Q & A: Composer Lee Bradshaw on His Journey of Composing Historic Arabic Opera “Zarqa Al Yamama”
By David SalazarLater this month, audiences in Riyadh will bear witness to “Zarqa Al Yamama,” “the first Grand Opera produced by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
The opera will star Dame Sarah Connolly. She is joined by Khayran Al Zahrani, Sawsan Albahiti, Reemaz Oqbi, Aleksandar Stefanowski, Amelia Wawrzon, Serena Farnocchia, Paride Cataldo, and George von Bergen. The libretto by Saleh Zamanan tells the story of the pre-Islamic heroine who could foresee events before they happened.
The opera’s music was entrusted to Lee Bradshaw, who was previously Composer-in-Residence for the Mediterranean Notes Festival, and his music has been performed by a wide range of major organizations including the Quartetto Energie Nove, the Montenegrin Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Fidelio String Quartet, and the Orchestra Svizzera Italiana, among many others.
The Melbourne-born composer spoke to OperaWire about his involvement in the opera, his musical language, and the responsibility of taking on an opera in Arabic.
OperaWire: What was the inspiration for this work? How did you become involved?
Lee Bradshaw: Outside of the story itself? It’s a composer’s dream to write opera. You imagine composing one, but you don’t even bother because it’s an impossibility to mount one without an avalanche of miracles, and an entire cohort of like-minded, risk-taking dreamers. Ivan Vukčević—my oldest friend, long time collaborator, and [someone] who has always been a champion of my music—is a risk taker, and when the prospect of producing this opera came to him through a series of impossible coincidences, I was his first phone call:
“Don’t get excited, but, would [you] consider writing an opera?”
“Of course!”
“There’s a catch…”
“Ok. What is it?”
“It’s in Arabic, and it’ll be in Saudi Arabia.”
“Ok. Do they have an opera house?”
“No.”
“What’s the story about?”
“A pre-Islamic tale about a female called Zarqa who is killed for trying to save her people.”
“I’m in. Let’s go get it.”
Now, I’m sure the conversation didn’t go exactly like that—but you get the picture! In terms of musical inspiration, it’s going to be the usual suspects for me… Beethoven, even though his only opera, “Fidelio,” is brilliantly flawed. I think, like everything he did, he just went about it his own way. He created an opera that didn’t abide by the laws of opera and said “that’s what you’re having.” I love that about him, and there’s a particular moment in “Zarqa” where I’m definitely channeling “Fidelio…” A couple [of moments,] even… Not that you might be able to tell, necessarily, but I know it’s there. I find it difficult to escape his influence; although I don’t particularly try to! Mozart’s “Figaro,” I think, is the perfect opera in terms of its form, dimensions, and fluidity. But I think I was mostly cognisant of Verdi and Puccini, for different reasons. Puccini practically invented the modern pop song, and Verdi had a tremendous grasp of dramatic storytelling with operatic forces. I wanted to somehow combine those elements with some Beethovenian punch and filter them through my own voice.
OW: The opera is based on the legend of Zarqa Al Yamama. As an Australian composer, how do manage the challenge of making this story your own, while also maintaining its cultural authenticity as a pre-Islamic legend?
LB: I suppose my perspective on identity and the modern obsession with it can be best summarised, for me, like this: I’m a composer, who happens to be Australian. My own ethnic background is a mixture of English/Irish/Welsh and Slovakian/Hungarian/Russian. One side of my family has been living in Australia since 1797, [while] my mother is first generation. [One of my best friends] is Montenegrin, and the other a Calabrian Italian. So, I’ve spent a lot of time around various Eurocentric cultures. I guess I’m what I would describe as a ‘true’ Australian—a person with a genuinely multicultural experience—and yet I imagine that’s different from what I guess to be the international, general summary of non-indigenous Australians, [who have been perceived] as ‘white colonialists.’ Having said that, I don’t reject the notion that I am Australian either. It’s an interesting concept; how an artist sees themselves versus how their work is summarised externally.
My lived-in Australian experience, insofar as its influence on my musical work, is likely that I don’t feel overwhelmingly attached to any particular ethnographic music, although I think my Eastern European heritage somehow bubbles up to the surface more than anything else. I developed my voice over the years through many and various influences—not the least of whom is Beethoven, [who was] an ethnically Flemish, German-born composer who lived in [Austrian] Vienna. I worked for years in a Jewish wedding band playing klezmer music and singing Horra. I went on to sing in hard rock bands covering material from artists like Led Zeppelin and Free; and on top of all that I’ve been a record producer for nearly 30 years, helming records in just about every genre of music you could imagine.
So, the very long answer to your question is that my being Australian and the story being Arabic I don’t think necessarily mitigate, or have any extra special bearing on the other, although perhaps they don’t not either. I did actively submerse myself in traditional Arabic music from the region to see what resonated with me, and what I discovered was that many aspects—particular intervallic relationships, suggested movement of harmony, etc.—were elements already present in my music. Perhaps I used them differently, but I wasn’t hearing anything that would turn my own musical language on its head if I chose to incorporate it. In this sense, the Arabic musical influence felt very natural to me.
OW: What are the unique challenges of composing opera in Arabic? How do you have to adapt your composition style to suit the language?
LB: The brief was a ‘western opera,’ with an influence of Arabic—notably Saudi—musical culture. I didn’t really adapt my writing style at all, other than to say that I took a very non-academic approach to the Arabic music influence while I was working on the score. At one point—very briefly—I thought I should probably do some research, but the deeper I pushed into that approach the more concerned I became about writing cerebrally, and not instinctively. It also became apparent to me that this was probably the way that would deliver an ‘orientalist’ outcome—which was absolutely not what I wanted to do at all. So influence by osmosis it was!
Handling the language was—in a practical sense—where I had to be mindful. In order to retain the inherent rhythm in the poetry, I did a notation of the entire document as a musical rhythmic dictation, so that I had something musical I could use to set the top lines with. From there I developed the rest of the score from the ‘top down,’ so to speak. How “Zarqa” was written meant that the bulk of the musical score is intrinsically linked to the vocal lines and the rhythms of the Arabic poetry; and I’m really pleased about that. It feels to me like the music has its bloodlines in the language itself.
OW: What is the musical language for the opera and what is your process for discovering how to approach this opera as a musical storyteller?
LB: The characters in “Zarqa” are essentially different archetypes of the human condition, and the story is about how these archetypes come crashing into one another, and often quite violently. It is more of a fable than a typical drama, and from the outset the entire creative team were in accord on not staging any of that violence explicitly. The challenge for me, then, was to create a narrative subtext in the music to give these characters development and relatable story arcs, as well as musically depicting the violence and the drama that we’re not seeing played out on the stage. As a result, the range of the music is probably more broad than I might normally employ in a piece of chamber music, for example. My typical musical language is a form of tonal music, I suppose, exploited for greater emotional effect with harmonic and melodic ‘distortions.’ In “Zarqa” I’m able to lean into these ‘distortions’ in one moment and then pull all the way back to complete tonal diatonicism the next. In a purely abstract work that can be dangerous ground. In “Zarqa,” however, when those tonal moments happen, the shift from ‘darkness’ to ‘light’ provides quite a contrast, and I hope proves to be a moving and effective experience for the audience.
OW: How did you choose your vocal collaborators for this project? What makes them ideal artists to create and inhabit these characters?
LB: Some kind of divine providence! We didn’t have normal auditions or a ‘cattle call,’ per se. We targeted certain individuals and worked our way into the cast we have now. One of the ways our artistic director, Ivan Vukčević, is a genius is in putting together wonderful people who happen to be wonderful musicians. I’m not lying when I say everyone involved is calling this entire production a ‘dream team,’ and it’s gratifying to feel the goodwill from everyone involved. It’s not easy work, and establishing this kind of spirit is a rare and special talent—Ivan has it, and has delivered big time.
In terms of the details, both casts are stellar, and you could switch them without batting an eyelid. What each individual brings, and the way they’re handling the material, far exceeds what I imagined or hoped for when I was composing the score. The expressive potential in the music is not only being expertly mined by the cast, but you can hear that potential being absolutely cherished. For a composer, that’s a gift.
OW: How has the opera changed or developed while rehearsing in Czechia? Will you make further changes to the score while it’s in rehearsal?
LB: No, not at all. I’m not a ‘workshopper’ or an ‘experimentalist,’ and I think that helps. The discussions have mainly centred around interpretive and dramatic options in certain scenes, and [I have been present primarily] to give some insight [into] my musical choices, and to collaborate with the singers on what they’re hoping to bring to their performances. There have been a few, small, adjustments to the orchestration here and there, and some text changes etc.—but really the score going into the production is pretty much what we’ve been working with the last 12 months or so.
OW: What do you hope audiences take away from this work and experience?
LB: Like anything I do, my main consideration and hope is that the music is something people can use. And what that means is; whether you’re in the audience, in the pit, or on the stage, that the music is something you can use to express yourself with and/or through. I like to think of my music as something with enough touchstones of familiarity to invite people in, and with enough ‘new stuff’ to keep them interested. Ultimately, it’s a layered story with a number of themes which reach into our modern life, despite the ancient setting, and I hope the music moves and connects the audience to that story.
