Libettist, Simon Pettifar chose one of Guy de Maupassant's works......

I was sitting in the pub reading Guy de Maupassant's journal of his days at sea, Sur l'eau, first published in 1888, in the English translation of Marlo Johnston which was published as Afloat by Peter Owen in 1995. I'd had the book on my shelves for twenty years or more, had often looked forward to reading it "one day", and that day had finally come. 

The celebrated author of such masterpieces of short fiction as "The Necklace" and "Boule de Suif" was an inveterate rower and sailor - by the age of fourteen he was already saving up for his first boat and during his life he came to own, or part-own, a good number - rowing boats, sailing dinghies, big yachts; he always had a boat of some sort, and often several. Sur l'eau purports to be a more-or-less daily diary of a single voyage along the French Mediterranean coast undertaken in 1887 in Maupassant's yacht Bel-Ami with it's skipper Bernard and first mate Raymond; in fact Maupassant undertook three short voyages in the spring of that year and his text is a carefully constructed piece of work most of which is new but which also incorporates and draws on episodes from many earlier voyages from the 1880s as well as previously written newspaper articles and stories. This artifice, however, is perhaps what enabled Maupassant to speak so honestly; writing to his publisher concerning the manuscript he stressed that it was "something I want to do very carefully, because it is full of very intimate thoughts". 

Maupassant's yacht Bel-Ami

The history of the old Hussar and his wife occupies a mere few pages in Maupassant's account. He first hears their story from a friend, a certain "Count X" who, a year or two earlier, had come across the couple's necessarily hidden but apparently idyllic life; intrigued, Maupassant seeks them out himself the following year and apparently converses at some length with the wife; of the husband he writes: "He had filled her existence with happiness from one end to the other. She could not have been happier." Then - during the voyage of which Sur l'eau purports to be an account - he goes ashore and once more seeks out the farm and its elderly mistress, "going to see her again with the astonishment and vague contempt that I could feel for her within me"; this time learning the conclusion to the tale. 

Over the course of its mere two or three pages the story first charmed, then intrigued and finally appalled me. I sat stunned, like one who had suffered a hammer blow to the heart. "Something has got to be done with this!" was the swift and inevitable conclusion. I felt I had stumbled upon a gem and was amazed that nobody had ever used it - as far as I knew - as the basis for a longer work. The essential vision of the old couple and the life they had spent in contented devotion to one another was so entrancing, the issues it raised were so perplexing, not to say troubling, and the conclusion was so distressing and so thought-provoking that the story begged to be teased out in all its subtle and challenging implications. 

"But what is it?" I asked myself. A short story? No. A play? No. A film? No. 

An opera.

What?

An opera. Yes, it's an opera.

I didn't know anything about opera. I've probably only seen about a dozen in my life; and listened, casually and ill-informedly, to twice that number at most. And I certainly didn't know anything about how to write a libretto. 

The wonderful thing about starting a piece of work in a form you know absolutely nothing about is that you don't know what you "can't", or are "not allowed", to do; so you just do what you want - or what the material seems to want. And, through bits of research and responding to your own intuition, in this case concerning what composers or pieces of music it might be helpful to listen to and what libretti might be worth looking at, you learn a lot very quickly, which is extremely enjoyable and lends a great sense of newness to the venture.

So I entered a world which was incredibly fresh and new to me, and imaginatively incredibly potent, and I found that Maupassant's text contained other characters and episodes, apparently unrelated, which yet were also extraordinarily vivid and could be used to reflect upon various aspects of the main story. 

Around this time there came my way, completely out of the blue, a significant sum of money; I decided to stop working one of my days in the second-hand and antiquarian bookshop which occupied me four days per week and make my newly-free Mondays my writing day.

The evening before that first free Monday I re-read the source material and the following morning, first thing, I sat at my desk and began to write.

The lines came quickly and easily. I was surprised, and I was enjoying myself. After an hour or so I left off the writing, made a few notes about possible structure and characters, listened to (probably) some Debussy, or Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream, or one of Britten's operas - I was just following hunches as to what would feed my sense of the world I had begun, imaginatively, to inhabit - and turned off the computer.

The following Monday I looked at what I had written the previous week. I was surprised to find that I still quite liked it. I didn't particularly care whether it was any "good" or not but I quite liked it. 

I carried on where I had left off and the lines continued to come quickly and easily. 

This was perplexing but enjoyable. I thought I might as well continue putting the lines down for as long as they kept coming. 

To my very considerable surprise they kept coming, more or less, Monday by Monday, until the end. 

So I had a libretto, sort of, for a full-length (likely about three-and-a-half hours, I gather; and of course I'd envisaged a full orchestra!) and had had a great deal of fun, and the imaginative world this work had summoned up for me and which I had spent so much time inhabiting remained something utterly magical for me. 

But I knew next to nothing about the world of classical music, contemporary or otherwise, and had no contacts in that area; I put out a few informal feelers but nothing led very far. I put the typescript aside and life moved on. 

One day I mentioned the libretto to my acquaintance Lucy Green; she said she had a friend who was a composer, should she ask her friend if she would be willing to read the libretto? Why not, I thought. 

Janet read it; I rather like the fact that to this day she has never said much about it. Instead she just began composing bits of music for one or two scenes . . . 

After we'd met and chatted about it all - would I consider a much-abbreviated version, for starters at least? Of course I would - Janet sent to me a very beautiful sort of book she had made, which had she said started out as a sort of "mood board" created in response to the libretto. It is something I treasure. Somehow it represents perfectly that world I lived, slept and dreamed in while writing. I knew then that I just wanted Janet to go ahead and do her thing, whatever that might be, without any constraints from me. Since then she has been an absolute dynamo of effective activity, much of which has extended far beyond the normal role of composer, and I am profoundly grateful for her commitment to this - for me - quite extraordinary project.

Of course, once the opera is performed everyone will forget the libretto. That is the normal order of things and I don’t mind in the least. I came to the conclusion while writing that the only purpose of a libretto is to prompt, hopefully to inspire, the composer; and of course to give the singers something to sing which, again hopefully, they find emotionally meaningful.

So far I’ve enjoyed enormously everything The Hidden Lovers has caused. It’s hugely exciting now to simply let it go and discover in due course what composer, cast, director, designer and musicians will make from it.

Simon Pettifar.