What made you think of Persian literature in the first place, and why Shah-Nameh in particular?
My wife is to blame! She is a linguist, reads five languages, and even a little Farsi. She has several books in Farsi (one about Rostam, it turns out), and she also has a translation of the Shah-Nameh, which I read. At the time, I was looking for a plot for an opera, and when I read about Rostam and Sohrab, I know that this was it. Fantastic story! Every bit as good a plot as the stories in Wagner or Verdi. I was lucky that they didn’t discover the story and write the opera first — but there is such ignorance of Persian culture in the West that they missed it. Opera music and Shah-Nameh literature come from different sets of cultures. Do you see any challenges in bringing Western and Eastern cultures together in this work? Not really. There might be a problem if Iranian listeners don’t understand the music, since I’m an American composer writing in a style that derives from the European tradition, not from Persian music. But I’m writing what’s called (sometimes derisively) “accessible
