Libretto Premiere at the Royal Academy of Music

The four teams of composers/librettists/singers from the 2025-6 Opera Makers cohort

Since starting my Substack (https://rebekahkingwriter.substack.com/) I have been quite bad at updating my website here but I have recently been working as a librettist for the Opera Makers course at the Royal Academy of Music and in March 2026, saw the second of two short operas premiere. Working with composers and musicians is an absolutely dream; I'm so lucky to be able to tell stories with whole new departments of creatives.

I had worked with composer George Parris on a piece called 'The Shadow' which premiered at the Academy in the Susie Sainsbury Studio back in 2024. That piece told the (true) story of Hans Christian Andersen's disastrous visit to Charles Dickens' family home intertwined with the plot of a lesser-known fairy tale about doppelgangers.

It wasn't an opera, it was a play where actors performed a drama whilst a conductor and four musicians joined them onstage, making music part of the story and embodying the concept of inspiration itself as the two great writers clashed.

After 'The Shadow,' I was asked to join the Opera Makers course by the amazing Jess Walker who is a true champion of new writing and an accomplished librettist herself. It's from her that I've learned this completely different approach to writing where the words must be sparse and leave room for the music. Music often replaces sections of the libretto entirely but a good librettist shapes a story and characters that inspire the composer. It them becomes the job of the director and singers to bring the story to life.

In the first year, I was paired with the wonderful Dawn Erridge and we crafted a piece called 'The Truth of This' based on the real-world case of Elizabeth Clarke who was executed for witchcraft in the seventeenth century. The 15 minute opera told the story of the night she is forced to confess through sleep deprivation torture, finally allowed to sit down after walking in circles for hours and hours.

Dawn and I talked a lot about the Rite of Spring and the use of music to express physical exhaustion. We then worked to create the 'familiars' the woman conjures as she goes along with the witchfinder's demands. What he thinks are devilish imps, we recognise as memories: a friend, a lover, a lost child. Three singers embodied these shadows and I tried to give Dawn onomatopoeic phrases to suggest the animal shape each of them took.

We were really proud of how 'The Truth of This' turned out and were lucky to see it transfer to the Tête à Tête new opera festival in autumn 2025.

I was asked back to join the 2025-6 cohort of Opera Makers and was this time matched with composer Ruben Doda. I have been keen to use music to explore stories from the world of sport (despite not being vaguely sporty myself!) There was something exciting about the idea of expressing feats of strength or skill through music, and some of the stories that emerge from these contests feel timeless: legendary characters, bitter rivalries, victories earned through years of toil, defeats that shatter an identity...

We eventually decided to use épée fencing where the whole body is a target and you really are watching a duel. We had two female singers, a mezzo (Annabel Jeanes) and a soprano (Kathy Macaulay), who became an older champion and a younger challenger respectively.

The short opera was structured in three sections: the two semi finals where we watched each character fight an invisible opponent, then the final where they faced each other. I designed the characters such that the older fighter had a more courtly traditional style, perfect but old fashioned, whereas the younger fighter was a gifted natural who broke all the rules. Ruben then had to imagine two different styles of music and combine them at the end when they duelled.

Hard work for singers - and for our director Sophie Daneman - but it was epic, we were really proud of the result. At the time of writing we are hoping that the Royal Academy of Music will once again help fund a transfer to Tête à Tête in the autumn.