After having found a singer to sing with you and a pianist the real work could finally start. I asked myself: "How do you put together a singing programme you can learn quite quickly, but still works for a theatre, which story is not written yet?"
First, I decided to put the words for the theatre to paper. A first draft quite close to the original sketch, but in another language was born.
Secondly, the musical program hat to be chosen as soon as possible, since pianist and singers had to be able to learn it in time – next to other projects they were busy with.
For this I decided to stay close to the baritone’s repertoire. There were enough roles that complimented mine, so I could keep my workload a bit smaller as well. The roles I finally chose were however not all (or not completely) on my repertoire yet.
Thirdly, there was the subject of language I had to decide on. Would it be good to have three or four different languages in a play? And how could I make sure the “text” would be seen, once it became a recitativo? Since I decided to stick to German in the play itself – that’s the most spoken and best-known language of the region, I wanted to make sure the arias and duets were as clear as possible. So, I chose Italian operas to compliment the theatre (also, because most people understand quite a bit of Italian here, many people believe Italian to be the main opera language and quite a few of my favourite operas of the baritone’s repertoire are in Italian). Masetto and Zerlina from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Figaro and Rosina from Rossini’s Barbiere, Conte and Susanna from Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro and Germont and Violetta from Verdi’s Traviata were where my eyes fell on.
By now a second and third draft of the theatre already existed. Somehow it left the words of the original sketch more and more and became shorter and shorter (at least in words).
However, work became more difficult. How could I choose scenes, arias or duets from these operas and these characters to make the ideas of my theatre clear?
This is how I felt:
