If I Were You • Program Note
If I Were You has been one of the most challenging, inspiring and rewarding projects of my career — up there with Dead Man Walking and Moby-Dick. It is a big, dramatic, powerful story of identity, love and loss that feels timely and timeless, American and universal, human and supernatural.
Loosely based on the 1947 novel Si j’étais vous by Julien Green, this dramatic song cycle was written for a solo singer as the spirit and soul of the violins. The cycle would also feature a solo violinist, a quartet of the original instruments — and a young violinist to represent the future. Each song would intone a story from the perspective of the violin itself. This way, we could use music and words to explore the physical and emotional journeys of the instruments.
After composing It’s A Wonderful Life, I was hungry for that very project: one that would demand a dark, complicated psychology and poetry, and a musical language to match. A modern-day Faust story seemed just the thing: something in the world of magic realism that I have not yet explored. This score has pushed me into new territory as a composer and allowed me to find new levels of expression. It’s always difficult to describe music in words. The whole point is for the music to take us to places that the words alone cannot. I feel the score to If I Were You does this. It creates an eerily beautiful soundscape filled with the arching, long-line lyricism I love and allows for great characters and deep drama to unfold in operatic terms.
I can’t think of an opera that is quite like it — which is both exciting and terrifying. But I feel it is very much an essential story for our time, and I’m on fire with the possibilities.