Composers often fly blind with new operas

PostGazette: "The task before composer Ricky Ian Gordon was indeed Gordian in nature, with the knot being John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath.'
Commissioned to turn the American treasure into an opera, Gordon and librettist Michael Korie had to find the right musical tone and shoehorn the novel into a much shorter libretto.
'Talk about asking for it,' Gordon said. 'If it is bad, you have insulted and degraded every lover of the greatest book ever written in the United States.'"