🎉 Year-End Bonus Episode with Composer Stefania De Kenessey

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 mean, 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 with Yukimi Song with Yukimi Song. As we close out 2025, I'm excited to bring you a year-end bonus episode with composer Stefania Dechenesi. Earlier this season, we talked about one of her biggest projects, Microbits, 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 Dechenesi. Let's talk about your opera. So in the car, you know, on the way to Nayak, I mentioned, uh, 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, uh, 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 East Side stockbroker, basically. A Wall Street guy who is extremely wealthy and very successful with a wife and a kid in an East Side, Parkside, Park Avenue apartment, etc., etc., and is driving his 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. So, 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 a terrible indictment of the aristocracy and of men. I mean, it's just a brilliant, brilliant piece. So I loved 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 Derrière Garde. Because I wanted to unite artists, not just musicians, but also poets, architects, and painters, and 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 flute 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, you know, we were— 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 and he said, you know, Stefania, I don't know much about opera. My tastes only run as highbrow as G&S, 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, okay, 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, fine, it's yours. Um, 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, um, to make movies out of it, but in any form that currently exists and in any form— I have a copy of his, uh, uh, contract in any form is yet to be invented. So it's a blanket contract, you know, every— everything about the novel 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, $100,000 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. So, 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 Wolfe, 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 did—

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 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, you know, 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 because, partly because the novel is 700+ 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 3 hours, if you just sang it, never mind added instrumental, it would take 9 to 10 hours easily, if not more.

Really? Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah. No, once you start to sing, you need to take breaths and vowels get elongated. It's just, you expand the timeframe enormously. So for a 2-hour opera, you don't need more than 50 pages of text.

Really? I never— 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 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, more difficult and more cutting and more, more troubled than it is in the original, because after all, he runs over a Black kid, right?

Mm-hmm.

So to have him defended by a woman who's in the backstory in 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 has not, you know, 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 and a real prince about all of this stuff. We had an— 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, etc. 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, 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 know, I know, 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. By the way, for our audiences, Yukimi is an extremely, extremely accomplished pianist. That performance was amazing. So I, 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 microbits, 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 remembered 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, and—

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, 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, my emotions are not working. My musicality, where is it? I'm not thinking anything, right? So it's, it's, it's, uh, so, you know, 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-end bonus of The Piano Pod with Stefania De Canessi. 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 microbits, 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 Piano Pod with Yukimi Song with Yukimi Song with Yukimi Song.