MEDIATHEK

Letters from Quebec to Providence in the Rain is very brief (20 minutes), but quite dense: a whodunnit, love triangle, and tale of revenge all in one. My goal was to compose an opera that, despite extreme brevity and limited forces (4 singers and 12 players), possesses the complexity and scope of a full-length opera. The libretto is adapted from a short play by Don Nigro, a modern master of the American theater.
 
 The relationships between the opera's characters are revealed as it unfolds. Three of the characters—Petrus, Jonathan, and Marianne—are introduced via musical ideas that follow them throughout the work. Petrus is associated with a simple melody that he sings at the beginning of the opera (“I’ve found some letters”). The deranged Jonathan’s “mad” music is full of strident leaps and is strongly spiced with sevenths and seconds. Marianne enters the drama not by singing but by humming to herself; the majority of her music is light, colored with thirds and sixths.
 
 Vanessa doesn’t have any characteristic motif or intervals. Rather, she borrows from each of the other characters, and often inverts their ideas. Thus, she echoes Petrus’s simple tune by inverting it (“You’ve found some letters”), and when remembering happier times with Marianne, harmonically inverts Marianne’s music. She later takes over Jonathan’s mad music entirely. But the entire opera charts her journey of self-discovery; she uncovers her past by exploring the lives and memories of the people around her.