I am currently writing a libretto, P L U R A B E L L E, which is steeped in the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” chapter of the novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The libretto draws out and upon some of the 3,000+ references to opera that Joyce fused into his flourishing text.

The central character in Finnegans Wake, one of the most influential works of art from the past 100 years, is language: multitudinous and overlapping voices; melodic, lyrical, and rhythmic phrasing; marvelously inventive and multivalent words; ritualistic myths and reverberating stories. These sounds, words, phrases, voices, stories, and myths help propel us forward and stave off decay, decline, and death.

James Joyce plundered the entire world during the 17 years it took him to write the book, including polyglot puns from 80 different languages, barroom songs and the Bible, Shakespeare and shouts in the street, soaring operatic arias and the halting, disruptive stutters of our daily speech.

This opera concentrates its attentions, mostly, on one 20-page chapter of the book, a chapter known as “Anna Livia Plurabelle.” Joyce wrote to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver in 1924: “It is the chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone.” The chapter contains some of the most beautiful language ever written.