![]() ![]() Sam has been estranged from his children for many years-Junior, who is mentally ill, had fled to Canada to dodge the Vietnam draft, and Dede and François live with him there to care for him. Their two grown children, Junior and Dede, return home for their mother's funeral with Dede's husband (and Junior's lover), François. Sam's wife Dinah has recently been killed in an alcohol-induced car crash. Throughout the Leonard Bernstein Centennial, A Quiet Place received 40 performances by opera companies in Austria, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and the US. In this new environment, A Quiet Place finally enjoyed its New York Premiere in 2010 with the New York City Opera's production, directed by Christopher Alden and conducted by Jayce Ogren, and continues to intrigue audiences through its musical and psychological complexities. Crossover works that blend a variety of musical styles and explore contemporary subject matter are now much more common. The American language has never been treated in this particular way before." However, much has changed in American opera since 1984. It has a special language and sound all its own. ![]() As Bernstein said of his only full-length opera and final stage work, "It sounds like no other work by me or by anybody else I know of. It may be that A Quiet Place was simply ahead of its time. ![]() It has not, however, been staged professionally since Bernstein's death in 1990. The production was very well-received in Italy before moving to the Kennedy Center the following month, and the opera was subsequently performed in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands. The revised A Quiet Place premiered at La Scala in June 1984, conducted by Mauceri and directed by Wadsworth. The revised version-now a three-act opera containing all of Trouble in Tahiti-creates a more immediate dialog between past and present, the original musical motifs, and their reprises. After the premiere, conductor John Mauceri urged the writers to re-conceive the relationship between the two works, and in the year that followed, Bernstein and Wadsworth trimmed parts of the original A Quiet Place and interpolated the 40-minute Trouble in Tahiti into the new work as two flashback scenes. Some critics rejected the unusual subject matter and hybrid form, while others lauded the work for its musical sophistication and inventiveness. Artistically, they wanted to write an "American" opera-a through-sung musical drama that would use vernacular speech and music to explore American middle-class problems by drawing upon the American musical theater tradition in addition to contemporary opera.Ī triple commission from Houston Grand Opera, the Kennedy Center, and La Scala, A Quiet Place premiered in Houston on June 17, 1983, as a two-hour, one-act opera that followed Trouble in Tahiti on a double bill. On a personal level, they felt a need to write about death and loss Bernstein's wife Felicia had died of cancer two years earlier, and Wadsworth's sister Nina had been killed in a tragic car accident only one year before. In 1980, Bernstein discovered that a 30-year-old writer named Stephen Wadsworth had a similar idea of writing a sequel-opera to Trouble in Tahiti, so they began working together to achieve their common goals. This is presented musically by repurposing musical and dramatic motifs from Trouble in Tahiti, and though often dark and emotionally searing, A Quiet Place is interspersed with moments of communion, and ultimately ends on a hopeful note with a promise of reconciliation. They all yearn for and remember moments of intimacy, but struggle desperately to achieve it in the present. What was satirical, melodic, and jazz-inflected in the earlier chamber-opera became deeply psychological and percussive, moving fluidly between tonality and atonality.Ī Quiet Place tells the story of a contemporary American family struggling to connect, forgive, and accept one another's differences after the death of a loved one. Trouble in Tahiti was Bernstein's satirical caricature of 1950s American suburban life, gently exposing the illusion of contentment through its candid depiction of a couple's failing marriage however, A Quiet Place examines the same family, three decades later, through a darker and more emotionally wrought lens. 1984), one can reflect on the vast changes in the American cultural landscape between the 1950s and the 1980s. When comparing Leonard Bernstein's two operas, Trouble in Tahiti (1951) and its sequel, A Quiet Place (1983 rev. By Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Wadsworth ![]()
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