The Equity paperwork is filed, the contracts are signed, the music is in the hands of the performers, the set and costume design has been conceived and the director is deep in thought. Love in Public, an opera cabaret I wrote ten years ago on words by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, is getting ready to hit the stage. Who knew, in 2001 when I started this project, that it would take over ten years and the sea-change of the Internet to make Love in Public relevant for today's audiences? Who said artists are ahead of their time? We have to be, just so we're ready when the world is ready. Who knew that blogging our private, innermost thoughts for everyone to read would become the fashion? Nobody. But in six weeks, we'll be in a rehearsal for Love in Public, so I'd better get this blog rolling.

Love in Public is an opera cabaret for four singers, two dancers and piano set in the present day. It opens at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre on April 19, 2012 for a ten-day run. I hope you'll catch it. World premieres of new opera works aren't a dime-a-dozen. Neither is hearing four of Vancouver's finest singers paired with the hottest young director the scene has seen in years. And they're all performing my music. You can't imagine how much fun it is! And how much work it is! For this show, in particular, the journey from paper to performance has had more twists and turns than a Hollywood thriller.

It starts 160 years ago with the first blog. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, recluse Victorian poet, writes her astonishingly intimate forty-four poem cycle titled "Sonnets from the Portuguese" that chronicles her love affair with poet Robert Browning prior to their elopement in 1846. The sonnets, published in 1850, are disguised as mere translations from another source in an attempt to cleverly dodge the gossip of this real-life romance. After all who in their right mind would put such private and intimate thoughts on paper for others to read? Elizabeth did. Breaking all the rules of modesty, she wrote her deepest, most private expressions in rigorous sonnet form because she had to, because she could, because it mattered and, despite Victorian mores and the suppression of suggestive content, she ruled! The sonnets are among the most famous ever written.

In 2001, at the dawn of the internet, I decided to set these poems to music, all forty-four of them, and make an opera from them. Why opera? Because opera is the home of music, poetry, theatre and dance. And only opera singers can transcend the archaic "thee, thou, thine" language of the poetry in any believable way. I set about writing a cabaret for opera voices. Why cabaret? Because I needed four singers to sing forty-four songs and by setting Elizabeth's words to music, I both honour and desecrate them. And if love is to be celebrated, it also must be skewered - an opera cabaret - high-brow meets low-brow. Love crosses all boundaries and constructs, it recognizes neither class nor gender.

First thing you notice is there's a story hidden in the arch of these forty-four poems - the story of a woman on the edge of death who is revivified by the power of love. Such is the story of Elizabeth and Robert. Out of nowhere, she accepts a visit from the young poet who, in their first meeting, confesses that he loves her poetry with all his heart. Naturally frightened, she rejects him. But the stage has been set for a love affair that reaches to the depth of the human heart and concludes with "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," a line forever altering history.

When I decided to write Love in Public, the power of the idea was so intoxicating that I wrote the first draft in a white heat of one-a-day for forty-four days. Endurance. Little did I know that endurance of those first forty-four days was just the beginning...

Tickets and more information on Love In Public available here.

- David MacIntyre is a composer/professor with SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts