Most social media spats are storms in teacups and while a few can be blown completely out of proportion, on the whole they are usually over in a couple of days. However, in one particular case a Twitter feud has served as an unlikely source of inspiration. Last June an incident was picked up by various news sources, including the New York Time’s Paul Krugman, who wrote a post that was as short as it was damning. Krugman said the Estonian austerity budgeting has created, “…a terrible — Depression-level — slump, followed by a significant but still incomplete recovery.” Before going on to conclude, “Better than no recovery at all, obviously — but this is what passes for economic triumph?”

Then followed a retort from Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves who was taking his first baby steps onto the social media platform. Taking to the stage the new politician revealed his scorn at the softly dismissive Nobel-winning economist. Culminating in a tweet of striking sarcasm: “Let’s sh*t on East Europeans: their English is bad, won’t respond & actually do what they’ve agreed to & reelect govts that are responsible.” Hardly words befitting a head of state, more the medium.

Then writer Scott Diel is asked by Eugene Birman, a composer and fellow American in Tallinn, to write a libretto. Diel has freedom of topic. Instead of writing about a grand incident such as the rise of neoliberal capitalism in the early Nineties or the dissuasion to join the Euro, the focus is more acute, he picks the spat. At the heart of the libretto is the idea that Estonia is bullied by global forces and instructed on what to do economically by bigger powers.

I spoke to Diel at the premiere and he said “the kernel of the idea came from a mental list I’ve kept in my head over the years of all the times Estonia has rejected advice from the West and done things its own way”.

“I thought this series of big brotherly advice from the West was material for something, but at the time it seemed far too much for 16 minutes.”

“I had one of Krugman’s books open on the nightstand and started to think about that topic – stimulus as another instance of big brotherly advice. When I reviewed Ilves’ tweets they just sort of recommended themselves. So I took those tweets, added a few lines of explanatory text and then constructed a part for Krugman based on what he’d written.”

The libretto premiered Sunday night with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra. It’s a peculiar piece that works asynchronously to the narrative, only occasionally echoing the text. Wonderfully enlivened when vocalist Iris Oja inflexes sh*t. What results is a work of simple command and clean execution.

Diel goes on to say, “What interested me about this was that it seemed to be an incidence of the larger historical debate coming to an emotional head. It interested me that the disagreement between Ilves and Krugman served to some extent as a proxy for the bigger argument.”

But the incident points to a strangeness. Politicians rarely swear in public and lesser so on Twitter. “Surely they swear like plumbers in private,” notes Diel, “so President Ilves’ remarks merely proved to the public that he was human.” But as Ilves tweets like a rather potty-mouthed bird he usurps the traditional and I’d argue proper medium for presidents: to write a letter to the editor. So surely a libretto of the incident would be to highlight and expend the absurdity of the incident?

But no. Diel adopts an intelligent approach to a vibrant issue, and executes it without falling into cliché. And with the music, retains a neutrality. The semantics of the event is hugely relevant, and that writing about a specific political incident is a traditional, folkloric, although potentially forbidden thing to do. Although Diel points me to the broader historical nature of his motivation.

Strangely structured the work finds interest when imagining the chronology of events taking place as the music plays through. In this contemplation there’s the brutality of austerity and empathising with a belittled nation, a President’s frustration and an economist’s arrogance. It’s subtle, but it’s all there.

The performance was part of Estonian Music Days and took place at the House of the Brotherhood of Blackheads.