An American Operatic Season Year Lost In Transition... And Then A Philip Glass/Christopher Hampton World Premiere Based On The American Civil War!

Janos Gereben of San Francisco (www.sfcv.org) reports that American General Director David Gockley, fresh from a distinguished career in Houston, is hitting the ground running as successor to Pamela Rosenberg at the San Francisco Opera. After the conservative 2006-07 Season noted below, Mr Gockley has commissioned Philip Glass and librettist Christopher Hampton to create an American opera, for premiere in 2007, on tragic American events at Appomattox, Virginia, during the American Civil War. (Will the Washington National Opera itself witness a Philip Glass premiere in my lifetime, afterall? ... And won't the employment of Mr Hampton as librettist perhaps lead to a potentially stronger work than the Robert Wilson/Glass/Byrne/Anderson civiL warS (or something like that) from the post-modern, American operatically barren, 1980s?)

Mssrs Glass and Hampton are, of course, fresh from their very well received J. M. Coetzee opera, Waiting for the Barbarians, which premiered in Erfurt, Germany last Summer. Will DGG now step forward and record the work as part of their 20/21 program?

San Francisco Opera 2006-'07 season

UN BALLO IN MASCHERA by Giuseppe Verdi
DIE FLEDERMAUS by Johann Strauss, Jr.
RIGOLETTO by Giuseppe Verdi
TRISTAN UND ISOLDE by Richard Wagner
THE BARBER OF SEVILLE by Gioacchino Rossini
MANON LESCAUT by Giacomo Puccini
CARMEN by Georges Bizet
DON GIOVANNI by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
DER ROSENKAVALIER by Richard Strauss
IPHIGENIE EN TAURIDE by Christoph Willibald Gluck

With many thanks to Janos for the information.












Chersones, Ukraine. In the general ancient Black Sea cultural sphere of J.M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians, set to music by Philip Glass and Christopher Hampton in 2005. (While the ancient Greeks controlled the ancient Ukrainian and Russian coastal areas and riverfronts, the Sythians and other culturally energetic peoples controlled the inland area north of the Black Sea.)

(Also see previous post.)

Image credit: http://www.sevastopol.iuf.net/rus/museums/img/chersones.jpg