Joby Talbot, Laura Esquivel and Christopher Wheeldon at rehearsals for Like Water For Chocolate

Last Thursday The Royal Ballet at long last gave the world premiere of Like Water For Chocolate, a new ballet, based on the novel by Mexican writer Laura Esquivel, that choreographer Chris Wheeldon and I have been working on for more than three years.
 
It was an unforgettable night, and I still feel kind of shell-shocked.
 
The weeks leading up to opening night started intense and grew progressively more so.

With 24 hours to go we still hadn’t made it through the show from start to finish and the atmosphere around the Royal Opera House was worryingly frantic.

Francesca Hayward, Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé (photo by Tristram Kenton)

Then, as always seems to be the way with ballet – or at least with The Royal Ballet – an alchemical shift happened.

A first performance of exquisite emotional balance appeared, seemingly out of nowhere and left me standing at the side of the stage, pinching myself, and trying to work out whether everything I’d seen and heard had really just happened.
 
No matter how many times I sit in that beautiful space and hear my music being played I’ll never get used to it. And this time, after all we’ve been through in the past few years, I found the experience to be more fantastically unreal than ever.
 
In the darkest days of the pandemic I’d begun to wonder whether the music I was writing would ever see the light of day at all.

Anna Rose O'Sullivan (photo by Tristram Kenton)

Composing is such a solitary undertaking  at the best of times. It’s often hard to imagine that what you’re writing will make any sense at all to the people for whom it’s intended.

This time, partly because of Covid, and partly just because I found this particular project so incredibly hard to write, I lived alone with the music for far longer than normal – and probably far longer than was healthy.

I can’t describe the sense of relief I felt when, on first visiting the ballet studios back in February, I finally saw bodies moving through space with my music playing, and realised that it was indeed possible to dance to what I’d written.

Marcelino Sambé and Francesca Hayward (photo by Tristram Kenton)

When conductor Alondra de la Parra started rehearsing the orchestra, I was beyond thrilled by how quickly the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House – a Rolls-Royce of a band if ever there was one – took to my complex rhythms and unusual orchestrations, and immediately started to make the music their own. There was even a brief moment where I nearly stopped worrying...
 
But it didn’t last long. The thing is, you don’t really know what you’ve got till you see everything onstage – properly lit, in costume, run right through from beginning to end, with the orchestra and dancers fully committed, and of course with a real live audience.

On Thursday all those things came together perfectly. But it was one hell of a rollercoaster of a ride to get there.

Like Water For Chocolate is being performed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden until June 17. For more information, visit: roh.org.uk