“Rosen’s Turn” – Opera News Spotlight on ‘The Classical Style’
In Denk’s telling, he came up with the idea after dinner at the house of his neighbors—cellist Fred Sherry and his wife, Carol Archer, who knew Charles Rosen well. “I suddenly got this idea, and I wrote down a cast of characters for it, just as a joke for myself,” says Denk. “‘Who would be in The Classical Style by Charles Rosen, the opera?’ And I sent it around to some friends for yuks. It kept getting more serious in my mind as time went by.” Then he had his first meeting with Tom Morris, artistic director of the Ojai Festival. Morris asked if Denk had any ideas for Ojai’s annual theatrical evening. “And I said I’d always had this dream, as a joke mostly, of doing an opera based on Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style. Tom clearly fell in love with the idea. In the meantime, I had become rather close with Charles, and I spent a lot of time playing lessons for him. The project has a lot to do with Tom believing in it, and then having this idea, and my relationship with Charles — all of it sort of converged.” Rosen gave his approval for the project before he died, in 2012, and Denk began working on “a presentable libretto to convince a composer to write something.”