Carmen: Opera by George Bizet that, until his father's passing, David had been working on with Ivor St. Hubbin to translate into scat. David: "Occasionally I look back at what we've done and I think, Well, this was an enormous waste of time, and then I realize that no, it wasn't. It brought us close together and we got a chance to say a lot of things to each other that we wouldn't have ordinarily. And because we were working in the milieu of scat -- a classic American style; it's like exactly midway between opera and drivel, which I think is a very cozy place to be -- we were able to communicate something in this free-form, non-language language that we couldn't have in ordinary English terms. I don't know if I'll ever finish it or not. We came a long way, and of course the theory being that Italian, if one doesn't speak Italian, is scat anyway, makes the whole thing a global redundancy. Bizet was a marvelous bloke, he really knew how to turn a tune." David suggested that Jennifer Lopez and Julio Iglesias could play the leads. (SH) He also has plans for an opera called Beowulf of London. (FW) See also St. Hubbins, Ivor.