Daily Inspiration Quote by Carlisle Floyd

Control is the quiet obsession behind Floyd's line: the need to verify that what lives in his head survives contact with rehearsal, bodies, breath, and time. He isn't talking about tempo in the abstract. He's talking about pacing as lived experience - how long a silence can hold before it sags, how quickly a confrontation must ignite before it becomes polite, how a scene "turns" the way a melody turns. The repetition ("be sure that... what I think it is") gives away the anxiety underneath the professionalism: the score may be fixed on the page, but the drama isn't. It has to be tested.

Floyd's genius, especially in American opera like Susannah, was always about storytelling with an ear for speech rhythms and moral pressure. "Musically and dramatically" is the operative pairing. He rejects the old opera-world split between pretty sound and stage truth, insisting that music is the engine of the scene's psychology, not wallpaper. When he says "shape", he's invoking architecture: arcs, stress points, and release. A scene isn't just a sequence of events; it's a designed experience with a pulse.

There's also an implicit claim about authorship. Opera is collaborative by necessity, but Floyd is staking out the composer's responsibility as dramaturg: the person accountable for whether the audience feels the moment land. The intent is practical; the subtext is artistic sovereignty.