Griffh, I don't know what happened to the photo of Vera in a hat I had posted. It's been deleted somehow. I personally didn't touch it. How could it have happened?
As far as my opera in concerned, I can proudly announce that I have just finished the libretto, and have started composing the music. Usually I don't make proud announcements about any of my compositions. Even this time it's not the music that made me proud, but the libretto. And even here proud is meant more sarcastically than for real. I could have never imagined myself writing a libretto, since I don't think of myself as a writer. I must tell you I had been working on this text for seven years, and it's finally over. Wouldn't you be proud? The reason it took so long was the nature of it. Initially, I looked for librettists, I found some, but nothing ever materialized. I decided to write a bilingual opera, English and Russian at the same time to be more realistic, you now, Alix in English and Rasputin in Russian. That made the task of finding a librettist even harder. Finally one Russian lady provided me with a full libretto, entirely in Russian, and 100% useless for my purposes. I said that's it! 7 librettist to go through is more than enough. I had already read over 30 books on the subject, had traveled to Moscow and SP for my research, speak some rudimentary Russian (it's my dad's native language), have a better dramatic sense than most of the writers I met (in my early teens I wanted to become actor and stage/movie director), so I can't be any worse than my librettists. Most of the text and situations used in the opera come directly form original material: letters, memoires, diaries. That's one reason I use two languages in the opera, so I can keep the original wording of my document sources. Some stuff which was originally in French, I decided to present either in Russian or in English, depending on the situation (introducing a third language into the opera would have been problematic. Besides, I don't speak French at all.) So conversations between Alexandra and Anna Vyrubova which normally would have taken place in French are all done in English, and Rasputin's murder scene which is taken directly from Yussupov's memoires (originally written in French) is all done in Russian.
Out of dramatic necessity I had to create and add some dramatic situations of my own to the documented ones. Although there is no mention of Vera in Yussupov's memoirs, other historians suggest that she might have been present on the night of Rasputin's murder. So I thought why not!? I created a funny little scene between her and Dmitri, in which Dmitri is trying to teach Vera to laugh like a grand duchess in order to fool Rasputin, who is to arrive shortly in the basement, into thinking that Irina is upstairs having fun with her guests. The scene is in Russian. If you want I can post it here.
It just occured to me that I never explained how I solved the Russian problem in my libretto (since my Russian is very primitive.)
Except for what I found originally written in Russian, I wrote all the other material in English and then after I moved to Berlin from Boston (3 years and 1 week ago) I found a Russian woman who kindly translated all those scenes into Russian.
