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THE ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
THE words came before the music.
Before Stephen Paulus wrote a single note for his new opera, "The Woman of Otowi Crossing," he had Joan Vail Thorne's words before him on his grand piano.
Thursday, Opera Theatre of St. Louis will present the world premiere of the Paulus opera.
The crossing in the title is over the Rio Grande, between the Native American pueblo of San Ildefonso and Los Alamos, N.M., where scientists developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s. July 16 is the 50th anniversary of explosion of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexican desert.
In the four years the pair have worked creating the opera, they had fewer than 20 face-to-face-over-piano meetings.
However, Thorne figuratively hung over his piano by fax. From her Revolutionary-era Bucks County, Pa., farm house she'd send a text for an aria to his St. Paul neo-Tudor 1920s house. He'd place her words on the piano's music stand and write notes to fit the moods they expressed in telling the story.
If Paulus needed changes made, he'd fax Thorne.
"I'd say one word had seven syllables but I need just three syllables," Paulus said. She'd go to her notebook-size word processor and come up with a word that fit the music. "Sometimes in a couple of hours she'd fax me back a new word or a choice of three-syllables words."
So faxes would swoosh back and forth as he needed more words to make his final quartet a quintet. Or when he'd nip out music and matched lyrics, he'd ask her to tuck the idea behind the discarded lyrics somewhere else in the story line.
New operas can be sticky business. Many confirmed opera lovers want to like new operas: They strain to like them. Opera should tell the stories of our times as well as present passionately loved works such as "Don Giovanni," they say.
But new operas are rare. The Metropolitan Opera in New York has done one in the past quarter of a century - "The Ghost of Versailles." It was directed by Opera Theatre's artistic director Colin Graham.
In its 20 seasons, Opera Theatre has become a Mecca for new work. It has presented eight mainstage world premieres,...