ADA

libretto by Margaret Vandenburg

“Ada” is an opera celebrating Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, (1815-1852) One of the most spectacular characters in computer history, her life was epic.

Ada was the daughter of the Romantic (and rather mad) poet Lord Byron and the “Princess of Parallelograms”, Annabella Milbanke. Concluding that she could not “cure” Byron of his scandalous behavior, (among his transgressions, he fathered a child with his half-sister) five weeks after Ada’s birth, Annabella separated from Byron and was awarded sole custody of Ada. Fearing her daughter might follow in her fathers notorious footsteps, Anna secreted her away, cramming her days with Math and Science lessons so that any creative tendencies would be stifled. Instead, Ada’s inherent genius and creativity became expressed through numbers, leading Ada to ambitious and extraordinary discoveries. Like her father, Ada embarked on a Romantic quest very much at odds with the prevailing Victorian ethic of restraint. Though her medium was mathematics, she rejected the notion that virtue lies in conformity, believing instead in a higher ethic of knowledge and ambition. As a young woman, Ada met the inventor Charles Babbage and became smitten with his new invention, The Difference Engine. Ada melded her father’s Romantic visions with her mother’s mathematical genius to develop the prototype of modern computer language. She is often cited as ‘the first programmer.’ She died of cancer at the age of thirty-seven, and is buried next to the father who she never knew in life.

The music of “Ada” contains a nexus of old and new, pairing Romantic lyricism with atonal vocabulary to reflect the opposing forces contained in the person of Ada Byron, who embodied the conflict between her parents as well as the clashing shift between The Age of Reason and The Romantic Movement. She struggled with this dichotomy her entire life until she decided to combine the two in creating “The Poetry of Numbers”. These warring factions are very much present in the score. There are soaring lyrical melodies juxtaposed with introverted passages of minimalism, next to highly percussive and dissonant gestures. The libretto weaves tapestries of numbers and Byronic flights of fancy into a story that is simultaneously timeless and timely, the journey of a woman who ushered the industrial age into the digital age. Ada was a brilliant and imaginative pre-conceiver, a woman very much ahead of her time, who valiantly wrestled with the societal constraints imposed upon her.

Recent public attention has acknowledged the contributions of Ada Byron Lovelace to our computer age world, and she has become the heroine she was meant to be.Item description

Libretto by Darrah Cloud

Premiered by Theaterworks, Palo Alto, California (1994)

Winner of Frederick Loewe Foundation Award (1994)

The epic story of the great Lakota warrior Crazy Horse and the last days of the free Lakota people.

LONG ISLAND DREAMER, RED TIDE and LAMENTATIONS

Libretto by Paul Selig

Commissioned by New Music Theater Ensemble, St. Paul

Premiered by New Music Theater Ensemble (1996)

Characters on the cusp of self-realization unwittingly collide with elements of the fantastic–stray killers, beach ghosts, bed ghosts– and find their personal trajectories irrevocably altered.

Long Island Dreamer evokes a doo-wop sound (four voices accompanied only by an electric bass). “Are there any Long Island dreamers out there?” asks Amana del Ray, after a stranger of unknown intention appears at the window…In Red Tide, Lutece, a boy of 15 returns to a beach, ostensibly in search of a lifeguard who saved him from drowning a decade previously. In truth, however, he has been drawn there, like a moth to a flame, by a mystical power he cannot explain to his friend, a hopelessly earthbound clod whose name, aptly, is Worm… Like an un-sanitized German Fairy tale, Lamentations is a dark psychodrama where aberrant sexuality and corrosive envy reveal the deeper scripts of ordinary lust and desire.

Libretto by Eric Anderson

BLUESTEM is an intimate opera weaving together two works by American writer Willa Cather. The first part of “Song of the Lark” is set in the 1890s, and tells of Thea, a fledgling opera singer, ready to burst forth from her hometown in the rural foothills of Colorado . This story alternates with Cather's short story “The Sculptor’s Funeral”, set in the same town but our time, with the apprentice sculptor Stephen accompanying the body of his mentor and lover Harvey, a world-renown sculptor, back to the artist's hometown for burial. Both are from humble roots, nurtured and stifled by their early environments.

Thea, having come from a ramble in the hills, takes a piano lesson from her teacher, Professor Wunsch. He instills strange, beautiful ideas about music and art in her head. But she is busy at home, and in a budding romance with railroad man, Ray Kennedy. As Wunsch's notions intensify inside her, she finds herself overwhelmed with feelings of fear and excitement. She cannot afford to go away to study. And, increasingly, she cannot comfortably stay homebound. Ray’s death in a railway accident and a financial bequest to her in his will finally free her to escape.

Woven throughout Thea’s story, and as a dramaturgical counterpoint, Stephen arrives alone in a drab little town, accompanying his lover’s body home. Stephen, in his grief, is troubled by Harvey’s insistence on returning to his childhood home to be buried—a town full of small-minded people indifferent, even cruel to him as a boy. A contingent of townspeople show up to “view” Harvey’s body and gossip about him. Harvey’s childhood friend, Jim Laird, appears and befriends Stephen. He chastises the townspeople, then helps Stephen deal with his grief and confusion. They go out to the countryside and together begin to understand why their friend Harvey chose to come back to his hometown, despite all its “garbage and meanness.”

One artist is born. Another is laid to rest. Each tale enriches the other.

A Chamber Opera based on the Ibsen play. Love’s Comedy is relatively unknown in the USA but considered by many to be the playwright's first masterpiece. By turns romantic, ironic, and wry, the people of "Love's Comedy" engage with the enduring questions of love, marriage, and truth in relationships. Two young people -- a fiery, iconoclastic poet, Falk, and a brilliant, bold woman worthy of her mythic name, Svanhild, fall in and out and back in love, roiling the placid waters and assaulting the confining morality of their all-too-comfortable middle class social circle. A wealthy older man, Guldstad, offers Svanhild his hand, and a promise of freedom, as an alternative to Falk's self-absorbed egotism. When Falk accuses him of using his money to win her, he offers to provide for her no matter whom she chooses. Her difficult decision forms the climax of the opera as the gathered society of relatives and friends looks on. 

3 sopranos, 1 Mezzo, 2 Tenors, 2 Baritones, Chorus