Cincinnati Opera today announced that for its centennial year in 2020 it has commissioned a new opera from Fellow Travelers composer Gregory Spears and librettist Tracy K. Smith, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet laureate of the United States. The opera, Castor and Patience, will premiere in July, 2020 at Corbett Theater in the School for Creative and Performing Arts. It will be “evening-length,” according to a press release issued by the Opera
In that press release issued, Smith — who won a Pulitzer for her 2012 poetry collection Life on Mars — explained the new opera’s focus. “(It) tells the story of African American cousins who find themselves at odds over the fate of a historic parcel of land they have inherited in the American South,” she said. “It’s 2008, and Patience is fighting to stave off overzealous developers. Castor has a ballooning mortgage to contend with and is hoping to sell his share of the land. But if they’re going to get anywhere as a family, they must first learn to see past their differing allegiances and trust one another. Castor and Patience is the story not just of a single family or even a particular geography, but of America’s warring tensions between reckoning with the hard facts of history and racing blindly forward toward the dream of progress.”
Spears composed the music (and Greg Pierce the libretto) for Cincinnati Opera’s enormously successful 2016 world premiere of Fellow Travelers, which has since been getting productions by other opera companies. It concerns the fearful life of gay federal employees during the right-wing McCarthy blacklisting of the 1950s.
In the press release, Spears said, “I am thrilled to be collaborating with Tracy K. Smith — one of my favorite authors and an old friend — on Castor and Patience, an opera that explores the ways in which the history of the South continues to shape the lives of modern Americans. It is a special honor that Cincinnati Opera, who so lovingly developed and premiered Fellow Travelers two years ago, has decided to commission this project. I am particularly excited that Tracy is writing an original libretto, rather than adapting a pre-existing work. Composing music in response to her words and story has been uniquely inspiring.”
Evans Mirageas, the Opera’s artistic director, said, “It has been an honor to watch these two young artists — already at the top of their game — develop this fascinating, important work from whole cloth. Cincinnati Opera is proud to commission and premiere this opera, which I am confident will be both timeless and thought-provoking.”
Patricia K. Beggs, Cincinnati Opera’s general director and CEO, said in the release: “In the tradition of our previous commissions of Margaret Garner and Fellow Travelers, Castor and Patience will speak to issues vital to our nation’s continuing cultural conversations. What is home? What do we owe our ancestors? How do we come to terms with the shameful parts of our nation’s history? The stage is in Cincinnati, but the impact will be well beyond.”
This article appears in Jul 4-11, 2018.
