until I was able to submit the project as a Doctoral Dissertation to National University of Ireland Maynooth with the subsidy of a John and Pat Hume scholarship that I was able to get away from trying to make a living and really get my teeth into the work.

SO what's the big deal, you ask. Loads of people have written operas before. Why is this one so hard?

It's just that I've arranged the musical structure in such a way that each character of any importance, or group of characters, in some cases, has its own tempo; Thomas moves at mm 72, Frances, his wife, a flighty little thing, moves at 144 (which the quick among you will spot is 2X72), Lord Leonard Gray strides along at mm120, while Skeffington hobbles along at mm60 (same relationship between those 2 as between Thomas and Frances 2:1 ratio, but with different tempi). But when Christopher Paris, Thomas' foster brother, pops into the scene at mm84, things get a bit complicated, because having him and Thomas in the same room means having musical pulses with a ratio of 6:7 being notated at the same time. My problem is, do I notate this music at mm84, or at mm72 or do I find a different tempo and notate them both in that? And what if O'Brien, the Irish Chieftain, is there as well? I have now three different tempi, 48, 72, and 84 in a ratio of 4:6:7. 4:6 is easy, a child can tap it out, but that 7 really throws in the dissonance in the metric flow (which is exactly what I wanted it to do, as Christopher Paris is the Judas who betrays Thomas in the end, so the tension in their relationship is translated into the tension between the tempi as they pound and grind against eachother).

These are the main issues which have held me up all this time. Act 1 is complete, act 2 virtually so, and Act 3 in progress. I now have the possibility of a workshop production, thanks to a serendipitous meeting on Grafton Street with Living Opera's John McKeown. Opera Ireland are on board also, giving marketing and management advice to the new company that John has formed. Of course the production possibility means that a new dynamic has been established, with changes being suggested which involve working with Celia and John in rewriting certain sections. I'm waiting for these new additions to the libretto from Celia as I write. She has been incredibly patient. I think she'd given up on the thing ever seeing the light of day.