Opera For Piano

Fantasies and variations based on operas for piano solo

By DANIEL ABRAMS

Music has an amazing ability to tell stories and paint pictures. Perhaps it isn't as detailed as the printed or spoken word, but it can create moods such as sadness, happiness, loneliness, or exuberance. It can create images of the wildness of the ocean, the darkness of a cave, intense passion between two people, or children playing. Of course, music can be enhanced with words and staging as in musical theatre or opera. But it can stand alone. An orchestra can tell a story such as in the Symphony Fantastique by Berlioz. A solo piano can paint pictures as in Pictures At An Exhibition by Mussorgsky.

In my series, Opera for Piano, my love for opera and the desire to play some of this glorious music on the piano was the driving force behind my series of variations on opera arias, or fantasies on entire operas, or in the case of Wagner's Ring Cycle, portraits of most of the characters in that mammoth work. The music is in the style of the various composers, and creates images of characters in the operas as well as "happenings" in the stories. Unlike Liszt, whose opera "transcriptions" generally focus on creating virtuoso show pieces, my aim is to use the piano to create the same general aura as the music in its original opera form.

The first CD in the series, Fantasie Variations On Tales Of Love, contains music based on operas by Wagner, Purcell, and Weber. It was Weber who inspired Wagner to become an opera composer, and it is Wagner's opera Tristan Und Isolde that inspired my play Tristan's Promise. It is a play with music about two concert pianists and the relationship between them and their manager. It is focused mainly on Wagner's philosophy of life and love, and what an artist needs and deserves to fulfill his talent.