Canada’s opera wordsmith
One of your jobs as a librettist is to inspire a composer to write really awesome music,” says Royce Vavrek, the Canadian librettist and playwright currently making extraordinary waves in today’s opera scene. “I strive to find words and phrases that are very delicious.”
And evidently, the opera world appreciates delicious. The 37-year-old from Grande Prairie, AB, is known for swift storytelling, for writing libretti that are filled with carefully chosen words, not a one placed without purpose or meaning. “Taut and nuanced,” says The New York Times and The Calgary Herald calls him a “bang-on minimalist.” The New Yorker dubbed him the “indie Hofmannsthal,” with a nod to the librettist behind Richard Strauss masterworks like Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier.
It’s no empty comparison: teamed with some of today’s most in-demand composers, Vavrek has produced a remarkable series of commercially-successful, widely-circulated, new 21st-century operas. He wrote and with Missy Mazzoli (2016 and 2018), with Ricky Ian Gordon (2014), and with David T. Little (2012 and 2016), and the Pulitzer Prizewinning with Du Yun (2016). Vavrek’s works play on the major stages of Los Angeles, New York, Houston, and Philadelphia. He has projects lined up with Against the Grain Theatre, Norwegian National Opera and Metropolitan Opera, and his first all-Canadian commission came just this past February with Tapestry Opera’s , the Jacqueline Du Pre-biographical opera, scored for soprano and cello by Luna Pearl Woolf (see review p. 51).
