Creative Spaces: Master of the Music (Library)

By Jennifer Williams


The window sill is littered with the empty husks of used up white-out tape dispensers. Stacks of music scores line the walls and pencils, worn down to stubs, signify hours of manual scribing.

This is the Music Library, the brains trust of Opera Australia.

Here, two full time staff and a rotating roster of extras sit bent over desks, painstakingly transposing music or marking up scores.

All of the music that ends up sung on the stage or played from the orchestra pit comes from the crowded shelves of the Music Library.

A compactus of heavy sliding shelves houses full scores and individual parts for operas by Beethoven through to Mozart, Puccini through to Wagner.

Magazine files of well-thumbed librettos are an invaluable resource for singers and directors trying to get their head around an Italian or German score.

Old programs and a carefully preserved record collection hark back through the long history of this company. In a separate room, floor-to-ceiling shelves contain archival recordings of every single opera the company has put on in recent years.

Peter Alexander is the master of the Music Library, a singer himself who started work among the scores in 1982.

Despite Peter’s 30 years of watching spidery musical scores transform to lavish productions on the stage, the thrill of opera hasn’t left him. “These massive things go on stage, they take months and months and months of work, and it’s so exciting.”

Over all those years, little has changed in the bright office of the library staff. Despite all of the technological advances in music software, it’s often faster and more accurate to notate by hand.

The sheer volume of work is evident in the stacks of scores and parts that almost conceal Peter’s officemate, Jennifer Fung. She is creating parts for Wagner’s four Ringoperas: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siefried and Götterdämmerung.

It’s been a busy year in the Music Library. For Carmen, the staff created six full orchestral sets. There will be four sets of scores for the Ring. Jennifer spent a full month working solely on the parts for Tosca.

For anyone who has ever played an instrument, it may come as a surprise to learn that professional musicians don’t mark up their own music.The conductor makes their additions to a full score - bowing, dynamics, expression – and the music library staff pencil the directions in on each individual part.

Occasionally, a conductor or a cover will decide to transpose a piece of music. When the singer requires a different key, the music library must transpose every single part, from the first violin to the timpani.

On the rare occasions that Opera Australia commissions a new translation of a libretto, the main work is done in the Music Library.

Before Oz Opera toured Michael Gow’s production of Don Giovanni, many hours were spent in the music library blowing up pages of music on the copier, whiting-out the Italian libretto and writing in the new English wordings by hand.  

“Whatever we do here, if we do it properly, we know the performance will be at its best,” Peter says.

The critics that sit in judgement on each new performance probably never think of the Music Library, but the staff are keenly reading their reviews.

“When you read that the orchestra was “playing crisply”, or “with great tempo”, we like to think we had something to do with it,” Jennifer says.