I first read the poems of George Elliott Clarke in 1990, while searching for material suitable for song lyrics. His words seemed to leap off the page, as if possessed: alive, argumentative, by turns violent and blissful, never at rest. So I wrote to him blindly, sending a cassette of my music, proposing that we collaborate on an opera; his reply was “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Then what? Neither of us knew anything about writing an opera. We cast about for ideas, settling after a few false starts on the story of the Cenci family. It goes like this: in Rome, ca. 1600, Francesco Cenci, the Pope’s treasurer, is rich, powerful, and very bitter. Not wishing his children to inherit his wealth, he has two sons murdered, and rapes two daughters to reduce their dowries. The first daughter escapes and marries; he imprisons the second, Beatrice, to prevent her from doing the same. She hires assassins who kill her father, but the job is bungled. Confessions are extracted under brutal torture; Beatrice, her stepmother Lustra, and another brother are executed on orders of the Pope (who then inherits their fortune, the Cenci family now being defunct). Murder, incest, torture, execution--we had found our opera. But George then transposed the action to early 19th-century Nova Scotia, giving the classic tragedy new dimensions of racism, slavery, and liberation. Over the next five years, he wrote draft after draft of the story, drafts which I would then edit to suit my musical and dramatic instincts. These edited versions evolved into the libretto of Beatrice Chancy, while the longer drafts grew into a dramatic poem of the same name, recently published by Polestar Press. During this time, we had two sojourns at The Banff Centre’s Composer-Librettist Workshop, where Music Director John Hess kept an interested eye on our progress. He later founded The Queen of Puddings Music Theatre Company in Toronto, with Dáirine Ní Mheadhra; they workshopped the First Act in June 1996, and the first draft of the entire piece in December 1997. These workshops were crucial to the opera’s birth; we could immediately hear what worked, and what didn’t. Most important, it was encouraging to hear at last the fruit of our years of imaginative labour. The Queen of Puddings were also encouraged, and premiered the opera in June 1998 at The Music Gallery in Toronto.

- James Rolfe, composer, from JamesRolfe.ca

In composing this opera, I have tried to use the simplest possible means of expression, to let the characters tell their own stories, and to let George’s eloquent words be heard. Simple, direct vocal lines also keep the singers closer to the viscerality of their art. Body and soul are intimately bound together in opera: the singers bathe the audience with their sweat and blood, their voices and their souls. Perhaps that’s why people either love or loathe opera, without much middle ground. My favourite dramatists (I think of Shakespeare and Mozart) give life to complex and utterly alive characters, with all the contradictions, joys, pain, and conflicts that we humans live through. They know that the answers are never revealed to us, that the decisions we struggle to make are as likely to be bad ones as good. What seemed right to Canadians in 1801- slavery, the superiority of Europeans over Africans and native peoples, of men over women- now seems arrogant and oppressive. But 200 years from now, how will we be judged? One of the “mottoes” George chose for the opera seems more true now than in 1991, when it was penned by Hardial Bains: “The old enslavement was to nature, and the new one is of one individual to another, beginning with chattel slavery and proceeding to the modern kind, where enslavement has assumed the most grotesque form--not only wage-slavery, but also bondage to the financial institutions which, in the present period, hold the entire world in their grasp.”

- James Rolfe, composer, from JamesRolfe.ca