Dream Hunter: from folktale to opera

A poet explains how the tradition of dreams inspired him to pen a libretto.

When the composer Nicola LeFanu came to me with the proposal that we write a short opera, I was ready. After collaborating on a dramatic monologue, Alkman, and some love-lyrics, The Tongue and the Heart, it seemed the right thing for us to do. Poets really do envy the purity of music. It's an elaborated art of generalised, unlocated emotions, and we always feel that if we could somehow model our poetry on music, it wouldsatisfy our need to get some aesthetic distance between our experiences and our crafted words.

But the librettist is always saddled with words, and an opera must have a story. I very much wanted a Corsican subject, and for a while thought I had found one in Mérimée's "Mateo Falcone". Mérimée, whose novella Carmen was the basis for Bizet's opera, has perfect credentials, but the story has no female characters, and there is at its centre a small boy who would be difficult to cast. My alternative was a story of my own invention about a girl who has the unearthly power to hunt in her dreams and by doing so to foretell a death. This was more promising. The Corsican tradition of the mazzeri, the dream hunters, taps into the world of supernatural folk-belief, the sort of thing that traditionally in operas is a fertile ground for psychological ambiguities, and for which LeFanu has always had an eye and an ear.

In Dream Hunter my mazzera is Catarina, a rebellious girl of the hills, whose older sister Angela is betrothed to the dissolute son of the village mayor, Sampiero. Their marriage will heal rifts between the families, and her father Domenico is happy to use the occasion to collect old debts from Sampiero, as well as providing land as a dowry. But Sampiero is an opportunist, and has his eye on Catarina as well as Angela. In the course of the opera, Angela begins to realise this, and says to Catarina at one point: "It is you who are my dowry!"

What is crucial to the drama and to the music is the way in which Catarina's hunting dreams represent her response to attentions that she consciously repulses but which at the same time disturb her adolescent emotions. And the audience will not quite know whether her hunting in her dreams is simply in a Freudian sense purposive or whether the supernatural implication is true (after all, the theatre is a place of magic). Either way, Sampiero is in danger. He is a provincial dandy who has strayed into a troubled complex of female will and appetite that is too much for him. The whiff of witchcraft is his undoing.

LeFanu has responded to Catarina's dream hunting with music of thrilling force and ambiguity. What we have ended up with is a powerful example of the melismatic, somnambulist soprano, the victim turned avenger.

Now critical orthodoxies are funny things. If asked what opera is really about, you might today say with some apparent justification that at the heart of it must be a woman so subjected to male power (a father's cruel whims, the outrage of a rejected lover, the attentions of a sadistic rapist, whatever) that in response she is compelled to sing her heart out and die on a top A. That this is the not-so-secret wish of most 19th-century male composers has long been the accusation of feminist critics. Classic examples: Verdi's Violetta or Puccini's Butterfly. If along the way the heroine can show signs of derangement (Bellini, Donizetti) so much the better.

Although a victim of male presumptions, our Catarina defies this type. She's never going to be comfortably restored to a docile role. She isn't going to die. She is a survivor. She happens to be the agent of the disaster that overtakes her family, and this uncanny agency belongs to a violent dream that expresses the ambiguous nature of her sexual reactions.

Dreams are useful theatrical devices. They can confirm a character's real feelings when circumstances might suggest something unhelpfully different. Take Walther von Stolzing's dream in Wagner's Die Meistersinger. This hard-up nobleman has just met Eva Pogner at the house of her father, a wealthy citizen of Nuremburg. What better way to improve his finances than to marry Pogner's daughter, who is currently the prize (together, it should be noted, with all Pogner's goods) in a singing competition? If the audience suspect Walther's motivation, then they will surely be put at ease by his dream-vision of a garden of pure and paradisal love. Or will they? The opera's sympathy lies firmly with Hans Sachs, who himself loves Eva, and who self-sacrificially coaches the amateur Walther in the winning prize-song that derives from his dream. I find it difficult not to detest Von Stolzing, dream or no dream.

Sometimes dreams can be disastrous. When Stravinsky's bored Tom Rakewell dreams of a machine that can magically turn stones into bread, he doesn't know that it is a trick arranged by his Mephistophelean servant, Nick Shadow. He is encouraged in an enterprise that is literally devilish, and in terms of the opera's symbolism is a critique of capitalism's faith in material progress: "I saw all want abolished by my skill / And earth become an Eden of good-will." Stravinsky's rhythms here are propulsive and contagious. It is actually the first moment where one might have some constructive sympathy for the wastrel hero.

These dreams of an Eden gained and an Eden lost each show what a central character desires. He may be frustrated by a magical illusion, like Britten's Bottom is. He may dream of a punishment he fears but deserves, like Ravel's Enfant. But dreams supply for the audience a symbolic dimension, just as fantasy does. A modern opera may of course enter the world of fantasy directly, as in Shostakovitch's The Nose or Janacek's The Adventures of Mr Broucek, for example, but it doesn't have to. My libretto for Dream Hunter contains nothing that couldn't have been set by an Italian composer of the early 20th century. Indeed, LeFanu at first thought that a verismo libretto was a bit of a conundrum for a living composer. It never was for me, though. I think that audiences like to know what is happening on the stage and to believe in it. It is the music that takes them directly into the minds of the characters, where unaccountable and ambiguous things may be going on.

The world of the Corsican mazzeru or mazzera is strange enough. Who knows whether it is true or not? Whole villages have had collective dreams where they meet the mazzeri from the village over the mountain and do battle at night armed with asphodels or human shin bones. In such a context, our Catarina may be forgiven for being so disturbed by the attentions of her sister's fiancé that she dreams of hunting him down in the form of a magnificently muscular boar. Let the audience make up their minds.

Kenny Wheeler: The Long Waiting

Kenny Wheeler, the expat Canadian trumpeter and jazz composer, was 82 last week – but this big band session featuring new themes and plenty of flugelhorn improvising, was recorded only a few months ago. Wheeler still practises four hours a day and writes for another four. The pieces here glow with his inimitably bittersweet harmonies and build melodic fragments that sound like snatches of wistful songs into richly layered, choirlike effects. They sound as fresh as if he'd just discovered his muse.

Wheeler's flugelhorn-playing has its wobbly moments, but his upper-register sound still soars and glides. It's complemented by trenchant playing from a classy band that includes alto-saxist Ray Warleigh, trombonist Barnaby Dickinson and pianist John Taylor, with Italian vocalist Diana Torto functioning as an extra saxophone, soloing dazzlingly on Enowena. Comba N3, with its pensive flugelhorn and delicate alto-sax passages, and the lovely Old Ballad (a Wheeler staple) are among the highlights of another essential item for followers of Britain's most reluctant jazz hero.

Rhapsody takes battle to Spotify by buying Napster's European operation

US digital music service challenges rival with push in UK and Germany using long-established brand name

Rhapsody has acquired Napster's European operation, marking the music streaming service's first move beyond the US market and kicking off a battle with Spotify.

The US service, which has only been available to American customers for the past 11 years, has reached a deal to acquire Napster International's subscription music business.

The deal, for an undisclosed sum, will see Rhapsody launch in the UK and Germany under the Napster brand name and take the fight to the increasingly popular Spotify.

Rhapsody, which acquired and drastically restructured Napster's US business last October, intends to keep all the company's staff and migrate users to its infrastructure in March.

The Napster brand name will be retained in UK and Germany because it is better known in Europe than Rhapsody.

"The acquisition of Napster and its subscriber base in the UK and Germany gives us an ideal entry to the European market," said the Rhapsody president, Jon Irwin. "Through the benefit of scale, the strength of our editorial programming, and strategic partnerships, we can now bring the Napster service to even more consumers on a variety of platforms."

Rhapsody launched in the US in 2001 and claims to be the largest subscription music service in the US with more than 1 million paying customers.

However, it now faces serious competition from Spotify, which is well established in Europe and launched in the US in July. In November, Spotify claimed more than 2.5 million paying subscribers.

Spotify is the biggest subscription service in the UK, while Napster ranks second. Spotify has not launched in Germany, although it is thought to have plans to go live very soon, while Napster is already well established.

"This is the perfect time to extend our borders both geographically and technologically," said Irwin. "Consumer demand for subscription music has never been greater. There is a lot of room for growth in this market and I firmly believe that 2012 is going to be our biggest year yet."

Student Exchange Fair in America home

The Amerika Haus Munich is the venue for the exchange students to go abroad one measurement is a personal experience that works for life, and especially young people can provide much useful knowledge that is not in textbooks. In order for the stay abroad is a success is important, of course, a good preparation. Information of any kind provides the student exchange fair on 28.01.2012 at the Amerika Haus in Munich.

The student exchange fair wants to show young people ways to stay successful abroad - during the school day and after school.

For comprehensive information is available: Exhibitions of the leading providers and neutral consulting services, embassies and consulates, high-class discussions and lectures by experts and former exchange students. Admission is free.

Internet pages, colorful brochures, books and information evenings individual providers can afford one nothing to get to know personally all the leading vendors and compare. This performance, however, offers the student exchange fair to their partners not only ministries, embassies, consulates and schools are, but also companies that are committed to international exchange.

Patron of the event is Conrad R. Tribble. The Consul General of the United States of America in Munich remembers with great joy on a student exchange in his youth: "Anyone who has ever participated in an exchange program is often the rest of his life as a mediator between nations and cultures. I speak from personal experience: 1979-80 I spent a year as an exchange student in Lower Saxony. "

They also visit the Student Exchange Fair on 28.01.2012 at the Amerika Haus in Munich. The team from Munich Blog wishes much fun.

FM Belfast

Ballroom Kreuzberg and I have long wondered whether I should go. The weather was so cold, the club is so far gone, I weary Sun At the end I still decided. And rarely have I met such a good decision (except the one time I took another way home and have it found five € on the street).

The concert was absolute madness. The five to seven Icelanders playing like there is no tomorrow, with the motto that summed up the singer in a stunning German unequivocal "Spassss". Besides their own hits like "underwear" were some classics in a unique manner gecovert FM Belfast and converted into party anthems. After two hours, the band had played in the deserved leisure time. And for me it was time to get home after this concert, but were also endure cold and fatigue.

Nikkels aka Princess Chelse

What can emerge from a conversation about smoking, shows us the New Zealander Chelsea Nikkels aka Princess Chelsea. She came over to music that is the idea that a run with her ​​boyfriend talk about their smoking habits.

The fact then is it possible such a charming work is, in their abilities no big surprise!

The woman at second May this year, her debut album "Lil 'Golden Book' Lil Chief Records released via. (Published 9 June 2011) In addition to the single "The Cigarette duet" Another 10 songs are included. Support they receive by Jonathan Bree, whose name you out of band "The Brunettes" could be a term.

A plate full of melodic indie-pop fairy tale.