How to engrave an Opera (in Sibelius) – ep. 13

Episode 13 – The piano reduction

Welcome back! Today we look at how to create the vocal score for your opera. Without further ado, le’s get started!

When to do it

It may seem obvious, but unless you or the composer decided to create the opera first on the piano, you will perform this as the last step. I believe this is best done when the score has been fully written out so that you only need to remove the orchestra, add the piano, and write it in.

How to do it

Sibelius has fairly recently implemented a feature called Score Subsets, allowing you to create additional Score layouts beyond the Full Score¹. This feature is not yet 100% functional, so I will first show you how to create your vocal score template without it, and then we will give it a chance.

No Score Subset method

Go to your file manager (File Explorer on Windows, the Finder on macOS), and locate the template for the full score. Duplicate this file and change its name to “Opera Template – Vocal Score”. Open it with Sibelius and follow these steps:

1. On the first music page, select the “Special Page Break” layout overlay symbol and delete it, since we do not need any front matter here (unless your publisher says otherwise). If you do not see that symbol, go to View > Invisibles > Layout marks in the Ribbon and make sure it is checked. As a result, all the front matter pages will disappear.
2. Open the Instruments dialogue (press I on your keyboard or go to Home > Instruments > Add or Remove.
3. Carefully select every stave that won’t be needed in the vocal score, making sure you leave all singers, all choir instances, and the top-level Stage Instructions stave.
4. Tap on the Delete from Score button, and on Yes in the pop-up. You may avoid this by hiding all staves and their contents, instead, but I advise you not to do that. Sibelius becomes incredibly slow if it has to manage invisible staves with content, or above a certain number of staves.
5. In the Add Instrument field, type “Piano” and add it to the score, possibly adding a third stave above if you believe it will be needed.
6. Confirm and exit the dialogue by hitting OK.
7. Enter Document Setup by pressing Cmd/Ctrl-D or by going to Layout > Document Setup and tapping on the SE-pointing arrow.
8. Change the page and staff size according to the instructions from your publisher. If you got no instructions, it all depends on where you are located. If American sizes are to be used, choose one between 9×12, 9.5×12.5, and 10×13 inches (a bigger one will help the pianist). With A-based (European) sizes, please do not use A4, rather use B4. Reduce the margins to something sensible compared to the A3 paper (roughly reduce them to 50-60% of their original value), and increase the staff size to about 6.5 mm or more.
9. Adjust the size and position of any text style you see as looking odd at the moment. Your personal taste will guide you here.

That’s it for this method!

Score Subset method

Go back to your file manager and create yet another copy of the full score, calling it “Opera Template – with Subsets”. Open it with Sibelius and follow these steps:

1. Add a new “Piano” instrument to the score and move it to the bottom of your score. In the Full Score, change its name to something sensible, such as “Piano (rehearsal)”.
2. Now select the first bar of the top stave and Shift-select the first bar of the last stave before the extra piano we created.
3. Go to Parts > Create > Score Subset. A new tab called “Score Subset 1” opens next to the Full Score. Immediately go to File > Info and change its name to “Orchestral Score”.
4. Now go back to the “Full Score” and, using Panorama view, Cmd/Ctrl-select all the vocal staves and the bottom piano staves. Repeat the process to create a new Score Subset. Edit its name to “Vocal Score”.
5. As you can see, all front matter pages have remained, since we cannot yet have independent blank pages between score subsets. If you find this annoying, simply delete all of them and use another template for the front matter, such as the Apple Pages or Adobe InDesign ones I have created. In my template using score subsets, I have removed them because of how they cannot have different text sizes. You may work around this by using Parts instead of Score Subsets, but why would you want to complicate your life so much?
6. In Document Setup, perform the same changes shown in steps 8-9 of the previous section.

There are several issues with this approach:

1. Upon creating the extra subsets, staff spacing of the other Score layouts get completely messed up and needs to be reset. If you are doing this after you have completed the layout of the orchestral score, be careful!²
2. After deleting the front matter pages from the Full Score layout, you will see that they have not been removed from the other Score Subsets.

In short: I suggest you do not use this method for creating your vocal score, unless you are simply inputting the musical material and will then extract the separate scores for layout. At this stage, Score Subsets are great scratchpads to try out different orchestrations, or as a substitute for Focus on Staves, but they are very dangerous if you are already in the final engraving and design phase. Be careful, and proceed at your own risk!

Two safer alternatives for composing from the piano

If you prefer to compose from the piano first, and then expand, I propose you make a copy of your full score and add a piano to it. Then, you can directly orchestrate above it without losing focus on the piano part. Create as many Focus Sets as desired and work your way up from there. In my template, I have created an extra full score with a dedicated piano instrument added to it.

Alternatively, from the other file, “Opera Template – Vocal Score”, you can start adding instruments to it once you are done with writing the piano part. Both approaches are possible, and only you as a composer can decide what works best for you!

Bottom Line

That’s it for today and for this series! If you got to this point, you should be proud of yourself. I hope you enjoyed the ride, and that you learned a thing or two on the side. If you did, please consider liking this article, sharing it with your friends, and subscribing to this blog to be notified of upcoming articles. If you use an iPad and would like to improve your Sibelius experience, please give a look at my profile for MetaGrid Pro here.

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Thank you for your time and continuous support.

See you in the next episode!

Michele

1. If you didn’t know, layouts in Sibelius are of two kinds: Score and Part layouts. ↩
2. That means: make sure you can roll back, make redundant copies of your original files! ↩