An Opera by Post

In 1896, composer Elias Venn accepted a commission for an opera whose librettist, Mara Sol, lived three countries away and refused to travel. Their correspondence soon became frenetic: packets crossed at such speed that each artist sometimes answered a scene the other had already replaced. The impresario, hoping for conviviality around a shared supper table, repeatedly proposed a meeting and received two courteous refusals. In public, he remained impassive when reporters mocked the strange partnership; in private, his letters reveal mounting alarm.

Sol's verses arrived first as tight rhythmic blocks, but Venn's mellifluous settings made even a jailer's warning flow sweetly across the orchestra. He seemed to possess an innate instinct for matching vowels to pitch, a gift his teachers had noticed before he received formal training. Because Sol considered every draft malleable, she welcomed large revisions and sometimes rewrote an entire exchange after one musical suggestion. Yet distance also magnified ambiguity; a lightly penciled question could resemble a command after weeks in transit.

Their sharpest disagreement concerned the heroine's final aria, which Venn expanded into a brilliant display while Sol wanted restraint. Sol's trenchant reply cut through several pages of theory: applause, she argued, would cheapen a character who had just renounced fame. Her carping marginal notes also attacked tiny matters of punctuation and capitalization, irritating Venn more than her central objection did. The criticism could discomfit him; after reading it, he postponed rehearsal and asked an assistant whether his judgment had become ridiculous. Still, he offered no perfunctory concession merely to end the quarrel; instead, he removed the cadenza and rebuilt the aria.

Sol proved recalcitrant on one point, refusing every request to let the heroine marry in the final scene. Venn, usually patient, became irascible under pressure; a violinist's harmless question provoked a shouted answer and an abruptly canceled rehearsal. Then a spurious newspaper report announced that the collaborators had met secretly in Paris, complete with an invented account of their conversation. Both artists were nonplussed by the fabrication, and their initial replies wandered between disbelief and uncertain jokes before they issued a firm denial.

When the opera finally premiered, its first act seemed insipid to several critics, who found the melodies pale and the drama lifeless. By the final curtain, however, the audience was cheering, and even an inveterate opponent who had condemned new operas for decades admitted the prison aria moved him. A few musicians tried to ostracize Sol from theatrical circles for challenging the celebrated composer, but Venn publicly credited her with the work's strongest choices. Their letters continued for twelve years, although they never occupied the same room, proving artistic intimacy can arise without physical acquaintance.