Rubato Press
Read-along books · stolen time for the page

Read the opera
before you hear
a single note.

Each book is an opera told as a novel — prose paced to a named recording. Press play, begin to read, and finish exactly as the music finishes.

Edgar Degas, The Orchestra at the Opera — musicians in the pit with ballet dancers visible above the stage.
Plate · the pitPublic domain

Edgar Degas, The Orchestra at the Opera, c. 1870 — the music made visible, an instant before it sounds.

Movement I · The Overture Series

Operas, told as novels.

Live now — three titles by Wilson Pruitt. Read them in the weeks before you go, or read alongside the recording itself.

Parsifal — An Overture, after Richard Wagner

Parsifal

An Overture · after Richard Wagner

A wound that will not close, a cup that will not empty, and the holy fool whose only gift is pity.

Afterword · “Made Wise Through Pity”
≈ 4 hr 15 · timed recording $10Read along ▸
Don Giovanni — An Overture, after Mozart & Da Ponte

Don Giovanni

An Overture · after Mozart & Da Ponte

One last night, an endless catalogue, and a man too purely himself for any words to hold.

Afterword · “The Devil You Cannot Narrate”
≈ 2 hr 55 · timed recording $10Read along ▸
Tosca — An Overture, after Giacomo Puccini

Tosca

An Overture · after Giacomo Puccini

A singer, a painter, a chief of police — and one night in Rome that refuses to be ashamed of itself.

Afterword · “That Shabby Little Shocker”
≈ 1 hr 55 · timed recording $10Read along ▸
Movements II – IV · Forthcoming

An expanding catalogue.

The read-along method, carried into dance, devotion, and music that tells no story at all.

II

Ballets

Famous ballets retold as prose, each chapter paced to the dance as it unfolds on stage.

In preparation
III

Sacred Works

Devotional reflections timed to the movements of sacred masterworks — Bach’s Mass in B minor, the cantatas.

In preparation
IV

Absolute Music

A story built to the beats of music that carries no story of its own — beginning with Beethoven’s Seventh.

In preparation · experimental

Rubato

“stolen time”

Rubato is the freedom a performer takes within the beat: time borrowed from one note and paid back to another, the pulse never lost. These books borrow that liberty for the page — and give the listener back the time a performance cannot spare.