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3 sop/mezzo/ten/bass bar/fl/altfl/ob eh/sop sax/cl bcl/kbd/vla/vc/db. Duration: 70:00. Full Score.
Parts, libretto, and a vocal score with two pianos are available from the composer.
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a chamber opera in ten scenes
by Paul A. Epstein
Libretto by Toby Olson, based on his novel Dorit in Lesbos, Simon & Schuster, 1990.
The painter Edward Church has died, and his nephew Jack, a landscape architect, returns home to Congress Park, Illinois to set his uncle’s affairs in order. He is moved by his returning, by his old childhood house, by his gradual retrieval of memories of his dead parents, and by his aging Aunt Waverly, who has remained valiant in spite of the loss of her daughter, Angela, and her husband, Edward, both of whom left her more than twenty years before. Jack searches his uncle’s belongings: personal papers, paintings, and a packet of letters Edward has sent to his estranged wife over the years of his absence. The letters reveal Edward’s rise in the London art world, his aesthetic struggle as he searches to paint a reality just under the surface of the world and people, and his tortured relationship with Dorit, his model, who becomes his lover, the mother of his child Andrew, then the lesbian companion of his daughter, Angela.
Formally the ten scenes of Dorit are analogous to a suite of paintings. Human figures and interior settings recur, as do textual motifs and, at times, musical materials. Yet the scenes are to an extent self-contained. They are arranged so as to display their contrasting colors and textures, even with some sense of sequential ordering, but their coherence is more thematic than structural. Stripped of all but a minimum of narrative, each scene unfolds lyrically, through textural layering of melodic patterns, often in harmonic stasis. Musical pattern, repeating and evolving, forms the transparent surface of the music. The pattern material is typically shared by voices and instruments; and though the voices frequently emerge from the instrumental texture as figures from a ground, transforming pattern into melody, they remain continuous with it. Ultimately it is in this web of melodic pattern that the intricate network of relationships binding the characters of the opera to one another finds resolution.
