Finished another lyric for the work in prog. Good to feel like I’m moving forward again.

It was a tricky lyric to work out, partly because I have so much more I need to say here than the original librettist did. He just needed to say, “Here we are at this point in a story you all already know,” short and sweet. But I’m taking the well-known story and I’m telling it in terms of a very different time and place, a very different culture, so I have a couple of additional points I need to make, and I didn’t have quite enough notes for all the words I needed to use, not unless I made the lyric so dense with information that the points would rush by too quickly for the audience to assimilate them.

After trying out and rejecting a whole lot of other possibilities, I ended up adding repeats to two sections to give me sixteen more bars to set words on. Not my first choice; I would have preferred to use the number exactly in its original form. But my ear tells me the repeats will make decent musical sense. And anyway, this is such a free-wheeling adaptation that any Opera Purists who would be offended by such liberties with the composer’s intentions will already have stormed out of the theater in a huff well before we reach this point anyway. So what the heck.