I would like to write music that is a signal
of my love for humanity and for my audiences.
So I try to write music that uplifts and educates,
but also soothes people and makes them feel loved
and makes them feel that the world is in fact
going to be a better place than it sometimes
seems. The way I try to describe my music, my
shorthand for it is it's an act of love, an act
of honor and respect and love for my audiences.
I would just like to think that my music points
a way forward for people, that I can bridge the
gap between a more distant past and a future
that speaks to, you know, generations to come.
Hello, friends, and welcome back to The Piano
Pod. As we close out 2025, I'm excited to bring
you a year -end bonus episode with composer Stefania
De Kinesi. Earlier this season, we talked about
one of her biggest projects, Mikrovitz, a world
that began in miniatures and grew into something
expansive. But today, Stefania takes us behind
the curtain of another groundbreaking work, her
opera, The Bonfire of the Vanities. She shares
how she secured the rights to adapt Tom Wolfe's
novel and reveals some of the surprising secrets
behind writing for opera. What better way to
wrap up the year than with a story about risk,
creativity, and bringing literature to life through
music. So please enjoy this extra episode with
composer and advocate for women composers, Stefania
De Chinesi. Let's talk about your opera. So in
the car, you know, on the way to Nyack, I mentioned
you. we talked about your work and one of them
was opera. I was like, wow, you wrote opera.
Tell me more about it. And then later you said,
oh, it was, it's called The Bonfire of the Vanities
and based on a novel. So, and you have this,
you told me about this very interesting story,
how you got the rights to this novel. So I would
like to know. Sure. So The Bonfire of the Vanities
was a best selling novel in 1987 by Tom Wolfe.
And it is the story of a very wealthy Yale bred
Eastside stockbroker, basically, Wall Street
guy who is. extremely wealthy and very successful
with a wife and a kid in an east side park side
park avenue apartment etc etc and is driving
his uh mistress home from jfk one day and this
is in 1987 and he takes a wrong turn by mistake
it's at night and gets lost in the bronx and
it's dark and he is his car runs over something
and he is accosted or he thinks he's accosted
by two young black teenagers and in their haste
to get away they run over one of the black teenagers
by mistake but they run him over nonetheless
and the story is basically the story of how his
life unravels bit by bit as a result of this
this crime coming to light and it's a really
really searing indictment of of New York life
and New York excesses. And it takes a very, very
harsh look at all aspects of New York life and
all echelons of New York life and all races and
genders. And it's kind of a real takedown of
everything about American capitalism. But it's
a comic piece. I mean, it's a very, very dark
comedy, but it reminded me always of The Marriage
of Figaro, which is a quote unquote comedy. But
also, if you think about it for a moment, is
is an absolute deconstruction of gender norms
and social norms and and a terrible indictment
of the aristocracy. And I mean, it's just it's
just a brilliant, brilliant piece. So I love
the book. I mean, it made me laugh out loud from
start to finish. It's a huge piece. And I met
Tom Wolfe in a couple of settings. I met him
first in an organization that I founded humorously
called the Derriere Guard because I wanted to
unite artists, not just musicians, but also poets,
architects, and painters who were interested
in kind of reviving classical techniques, but
in a very... forward -going, forward -moving
way. And I invited Tom Wolfe to be my keynote
speaker, and he gave a hilarious speech for free.
That's how I first met him. But I really got
to know him a little bit better when I was composer
in residence at the Bridgehampton Music Festival.
And the festival opened one summer. with a performance
of my flute concerto, a piece for fluten and
strings, with Maria Martin brilliantly playing
the flute part. And Tom just fell in love with
the piece. Unfortunately, the computer to which
he wrote some incredible note crashed soon thereafter,
so I don't have a copy of it. But he really,
really loved the music. He was just bowled away
by it. So we stayed kind of in touch on the phone.
And one day I was saying to him, you know, you're
a novelist. I'm a composer. Let's collaborate.
He said, great. And I said, well, the only way
we can really collaborate that I can think of
is by working on an opera together. And he thought
about it for a moment. He said, you know, Stefania,
I don't know much about opera. My tastes only
run as highbrow as GNS, Gilbert and Sullivan.
And I don't know anything about libretti or how
to write one. So I could be really bad at it.
And I'm thinking, OK, if somebody tells you they're
going to be bad at something, maybe you listen.
So I said to Tom, I said, well, why don't you
just give me the rights to Bonfire and I'll find
a librettist and I'll take care of it and turn
it into an opera. He said, fine, it's yours.
And that was the extent of the conversation.
You know, it's yours. And that was, to me, a
huge gift, because by the time this conversation
took place. He had sold the rights to the novel
to Warner Brothers, who wanted to make a movie
out of it. And he sold it to them both, you know,
to make movies out of it. But in any form that
currently exists, and in any form, I have a copy
of his contract, in any form is yet to be invented.
So it's a blanket contract. You know, every everything
about the novel is is owned by Warner Brothers.
And so I thought, how am I going to get the music?
I mean, I can't compete with Warner Brothers
if they ask for any kind of money to Warner Brothers.
You know, one hundred thousand dollars would
be nothing. And I'm not, you know. And the gift
from Tom was that he pulled the music rights
for me for free. And that was a genuine gift
and a huge gift to me. And that was because he
believed in my music. And from that moment on,
we actually didn't work on the libretto together
or on the opera together at all. He gave me carte
blanche to do as I liked. I can show you a copy
of my contract. The only thing it says in relation
to Tom Wolfe, his name has to be mentioned in
any publicity. regarding the opera so it has
to say it's based on the novel by tom wolf and
his name has to be in a font that is in size
and in boldness equivalent to my name that's
it other than that he let me do whatever i wanted
to do with it i could have changed the story
completely i could have turned it into porn i
could have done anything he didn't he there's
nothing in the contract and when i realized this
i called my lawyer and i said you know there's
nothing here that that restricts what I can do
with this property beyond keeping the name and
keeping Tom's name. He said, shh, just sign.
So that was kind of the backstory of that. So
I eventually found a brilliant librettist with
whom I collaborated on this piece, Michael Bergman,
who is also a film director by training. And
he wrote the libretto. And we worked on the libretto
for quite a while, partly because the novel is
700 plus pages. And a libretto, as the term indicates,
has to be a short book. It's not a big book.
It's not a libro. It's a libretto. Because when
you take speech and you turn it into music, you
expand the time frame enormously, right? So if
you take a Shakespearean play, which lasts three
hours, if you just sang it, never mind added
instrumental, it would take nine to ten hours
easily, if not more. Really? I never thought.
Yeah, yeah. No, once you start the singing, you
need to take breaths and vowels get elongated.
It's just you expand the time frame enormously.
So for a two -hour opera, you don't need more
than 50 pages of text. Really? Wow, that's fascinating.
That's why it's a small book. You need a tiny
little book. So how to take a 700 -page novel
and condense it into a tiny little book is actually
a huge undertaking. You have to decide what is
essential about the story, what is not essential,
and how do you tell that story dramatically.
dispensing with a lot of details and a lot of
the felicities of language so it was kind of
in some ways you know a terrible thing that we
did to the novel because it had to be cut down
to size you know but luckily Tom knew what he
was getting into and he didn't mind at all he
was delighted when he was at the premiere of
the piece absolutely taken with it thought it
was you know And these these emails I did manage
to save. He thought it was brilliant and couldn't
have been more pleased with the outcome, even
though I changed quite a few of the details.
Yeah. Like making a black woman the defense attorney.
Yeah. In the original, Sherman McCoy, who was
the hapless protagonist, is defended by this
Irish lawyer. And I thought, you know, I want
more women in this opera and I want more women
who have real. active power, you know, and I
wanted to also make the racial angle more difficult
and more cutting and more troubled than it is
in the original, because after all, he runs over
a Black kid, right? So to have him defended by
a woman who's in the backstory, my mind is she's
a Harvard educated Black female attorney. That's
my backstory. but to have him defended by a Black
woman who decides to defend him because he's
actually not the one who ran over the kid. It's
his mistress. And she is the only person actually
in the opera who has a sense of genuine virtue
and genuine justice. She does not want anyone
wronged who deserves to have something. So she
knows he's not guilty and she decides that she
will get him exonerated. And she does. Wow. She's
that smart and that, you know, so anyway, it's
a long and complicated story. But that was also,
you know, for me, very satisfying to create.
She's not the heroine exactly of the story. There
are no heroes in this story. It's kind of a little
bit like Marriage of Figaro. It's a, you know,
an ensemble piece. It really is. But it was very,
very satisfying also to both create a female
role that was so powerful and a female role that's
inhabited by an African -American woman. who
triumphs or, you know, manages to triumph over
circumstances. And it was also a lot of fun.
At the end of the book, which is much, much,
so my opera ends much, much more darkly than
the book itself, although relatively comically,
all of Wall Street collapses. The Stock Exchange
falls. And the last character in the opera looks
at the audience and tells them to all go home.
Get out of here. It's like everything has fallen
apart. So I had a lot of fun with it. But all
these deviations from the novel, which are quite
substantial, Tom absolutely adored. He absolutely
adored. So he was a real gentleman, a real prince
about all of this stuff. And this is an interesting
anecdote, perhaps. We had an earlier version
of the piece in which we did some excerpts as
a workshop. And we had a couple of arias for
the female characters, for Sherman McCoy's wife
and his mistress and et cetera. And afterwards,
Tom came up to me and he said, you know, this
beautiful music and so much, so much stuff for
these women. He looked at me, he said, you know,
honestly, I wasn't worried or I wasn't thinking
about what the women were feeling when I was
writing the novel. And that's a fairly, you know,
that's a very. honest thing to say and very honorable,
you know, that he really was focused on the men
in the novel and the men are the movers and shakers
in the novel. And arguably they are the movers
and shakers of Wall Street. But one of the things
I was able to do, I still had to inhabit the
male characters. I still had to do, you know,
Wall Street guys and moving money and all that
stuff. But I was also able to animate the characters
of the women in ways that Tom himself, you know,
didn't. And that was also very, very satisfying.
So it was just a lot of fun to write this opera.
I had a great time. Stefania, I'm actually really
overwhelmed of your, I don't know, depth of just
understanding of things and because your mind
works in such a way that it's very different
from just, you know, I mean, I'm a musician,
I play the piano, but Very different, you know,
being a composer, you just have this, I don't
know, the way your mind works is very different.
Well, that's very kind, but I've heard you play
piano and the way your fingers work is completely
different and wonderful. And by the way, for
our audiences, Yukimi is an extremely, extremely
accomplished pianist. That performance was amazing.
So I think we all have our talents. And like
I said at the beginning, when we were talking,
I can play piano. I'm not a pianist and I'm a
terrible pianist, frankly, especially at this
point in my life, because I don't practice. So
we all have, you know, we all have things that
that speak to our souls, you know, and to me,
just envisioning things and hearing things in
my head speaks to my soul in a way that practicing
the piano just doesn't, you know, and as somebody
who wrote my crickets, I shouldn't admit this
out loud, but I don't really like practicing
piano. That's okay. I don't either. I'm a pianist.
I mean, when I was young, you know, luckily I
could memorize music very, very quickly. So if
my piano teacher assigned me, say, a movement
of a Beethoven sonata, I'd play it a bunch of
times on Monday. And then I'd have it memorized.
And then I would play it once or twice through
each day. And then I would just sit at the piano
and improvise stuff. So I would sit at the keyboard
and move my fingers. You know, so I would get
practice, quote unquote, but I wouldn't actually
be practicing the Beethoven sonata. And then
next Monday, I could get away not quite with
murder, but with something because I kind of
knew the piece because I remember how it went.
And I could kind of get through it because I'd
been practicing my fingers. But I wasn't actually
practicing the Beethoven sonata. And you can't
really get good as a performer if you don't practice
the piece. Right. So I really was cheating, cheating.
But, you know, I always knew that I wanted to
play piano so that I could use my fingers to
imagine music rather than to play proper repertoire,
which is my, you know, it's my downfall, but
it's the way it's worked. But being able to bring
all these together, story and words and even
dance, you work with dance company and just,
yeah, brilliant. I don't think music that way.
So, you know. Well, it's a lot of fun. I mean,
it, you know, it uses all parts of my brain,
soul, musicality, ears, whatever you want to
call it. So one of the ways in which I describe
it is when this is all going well, it's like
being in heaven. It is absolute paradise, you
know, because every part of you is just soaring.
Every, you know, intellectual, emotional, musical.
When it's not. it is like being in hell, right?
Because then you feel like, oh my goodness, nothing
is working. My brain's not working. My emotions
are not working. My musicality, where is it?
I'm not thinking anything, right? So it's a mixed
blessing, but most of the time it's a blessing.
Thank you so much for joining me for this special
year and bonus of the PianoPod with Stefania
DeKennessey. I loved hearing how she transformed
the bonfire of the vanities into an opera and
shared her insights on the craft of writing for
voice and theater. And of course, if you haven't
yet caught our full conversation on micro -bits,
be sure to check out Season 6, Episode 3. As
we step into 2026, I want to take a moment to
thank you for the incredible support this past
year, especially for our very first live event.
It was such a success, and I was so moved by
all the encouraging words and energy you brought
to the experience. Please like, subscribe, leave
a review, or share this with a friend. It truly
helps keep the show going. Here's to another
year of music, discovery, and connection. Happy
New Year, and I'll see you soon on the PianoPod.