Francesca Simon writes:
SALKA, Lady of the Lake, started life as a cantata called The Faerie Bride. My friend and opera collaborator, the composer Gavin Higgins, suggested we turn the medieval Welsh legend about a lake faerie who marries a shepherd on condition he never strikes her three heart-blows into a piece for two voices, choir, and symphony. The Faerie Bride premiered at the Aldeburgh music festival in 2022 with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, featuring baritone Roderick Williams and mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons–who had stared as Hel in our opera The Monstrous Child, at the Royal Opera House–and then went on to be performed in the 2023 Three Choirs Festival. Over a long Covent Garden lunch, I told Leah Thaxton, my wonderful editor, all about The Faerie Bride, and she asked me if I’d turn the cantata into a novella.
I hesitated. Not because I didn’t love the story, but because I wasn’t sure how to tell it as a novella. Who should narrate? Should it be Salka? Owain? Both of them? Or a third person, all- seeing narrator? I couldn’t decide, so I just started writing to see what happened. First, Salka (named after Rusalka, the Dvorak opera about a water nymph who falls in love with a prince.) Her voice came to me immediately, as did Owain’s, the enchanting shepherd boy she gives up her faerie world for. But love love love can be tiresome, both to read and to tell, so I knew the story needed more grit.
Fortunately, Angharad, Owain’s mother, wanted to speak and had a lot to say. So I let her. I could inhabit three voices, and Angharad’s thoughts about her faerie daughter-in-law would add another dimension to the tale. (In fact, she became my favourite character.) Next, to my great surprise, Mati the sheepdog wanted a word. As a dog lover, I certainly wasn’t going to say no.
After the first four voices, the dam broke, and I ended up telling Salka and Owain’s story from the point of view of fifteen people.
Since I always wanted one of Salka’s themes to explore how insular communities project their fears and longings and prejudice onto outsiders, whose ways are other, it seemed right that the people of Myddfai should speak. Salka enchants, enrages, alarms, disturbs. There are many versions of her story, the legend of the lady of Lyn Y Fan Fach, and it’s been a joy to write mine.
