Pauline. A New Opera by Margaret Atwood and Tobin Stokes. City Opera presents world premiere at the York Theatre May 23 - May 31. For more information visit cityoperavancouver.com.
Composing the music for Vancouver City Opera's latest work, Pauline, landed Tobin Stokes in a bit of a competition.
"I got a phone call from City Opera Vancouver wondering if I'd like to write a piece of music to a little bit of text and so did a few other composers, from what I gather," says Stokes. "So they had a little bit of a contest going on and they had a private jury that listened to them all without knowing whose was whose and I guess I won. (It was) the first time I've ever done something like that. It was actually quite fun."
The text from which the composers had to create was written by one of Canada's most famous writers, Margaret Atwood. Stokes is humble as he speaks about Atwood on the phone from Victoria.
"It was great. She's very generous, very gracious. We had a lot of fun too," he says. "She likes to talk about sci-fithings, a lot. She has her dry wit and so many years of experience storytelling, a lot of wisdom in how to tell a story."
Stokes says he initially read the text and tried to understand where it was coming from and where it was going.
"In the libretto, the idea of the music is to help tell the story or be another element of the story," he says. "So it's important to understand the story and the characters and to really be in tune with the characters' evolution from the beginning of the story to the end and support that musically and drive it using music to show emotion or propel a scene."
Pauline is based on the life of Pauline Johnson, a Canadian poet of Mohawk and English descent. Johnson was born in 1861 in what was then Upper Canada and died in Vancouver in 1913. Her poetry portrayed the lives of Aboriginal women and children. Stokes says working with a story based on a historical icon changed the way he approached the composition.
"It's important to illustrate what she represents I think, as such a pioneer in such an artist like her," he says. "It's great that it's actually a true story, it adds a real dimension, the historical element adds a dimension, and it's been fun to research Pauline and get to know her, to get to know the challenges of what it was like to zigzag back and forth the country in trains. Going to big and small, very small communities to recite her poetry."
The opera has been in the works for more than two years, since Stokes got the initial call. He says he was handed a complete but rough version of the libretto, or text of the opera, and the collaborating began. Both Atwood and Stokes worked with the opera company, trying different things and then took it to workshop.
"After I'd written one act of it, it's a two-act opera, I was given a chance to try that with some singers and go away and make changes and come back and try out the new material," says Stokes.
They also had a workshop for act two, he says, and a bit of a run through before Christmas to see how it was all coming together.
"That's pretty normal for new opera, you get to try stuff out, and some of the material works and some of it doesn't so you rewrite, rewrite, rewrite," says Stokes.
The two-act opera includes eight singers and a seven-piece orchestra. Stokes says the rehearsals got underway a couple of weeks ago, but rehearsals for some of the workshops were more than a year ago.
"The singers have been rehearsing long before that and already know the material, they already have it memorized so by the time they get into staging rehearsals they're not using their music anymore," he says. "The tricky part is when I keep rewriting melodies and they have to relearn things as it evolved. It was a lot of work for the singers."
Stokes has composed music for a variety of genres, including film, television, theatre and opera, to name a few. He was born in North Vancouver but grew up in Powell River and studied percussion in university. While at school, he started getting ideas for choir pieces and tried his hand at composing.
"The choir in Powell River was very supportive and I would just send everything and they would try everything that I wrote," he says. "And I just fell in love with writing choir music."
Stokes was writing jazz music and improvising at the time.
"By the time I graduated from university I'd already done a television series," he says. "This television producer had found me while I was dabbling in some of the first computers that were used for music at the university, just as a side thing."
All those things came together and when he graduated as a percussionist he started playing in a symphony.
"I just thought I would be more satisfied in life if I was actually writing music instead of playing it, so I just set my goal to do that and lo and behold after many years it came to pass."
Stokes says there are hundreds of performing companies and individuals he would love to work with, including the Canadian Opera Company. He says there has been a change in opera over the years
"I've seen the big companies, these huge companies that usually do the same 30 pieces over and over, the Figaros, major Mozart and the Verdi pieces, all these famous operas. For years the big companies could just do these in rep and fill their theatres and sustain themselves that way by putting on great operas, the original the old great operas," says Stokes. "And these days because of economics and because there's so many different choices for what people can go to and see and what they can even get in their homes, that the bigger opera companies are scrambling, looking to reinvent themselves, looking for good opportunities to keep going and to keep presenting new operas."
One of the ways big opera companies are evolving is by doing chamber operas, says Stokes, using smaller venues where they can do "more interesting, more modern works."
Having an author of Atwood's prestige also helps bring a more mainstream crowd to the opera. "This opera (Pauline) was originally commissioned by the Canadian Opera Company, by the former artistic director who passed away," says Stokes, adding that it was the artistic director's dream to bring Atwood's idea to life. "I think Margaret sat on this idea and put it away, and Charles Barber at City Opera Vancouver got wind of it and called her."
It helped that Atwood knew the process of new opera, says Stokes, including how to cut and paste, as well as workshop.
"It's just been really fun."
