Michael Honeyman interviews Meta Cohen about Kiss My Sword
Thursday May 15, 2025
Michael: I’ve heard you say that Julie d’Aubigny was an obvious topic for your opera, and you said it last night, a subject that you have been intrigued by for some time. Why did you write an opera? And was Julie the first topic you considered?
Meta: I’ve had the idea for an opera about Julie d’Aubigny for a really long time – it’s always been an ‘eventually that’s going to happen’ project. Why an opera? Well, the obvious answer is that she is a historical opera singer! Opera offers a huge spectrum of ‘music plus drama’ possibilities that, to me, are the most interesting way of delving into the essence of a person for whom music and performance were crucial. Julie is someone who’s almost always performing, both on and off the stage, and I’m really interested in exploring that performer-celebrity presence. Julie’s history/legend is also full of over-the-top drama, swashbuckling-ness and audacity, which certainly resonates with traditional opera plots!
It’s a form I’ve always wanted to tackle with my background in composition and dramaturgy. It offers the big emotion stuff as well as, frankly, the campness, and enough flexibility of affect to deal with this rather elusive personality. I guess it could have been a cabaret too (that was my other thought about her for a while) – but I was also really interested in engaging with the Baroque operatic traditions that Julie was a part of creating.
There have been music theatre works about Julie in the past. There's a musical and an opera for film in America that was done a few years ago. There’s another musical film being developed in Canada currently, I believe. But as far as I'm aware, this is the first live opera about her, which is exciting.
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Michael : After you decided that, was the next step to make the structure? Or did you have to flesh out the concept a bit more first?
Meta: That's a good question. There have been a few versions of the structure, but the idea of multiple people playing Julie was there from the beginning – it was an early concept of mine that has never gone away. This is one of the many things that distinguishes Kiss My Sword from other media about Julie – from the start, we’ve been interested not only in telling Julie’s story, but engaging with the historical incongruities around her, and the impossibility of settling on one ‘version’ of the story (or of Julie).
Initially, we went into an intensive research period where we were trying to piece together the history (which is, frankly, patchy and really quite difficult to access). Luckily, my wonderful collaborator Evan is also an avid researcher, so they were digging up French sources all over the place. We did a lot of research and started compiling lots of lists. It was a process of thinking ‘ok, I’m making an opera about a person whose entire life has no hope of fitting into one piece – there are just too many stores. So, impulsively, which ones do we want to prioritise and why?’. So we started to make a palette of stories, if you like. I worked with Evan and our wonderful dramaturg Alyson Campbell on this.
Then, we assembled threads – life events (verified and unverified); threads of queerness (in 17th Century France in general, but then also how Julie resisted hetero-and-gender-normative ideas of this period); Julie as a sword-fighter; Julie as a performer; Julie as more of a legend-type figure. What really struck us when we went into the research is just that fallibility of truth around this person and the rumours and the gossip. We were pretty clear early on that the gossip around Julie was an important thread; that the point of the opera was essentially ‘how to talk about Julie’: how people have been talking about her all through time, and how she kind of exists more in rumour that in reality, in some ways.
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Michael : After that research and the threads, how did you decide on the first version of the structure?
Meta: The first version of the structure was a lot more bio drama-esque: we knew we didn’t want to do it like that, but we also knew we had to do that version first, so that we knew how to break it apart! After that, we went ‘that’s great. Let’s have that in our heads, but try and imagine what an alternative view of it might be’.
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Michael : And so, the new structure is something totally different?
Meta: Totally different. Lots has shifted – more to be revealed soon! But the version we’re currently working with is not only events in Julie’s life, but you see multiple versions of some of these stories, and Julie as almost a complex space-time-event by the end. The opera really tries to go into why we, as queer people in 2025, are still looking (and longing for) this person from the 17th Century. Eventually, it all breaks apart. It’s a lot more fun than the bio drama, in my opinion!
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Michael: Is there a specific musical language that you're developing for this opera to support the themes and the content?
Meta: That's such an interesting question. Firstly, it jumps between Baroque or Baroque-influenced music (which is a totally new world for me) and more contemporary styles.
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Michael: I heard some of the coloratura[1] last night that was in that era.
Meta: Yeah! I'm trying to find a relationship with that era, because this is somebody who premiered Campra[2] operas, and was really in that tradition. I wanted to be playful with the history in that way. So part of the opera is really me trying to figure out my style's relationship with Baroque. Then for a while it’s in a style that’s more ‘classic me’, and then towards the end, as it breaks apart, I am trying to find a much wilder, more experimental language. So in the opera, there is quite a stylistic shift that happens as the work progresses – quite literally – through time. We’ve been really curious about Julie as a somewhat anachronistic figure, and reflecting that in the music.
But I’ve also been finding a language for Julie as a character, where I’m particularly working with fast time signature shifts. She's darting between times, and also able to see structures and dance with them. I do a lot of 5/8-6/8, shifts, where you think it's settling into a pattern, but she's already way ahead of you. I'm doing that quite consciously, but I'm still finding that language! And also, as a character, she’s a delight to write for, because this is not somebody who’s afraid of showing off – it’s someone who takes great delight in their virtuosity. So I’m thinking about that quite consciously in her character moments – lots of ornamentation, lots of leaps.
A lot of the musical language tries to reflect the shift between character moments and more of a liminal, questioning space where that starts to break apart. In those sections, I’m playing much more with fragmentation, because I'm thinking about identity as this weird, contested thing, which will really be a feature later in the opera. Playing a lot with sliding off pitch, pitches meeting, sharing words – I'm doing a lot of that as the Julies start to split apart. I'm trying to find a language that is fluid enough to move where the thematic stuff wants to go.
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Michael: When Evan writes the text, do you go scene by scene to negotiate the text, or do you wait till you have all of the text first?
Meta: No, we're very ‘pass the parcel’: Evan’s great. They will share literally fragments of where their thinking is going for a scene. And of course, because we’ve worked so closely on the structure together, we’ll all know exactly which scene they’re talking about. And I'll be like, ‘Oh, yep, this is really resonating for this reason,’ or not, or ‘Maybe we could kind of push this angle a little bit,’ and then they'll send me a more complete draft. I'll have a bit of a play with it, and go, ‘Well, look, here's what I'm noticing trying to set this text. Here's what I still feel like is missing.’ That happened quite a lot in the love duet I wrote for the song cycle. I found that I was missing the darkness in it later on, and musically I wanted to go back there, and I kept having that impulse, and I was like, ‘I think it is actually about love and risk, and I think we shouldn’t lose that throughout. How do we bring that back?’ I definitely don’t wait for all the texts to be finished before playing with them – I’m far too meddlesome and impatient!
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Michael: Have you really requested any late changes to the text?
Meta: All the time (sorry Evan)!
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Michael: And how do you negotiate those changes?
Meta: To be honest, it's not really much of an issue in our team, because we see the whole work as still so in development and fluid. What I'll say about Evan is that there's a remarkable lack of obstructiveness/preciousness, which is so refreshing. They just want to get the work right and they're going, ‘Okay, well, are you not getting enough of a sense of this from that? Here's what I was intending with it. If that's not coming through, let's add this.’ Even in the rehearsal process for this, I had the wonderful Jess Aszodi going, ‘it doesn’t make sense for me to be repeating that word here, because it’s been a list of words previously, here and here. Can we add another word here?’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely, that makes total sense. Evan, what word would you like here?’ so really, very open to changing, and I’m especially delighted when those changes come from the singers, who bring an entirely different embodied understanding of it.
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Michael: What has Alyson's role been in the entire process for you?
Meta: It's really useful to have such a brilliant dramaturgical brain, but also the person who's going to be directing it and can go, ‘You two don't need to worry about that. I can solve that bit,’ like ‘Yes, that's not a text issue.’ Really useful perspective. Alyson does this amazing double-duty as a close collaborator – she’s been very involved for those key development periods, particularly with structuring the work – and as an outside-eye dramaturg, where she can take a step back and come back in at key points. I think at some point we hadn't checked in with Alyson for six or seven weeks, and then we were like, ‘Okay, here's what we've got. Here's what we're trying to do. Let's have a chat about it,’ which is super useful.
So really helping us with that structuring, but also particularly reminding us to resist the bio drama structure early on. They kept poking at us to do that, which is great. In this latest development, they helped us navigate that balance between characters we care about and just talking about Julie in the abstract. Lots of questioning and poking, which has been very useful!
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Michael: Last night, you said that Julie's story is fascinating to anybody from any time period. But are there aspects of Julie's history that you're trying to make relevant to a contemporary audience, the queerness, the temporality, those sorts of things?
Meta: It's interesting, because Julie's sort of in vogue at the moment. There's the wonderful Bad Gays podcast episode about her. There's Chappell Roan doing the knight in armour with the fire in the background, and Julie pops up as a reference. When you look at the history, there are periods of strong obsession with her, and she becomes this touchpoint for queer people, not only because of her gender deviance, but also because of this image of the virtuosic swordfighter who won’t take any of society’s bullshit.
I think there's a real political importance at the moment in insisting on queerness in history, because there's this weird perception in a lot of conservative circles (or rather, a calculated tactic), that ‘suddenly everybody's queer, and it was never like this’, blah, blah, blah, which is simply untrue. I think it is actually very contemporary and political to try and find lineages in history and say ‘this person burned everything and just somehow got away with it’. We’ve been trying to think about Julie in terms of a ‘take up the torch’ angle – especially about how contemporary people might think about challenging normalising structures around them. The opera does go there eventually, as it falls apart – it starts to deconstruct why we still care about this person, and what’s at the core of our contemporary desire for her.
Of course, Julie is also a placeholder for all of these ideas we have about queerness throughout history and today. It's amazing that somebody from the 17th century… I mean, you only need to say ‘bisexual sword-fighting opera singer who went around cross-dressing and burning convents’: that's still subversive today, which is amazing! And in the 17th century. Honestly – what an icon.
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[1] Coloratura: elaborate ornamentation of a vocal melody, especially in operatic singing.
[2] André Campra (1660-1744). French composer and conductor. He was inspired to write parts specifically for Julie d’Aubigny including Clorinde in Tancrède and Diana and Thétis in Iphigénie en Tauride.