Act One is finished. It runs a little over an hour and seems dramaturgically coherent to me—musically, I believe, although what I have chiefly in mind here is the text. The author, David Pountney, is a master. Usually, the dramatic texts I have worked with were written by masters of prose or stage drama. This often created a dynamic of experimentation: they would offer ideas based on my suggestions and requests, as well as on their own conceptions of opera—conceptions usually not grounded in extensive experience—and I would then make changes as we went along, with very specific musical and theatrical situations, and my own particular set of preferences, in mind. I think this process produced several good, fairly unorthodox libretti. David, by contrast, knows opera inside out—as a librettist and dramaturg, and above all as a director with immense experience. The text is suffused with that experience and with a profound understanding of the genre. It is an adaptation of a novel several hundred pages long and includes all its key characters and plotlines; yet it remains spacious and airy, leaving room for the music and mindful of the fact that setting words to music greatly expands their duration. In short, there is exactly as much text as there needs to be, and it has exactly the right density. At the same time, David remains open to my suggestions and needs, shaped as they are by the particular experiences I have described. He insists on nothing, but whenever he sees a risk of straying from the overriding priorities of dramaturgical precision and coherence, he makes his case tactfully and effectively. He also reads music fluently, which allows him to spot any prosodic lapses on my part straight away. In short, I feel that the resulting libretto is more traditional in its approach to the genre than my previous ones have tended to be, while still remaining unorthodox. It certainly resonates deeply with me.

Just before the end of the act, I hit another formidable wall. One of the scenes contains an unmistakable reference to a particular genre—barbershop-quartet music—so I had to decide how closely, and in what manner, to invoke it. I chose to make the reference quite explicit, which briefly cast me into unfamiliar waters—or at least waters I had not visited in a very long time: classical harmony with, let us say, an early-twentieth-century jazz twist. I spent ten days on what amounted to a kind of harmony exercise. Old nightmares returned, but so did a thought: a composer’s craft is not—or at least need not be—a complete set of tools, ready to meet every challenge that might arise. It is more like a set of drawers into which one places tools acquired in response to particular needs—the needs of particular works. In other words, the insecurity, seemingly familiar to many artists, that comes from not possessing a complete set of skills is both unnecessary and, like most insecurities, harmful. Skills are honed in response to immediate needs, gradually forming a toolkit that grows richer and, at the same time, more individual. Trying to assemble every possible tool in advance is creative suicide. One should begin writing a real piece as soon as possible—ideally at the very outset, armed with nothing but a stick and merely dreaming of a hammer—and accept full responsibility for the inevitable failures and humiliations, until one finally manages to write that first genuine work, however awkward it may still be. And then one should immediately throw oneself into the works that follow, thinking little, if at all, about technique and workshop as abstractions.

As I write, I am reading Kamieńska. Her account of grief and conversion is astonishing and somehow close to me, as well as to the substance of the work now taking shape. I find it in Notebook, in Faces of the Book—a title that could hardly be more apt—and, less often, though still unmistakably, in the poems. A kindred spirit, if I may say so.

As I approached the end of the act, working—as tends to happen in the advanced stages—from very early morning until well into the afternoon, with only brief interruptions, I felt a need to breathe and rest. Having finished the act yesterday, today I find myself growing restless at the very thought of taking a break. So I will probably carry on in a moment. Perhaps I will just have a nap.