Guildhall questions: Stephen Plaice answers

Dramatist Stephen Plaice is one of Britain’s leading librettists, currently Writer-in-Residence and Professor of Dramatic Writing at Guildhall School, where he teaches the MA in Opera Making & Writing in association with the Royal Opera House. 

On Friday 27 September in Barbican Hall the Guildhall Symphony Orchestra & Chorus will present the world premiere of Stephen's new English translation of Rachmaninov's choral symphony The Bells. We caught up with him ahead of this performance to find out about the history of the piece, and how and why this new translation has come about.

Could you tell us about Edgar Allan Poe’s original poem The Bells?

Poe wrote The Bells in 1848. He submitted it three times to the same periodical Sartain's Union Magazine before it was finally accepted. He was paid a fee of fifteen dollars. However, the poem was not published until after the author's death, in the November 1849 issue. It was reprinted on the front page of The New York Tribune on October 20, 1849 which declared it to be 'Poe's Last Poem'.

Rachmaninov originally set his music to the Russian adaption of the work by prolific Russian symbolist poet and translator Konstantin Balmont. Do we have any information about why he chose this text?

Rachmaninov discusses the text in a letter to Marietta Shaginyan in 1913 announcing the completion of the work. He told Marietta that he was ‘in love with Balmont’s translation of Edgar Poe’s text’. The Bells, he explained, was about the road, the wedding, the alarm bell, and death. The translation, he claimed, had been sent to him in a letter, but he does not name the sender. It was only discovered after the composer's death that it had been sent to him by Maria Danilova, a young cello student at the Moscow Conservatory.

Why was it decided to create a new translation for this Guildhall School performance, rather than using existing texts?

It was Dominic Wheeler, the School's Head of Opera, who suggested it to me. After a hundred years, he felt the English needed refreshing.  I saw in this the opportunity of returning it much closer to Poe's original. Rachmaninov worked from the Balmont's adaptation; and Fanny Copeland, who produced the existing English translation, seems to have worked largely from Balmont's version, so a lot of the ideas of Poe's poem have been lost in translation.

What are your thoughts on Fanny Copeland's English translation which accompanied the 1920 publication of the score?

Fanny Copeland's translation has a poetic politeness very much of its time. Crucially, it lacks the visceral imagery of Poe's original, which contains a kind of life-cycle, moving in its four movements between a youthful sleigh-ride, to a wedding, to a calamity, and finally to a funeral presided over in the belfry by the King of the Ghouls, whom Fanny rather unmemorably calls ‘a sombre fiend’. A lot of  Poe's original poem describes 'sound', a real gift for a composer, and Fanny has rather overlooked its carefully arranged assonance. The Bells is the most onomatopoeic of Poe’s works, and I've tried to reproduce that.

What are your aims for this new translation?

What I have attempted to do is to restore as much of the original poem as possible, while keeping it strictly within the syllabic and rhythmic pattern of Rachmaninov's composition. Where I have made additions and subtractions to the original poem, I've done so out of my own instincts as a librettist. 

This version is intended not only as a serviceable English version for choirs, but also as the redressing of a missed opportunity - that of a great composer setting a text by a major writer. Had Rachmaninov set Poe's original, and not a translation, I like to think this would have been somewhere close to the result. 

Practically, how did you go about re-setting the piece with the new text?

Marcia Bellamy, my wife, arranged the new English version of the text. It was a painstaking process for both of us, sitting side by side, mapping Poe's poem as far as possible onto the existing syllables in the score. It was like completing a musical jigsaw puzzle.

What are the main differences between writing for a choral symphony as opposed to, for example, an opera?

The main difference is that you have to keep a sense of drama in the text itself. In opera, the individual characters provide that; the drama comes from the on-stage interaction between them. In oratorio, you may still have characters, but they are static. The Bells is a choral symphony. It's purely descriptive and no individual characters sing roles. So the words and the music have to work in tandem to paint the picture in the audience's mind. Fortunately, Poe's poem is intensely visual, and of course, Rachmaninov has written very illustrative music, so we are quickly able to locate ourselves in each section.

What are you most looking forward to about hearing your work performed for the first time on 27 September?

I'm excited to see how clearly the poem is now delivered within the piece. The text has always been rather murky (even, dare I say it, in the Russian). But now I hope the text will add an extra dimension of brilliance to the music, which, of course, is already wonderful, as one would expect from Rachmaninov. I hope it will be a more visual experience in the audience's mind.

As a leader of Guildhall’s MA in Opera Making and Writing, delivered in association with the Royal Opera House, what are your top tips for budding librettists?

Libretto is a genre of literature unto itself. Don't imagine you are writing a poem or a play to be set to music. Imagine the dramatic structure, the characters and the staging first and don't let your beautiful words just run away with you. It's surprising how little text you need, and it must all serve the dynamic of the opera. It's an acquired skill, one you can best acquire on the Operamakers MA!

You have been Writer in Residence at Guildhall since 2014. What have been some of your highlights of this role so far?

So many. I have to say the Guildhall production of The Tale of Januarie, which I wrote with Julian Philips, Head of Composition, was a real highlight. It was a cross-departmental project involving so many aspects of the School, and the excitement around it was tangible. But I have also hugely enjoyed the end of year chamber operas our students have produced - it is always a privilege to be able to follow them from page to stage. The annual Voiceworks projects, a collaboration between our writers, the Vocal Department and MMus composers, culminating in a public performance at Wigmore Hall, have also been terrific. What is perhaps most gratifying is to see the number of new operas the Operamakers alumni are mounting in the UK and in the United States. Over the last five years we have genuinely created a school of operamaking at the Guildhall.

The Guildhall Symphony Orchestra & Chorus will perform The Bells in a concert which also includes jazz music by Gershwin and Duke Ellington at Barbican Hall at 7.30pm on Friday 27 September 2019. Tickets (£10–£15) are available from Barbican Box Office.