Collaboration, dictatorial ideology, Platonic philosophy hangovers, and other thoughts before starting work on an opera

In preparing to write larger, theatrically bound pieces of music, a voracious appetite for webs of information, culled from as many fields as possible seems to take hold.  (I'm speaking as a "newbie" here because I've only written one opera previously, Bang The Law.) Perhaps, it is because things like opera involve so many different features: poetry, acting, producing, directing, music, stage design, costume, psychology, history. Reasearch into everything possible seems to be called for. There is also the perennial fear of accidentally creating something too narrow or trivial. I get into a kind of trawling, sometimes directed, sometimes not, that leads to the right sort of mental and emotional fullness and wonder that overcomes stagnation, procrastination, and distraction.  Opera demands collaboration anyhow so mental flexibility derived from poring over related ideas seems paramount becuse there is a certain openness and general knowledge required in working well with others with specialized talents.

I'm involved in the writing of a semi-operatic work currently so this is the process that seems to be dominant again.  A couple of months back I was handed a libretto by writer, Adam Falik and agreed to collaborate on his libretto about a couple of early twentieth century art behemoths and a fictional encounter that drags them both down.  In perusing some of

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Putting it clearly...

"The confusion concerning music as a means of communication clearly arises from a lack of understanding of what music really signifies.  If we try to qualify the meaning of a piece or a passage of music in terms of specific emotions, we immediately run in to difficulties of which I have already spoken.  Not only do we find the music essentially indefinable, but the more we try to to define it, the more unsatisfactory the result.  What we achieve fails to be convincing as a true description of the music; and it becomes clear immediately that the music does not rouse the same specific feelings in different individuals- in fact, it does not define feelings at all. Once more, music embodies the attitudes and gestures behind feelings- the movements, as I have said, of our inner being, which animate our emotions and give them their dynamic content.  Each of us qualifies these attitudes and gestures according to the associations that our experience has provided."- Roger Sessions from The Musical Experience