A feature by Eugene Ostashevsky

How was it different to work on The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi as opposed to Rivale, your recent chamber opera for female voice which plays with Baroque music and Baroque poetry?

It has been very important to me—this episode of my life that involved your book—because my work is divided, in general, between new pieces that are, let’s say, explorations of still unknown realities and pieces that I consider analytical. An example of my analytical pieces are Lezioni di tenebra, which is my analysis of the manuscript of a baroque opera by Francesco Cavalli, Il Giasone. When I find myself in front of a text as complicated as your Pirate poem, in both prose and verse, in a language that is very complicated for me, not because it is English but because this English is extremely elaborate, I can say that my composition is more like an analytical investigation of my reading of the text. This approach is part of my work: even the pieces for solo viola are analyses of something that I don’t understand.

Of course, given my experience and my contact with you, I knew that I could do a piece that was both a comic opera and an analytical work that was faithful to my idea of theater of instruments. But at the root of all this was the desire to climb a mountain: for me, reading the whole poem was incredibly complicated, not to say impossible.