A Floresta

The first words are of thanks to the three people who challenged me to live this adventure: António Wagner Dinis, who envisioned this project, suggesting my name as the helmsman of the adventure; Jorge Salavisa, who organized and produced this show, and last but not least, Paolo Pinamonti, director of the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, who accepted the artistic risk of commissioning the opera. Writing for children, involving children, has been a very enriching experience. Deep down, it’s like writing for adults. I make no concessions. Kids hate being talked down to with baby talk. Complacently insisting on making them sing children’s nursery rhymes is outrageous, given their inexhaustible capacities and their spontaneous virtuosity.

More than anyone, the child has a natural taste for the challenge that a demanding score places before them. It’s elementary psychology. And a children’s choir can even become a distinguished symphonic instrument due to its rhythmic precision, its articulation ability, its melodic agility. Few wind instruments are so incisive and so full of luminosity.

The opera experience is an old dream. I am an opera aficionado. I consider it one of the most incomparable receptacles of the creative forces of the human spirit. A Floresta was my initiation into the genre and, to that extent, a very stimulating experience. It is my propaedeutic in musical drama, handsomely placed as the corollary of my collaboration with director João Lourenço in Peer Gynt. This close sharing of artistic worldviews that writing music for the stage represents had already revealed itself to me as a garden of delicious fruits. In Peer Gynt, spoken drama. Here, sung drama.

From the first team meeting for A Floresta, I felt artistic complicity pulsing. On one side, the spark of Ana Maria Magalhães and Isabel Alçada, authors of the libretto. On the other side, the balsamic phlegm of director Nuno Carinhas. And in bas-relief, the misty presence of Sophia, our Aeolian harp full of the fragrance of Autumn, apple, and rosemary. I left that meeting hypnotized and went with the wind, the forest in my thoughts.