Desire WORLD PREMIERE
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Desire WORLD PREMIERE MUSIC BY Hannah Lash LIBRETTO BY Hannah Lash, with Cori Ellison Commissioned by Miller Theatre at Columbia University © 2018 Schott Helicon Music Corporation Wednesday, October 16, 8 p.m. | Thursday, October 17, 8 p.m. Click on a section to learn more OVERVIEW SYNOPSIS NOTES CREATIVE TEAM CAST OVERVIEW Desire Wednesday, October 16, 8 p.m. | Thursday, October 17, 8 p.m The performance runs approximately 65 minutes with no intermission. A flowering garden sets the scene for the world premiere of award-winning composer Hannah Lash’s newest chamber opera. Written for a cast of three singers and string quartet, Desire grapples with the human, personal struggle of trusting oneself in the midst of doubt. The score paints a lush sonic landscape, performed by the adventurous JACK Quartet, and transports audiences to this metaphoric garden of creativity. Major support for Desire is provided by Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts. Additional support is provided by the Howard Gilman Foundation. Desire SYNOPSIS Present day. Set in a bedroom without definitive boundaries. A man and a woman lie in bed. The man sleeps, while she lies awake. The woman quietly climbs out of bed slowly, careful not to wake the man. The woman moves to the outer parts of the bedroom where it is dark. A warm, cavernous environment emerges. She calls out and is surprised to hear an echo. She continues to call out, the echo responds. Is it another person? She discovers curiosities around her and wonders if they may be hiding other secrets. She then discovers a figure who seems to belong to this mysterious space. She gasps at the discovery, and when she asks him who he is, his reply is “The garden. You.” They discover the garden together. She begins to understand this place she is creating. He tells her that when she has finished there will be something extraordinary: light, a song; unspeakable beauty. The figure touches her and they lock eyes. There is energy between them. A bird appears, having been born of their hands. She is overwhelmed by the flowering scent of the garden. She wants to stay in the garden and with him, but backs away, returning to the bedroom. The man in the bedroom is still asleep. The woman wakes him. He tells her he dreamt that she left, then notices a leaf in her hair. She describes her garden and its beauty. The man cannot understand, and does not believe the garden exists. She pulls him toward the edge of the bedroom to show him. He follows, uncertain. Returning to the garden, she is shocked to discover it is not as vivid as it was before. The mysterious figure is gone. When she reaches for a flower, it turns to ash. The bird falls to the ground at her touch. She questions herself, wondering what she did to destroy what she has created. Distraught, she insists they leave. The man tries to comfort her, guiding her back to the bedroom, saying it was just a dream. Angry at his disbelief, she pulls away from him. A faint light in the garden draws the woman back. The figure is there sitting on a stone. She interro- gates him, questioning what happened and why the garden as she knew it was gone. He doesn’t have an answer. They connect again, but this time is different, darker and more urgent. The man in the bedroom is upset to see the woman is gone. He searches for the garden. He finds it and sees the woman and man together. He confronts them. A struggle begins. The man demands that they leave. The struggle continues and the woman distances herself. She returns to the garden, now bathed in a soft light. They turn to watch her, but do not follow. She picks up the bird and buries it. A thousand golden birds burst forth and scatter into the air. She sings with joy, with strength as the light continues to grow stronger and the garden is restored. Desire NOTES Creating Desire PROGRAM NOTES BY LARA PELLIGRINELLI “I don’t consider myself a storyteller. I consider myself a maker of metaphors and an asker of questions.” — Hannah Lash A shadowy bedroom with cracked, distressed walls. A string quartet seated on the stage, bowing delicate figures. An unnamed woman on the verge of discovery; her companions a man, who attempts to enforce his own version of reality, and a mythical being, who helps her uncover a gateway to other worlds. Hannah Lash’s opera Desire is spare in its physical and musical conception, but emotionally expansive, revealing boundless private interiors. “The idea of allowing an opera to be very intimate, very internal, and not necessarily about spectacle is very beautiful to me,” says Lash. “I love when something is suggested rather than made explicit.” Desire is fueled by suggestion. The arc of the plot is barely a story, as Lash herself would say. A woman awakens in the night beside her lover. She rises to find herself in a garden, where she is surprised to see that she is not alone. With the aid of a mysterious character – we might think of him as a muse, or even her echo – she unearths natural wonders and brings the space into blossom. But when she returns to the room to tell her lover, he does not believe her. Was the experience just an illusion, a wishful fever dream? When she attempts to show him the garden, it crumbles before her eyes. She must return and restore it on her own. Desire is brimming with attraction, and yet the magnetic forces at play are not those of a romantic triangle. Rather, the piece is a metaphor for the creative process, dispelling illusions of what it means to encounter inspiration and overcome self-doubt. The departure to the garden mirrors the way a woman might slip into her imaginative life, wrestling with the pull of the domestic sphere despite her wishes to pursue her own artistic vision. The message is ultimately one of empowerment and self-reliance. Although Desire’s themes clearly place it in a long and distinguished lineage of feminist works descended from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, it is unusual material for opera. The genre is still dominated by male composers and perspectives; grand productions of 19th-century fare continue to loom large at prevailing institutions. Perhaps it is unsurprising then that Lash has sought her inspiration elsewhere. She describes her influences as vocal works that tend towards the dramatic, but are not explicitly theatrical. Historically, they lie at opposite ends of opera’s evolution. On the one hand, Lash admires works from the dawn of the art form: Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and L’incoronazione di Poppea, as well as the oratorios of Giacomo Carissimi and Heinrich Schütz. In addition to their extraordinary focus, she says the music and story in these works “come together in such a way that neither feels as though it is embellishing the other one.” On the other hand, Lash also reveres early modern opera, including Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1893), based on Maeterlinck’s symbolist play about a love triangle and evoking dream states through music; Béla Bartók’s Desire NOTES CONT. Bluebeard’s Castle (1918), a psychological drama about the secrets of the soul; and Leoš Janáček’s From the House of the Dead (1930), an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s autobiographical novel about his time in a Siberian prison camp, a setting conducive to exploring remorse, empathy, and forgiveness. In all of them, the characters’ inner lives take precedence over external drama. In terms of her contemporaries, Lash belongs to a generation of composers in their 30s and 40s refashioning an unwieldy genre into agile chamber pieces, Missy Mazzoli, David T. Little, Du Yun, and Ellen Reid central among them. Librettist Royce Vavrek, a highly sought after partner in these circles, bears mentioning as a creative force in his own right. An upsurge in new works has been enabled by opportunities to create them, through workshops and commissioning grants, as well as a rise in small, experimental opera companies and festivals. But opera’s contemporary appeal to composers likely goes beyond a need to update the form. It may very well be driven by a more fundamental impulse to tell stories, which has manifested itself across creative arenas: we see it in the New New Journalism; the rise of memoir as a formidable genre; a second golden age of radio and its extension through podcasting; a renaissance in television dramas through their serialization on streaming services; and, perhaps, most importantly, the ways in which social media has allowed us to perform our own stories while consuming those of others. We feel compelled to tell them and share them. After all, we live in an age of ubiquitous self- documentation. While Lash has been swept up in this wave, she has positioned herself in opposition to it. “It’s not about stories for me,” she says. “My operas don’t tend to be narratives. In that way, I feel that I’m a bit of a rebel in my generation— that I don’t fit in. I’m constantly trying to stand firm in a current that’s rushing in a direction I’m not compelled to go in.” If Desire can be considered an anti-narrative, its characters are vessels for larger themes and ideas as in Debussy’s symbolist work that Lash so admires. In that sense, Desire may also belong to countercurrents in recent literature through “autofiction,” first-person narratives by authors such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner that appear to be fiction, but are really autobiographical, blurring the lines between author and character.