Sophie Haigney interviews Gene Scheer at The Paris Review:
When the composer, Jake Heggie, said to the Dallas Opera, “We want to do Moby-Dick,” the artistic director Jonathan Pell asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to do?” So, yes. It was a daunting prospect, and it took a long time to figure out a way into it. For the first six months of the process, I just read and reread the book, which I hadn’t done since high school—and back then I probably skipped some chapters. I was also reading criticism about it. I was concerned not just with how to cut it down but also with how to really adapt it for the stage. The nature of Moby-Dick, or any novel, is that it’s telling a story. The narrator is very prominent. In the theater, we’re in the business of showing a story. Rather than what the characters are saying, it’s a question of what they’re doing and how the action can bring life to the story. But I could also see the possibilities immediately for the adaptation. There’s so much about Moby-Dick that is operatic—the language, the themes, and the power of the story. Throughout the book, there are these dramatic, incredibly poetic passages that I could imagine being sung, especially if they were distilled down. And the thing about Moby-Dick is that while it is a very long book and one that’s deep and dense, it does have a very compelling adventure story at the center of it. I knew we could exploit that.
more here.
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