A series of book recommendations landed Stephen Kitsakos a copy of his latest focus: “Swimming in the Dark” by Tomasz Jędrowski.
Kitsakos, an opera librettist and former teacher with the Theatre Arts Faculty at SUNY New Paltz, finished the critically acclaimed book in just one day. Within a week, he had read it again and soon thought the story of main characters Ludwik and Janusz was fittingly operatic.
“After I fell in love with ‘Swimming in the Dark,’ I asked my composer colleague, Martin Hennessy, who I had collaborated with on three other chamber operas, to read it,” Kitsakos recalled.
“He was blown away by the story, the characters and, in particular, the musical potential of the settings.”
With Hennessy onboard as an award-winning composer of art song and chamber opera, negotiations began with Jędrowski’s agent for the book’s musical adaptation rights during the pandemic.
Throughout that time, Kitsakos was already preparing another adaptation of the internationally best-selling “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini. That was commissioned by the Seattle Opera and scored by Sheila Silver. It debuted before an audience in early 2023 and is remembered as a career highlight.
Armed with this achievement, the librettist will now present a workshop of the first act of his operatic version of “Swimming in the Dark” at The Studios of Key West.
While the book is told as a series of letters that refer to past events, Kitsakos and Hennessy designed a linear dramatic structure that takes the audience through themes of love and political repression in the final years of the Polish People’s Republic.
The Jacobs School of Music, Opera & Ballet Theater at Indiana University, Bloomington is a main partner in this production with students enrolled in its Masters of Voice program playing the roles.
The hope shared by Hennessy and Kitsakos is to create a strong addition to the contemporary canon of opera that has a central love story between two men. They believe they have settled on a dynamic tale with many parallels to socio-political and cultural events happening across the world.
“Swimming in the Dark” presents Ludwik and Janusz, who meet at a farm camp where recent university graduates learn proletariat values and working principles through manual labor. A bond soon intensifies amidst a changing environment that might not change fast enough.
“Love stories are more dramatically interesting than politics,” Kitsakos explained.
“And like ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns,’ my approach to the libretto was to find the drama in the central love story despite being surrounded by, and encompassed by, the political landscape of post-Taliban Afghanistan.”
After all, Kitsakos thinks the point of opera is that the character emotions are so exalted that singing is the only way to release these feelings.
He wants the audience to experience hope for Ludwik and Janusz, no matter how remote the possibility.
“I want to demonstrate that there could be light.”
A Staged Concert of Act I March 21 & 22 at 8 p.m. at The Studios of Key West.
