Bedroom Community

Read Nico Muhly’s own words on the opera he is creating for The Metropolitan Opera / English National Opera (ENO) with libretto by Craig Lucas:

The chatroom is the masked ball of the 21st century.  There, the princess can be the peasant bar-wench, and the 60-year old man can be the 15 year-old girl he should have been 45 years ago.

The opera I've written with Craig is a love story, a murder ballad, and a proper mystery.

My adult life is grafted to the development of the internet.  When I was 14, in 1995, we got the internet in our house.  From that time, I've maintained friendships that have been exclusively online.  I think this is explicitly true for people of my generation, but also secretly true for older generations.

A love-story based on texts whose authors nobody can see is the most exciting love story I can think of.  It's an epistolary novel where everybody is lying about who they are.

An opera that takes place primarily online suggests immediately a synthesized orchestra; I resisted this.  The orchestration for this project is entirely acoustic.  In Britten's A Death in Venice, the world of forbidden sexuality is marked with a highly stylized gamelan music; I have stolen this idea and my opera is permeated with heavily manipulated Balinese ostinati which  symbolize the look-but-don't-touch online universe of lies and seduction.  I worship at the altar of operas with synthesizers; I think Nixon in China is a high water-mark of Western Civilization and if people say anything bad about Satyagraha they have to fight me.  Adams, Glass, and Reich created a world where the synthesized is incorporated into the acoustic; I was interested, in this piece, in forcing myself to conceive of the soundworld entirely acoustically.  

One of the things that so immediately attracted me to this case is the fact that the younger boy "composed" a very complicated piece of drama: many different personæ who, through content, grammar, diction, and orthography, manipulate their audience into submission.  The eventual fate of this composer is a knife to the heart in the parking lot of a shopping center — is there a story more tragic?  

I am as infatuated with online personalities as I am with people I have met in the flesh.  I am as angry with online personalities as I am with people I have met in the flesh.  

Craig Lucas's libretto is wonderfully settable.  I got the first draft as a PDF and within twenty minutes of reading it, I knew how the opera needed to sound.  

I made a decision early on in this process to have invented internet characters have as much personality (if not more) than real people.  How many of us have relationships with people online that are more nuanced, complicated, and emotionally involved than the people we see everyday?

It's all about an opera that is relevant to the social structures that govern us.  I spoke to four people on the phone today, but sent 150 emails from my computer, 62 from my phone, and an uncountable number of texts.  

My first experiences using the internet were ones that very explicitly and deliberately resisted (and of course, articulated) my upbringing: I searched for anything that would horrify my parents who are bohemian-bourgeois artists and academics.  The characters in this opera are engaged in similar pursuits: they are crossing class, race, and geographical lines to invent a life for themselves in a virtual space.  

 Online I am invincible; online I am with my friends in New York as opposed to in an efficiency apartment in East London, online I am with my grandmother in Heaven eating her roast capon, online I have access to all the music I want to listen to, online nobody notices what I am wearing, online I can simultaneously research King George VI and a proper recipe for a za'atar mixture.  Online I am chatting with a high church vicar as well as an homosexual shopkeep in New Haven; online I can research an Icelandic noun before I try to decline it haphazardly.