Amelia (opera)

Amelia is an opera in two acts by Daron Hagen to a libretto in English by Gardner McFall based on a story by Stephen Wadsworth. It had its world premiere at the Seattle Opera on May 8, 2010.

In 2007 Amelia became Seattle Opera's first new commission in 25 years.The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation issued a grant of $500,000 in 2009 to underwrite the first two revivals of the world premiere production.

The opera is set in America and Vietnam between 1966 and 1996. It revolves around the title character, Amelia, who is expecting her first child and explores her relationship with her father, Dodge, a United States Navy pilot who died in the Vietnam War. The story is told by interweaving various times, realities, and real, historic, and mythological figures.

Scene 1 - America, the Mid-1960s

Outside a suburban tract house a nine-year-old girl named Amelia sings a hymn to the stars as inside her mother folds laundry. Her father, a navy pilot named Dodge, emerges from the house in dress whites and indicates to her that it is time for bed. Her mother, Amanda, receives news that her husband Dodge has been shot down and is missing over Vietnam. Amelia is sung to sleep by her father and dreams of the final flight of Amelia Earhart. During the course of the scene it becomes clear that we are seeing the Father and his daughter in flashback and the mother in the present.

Scene 2: America, mid-1990s

Amelia, now aged 31 and in the final trimester of pregnancy, awakens in the arms of her husband Paul, an aeronautical engineer. Across the room toil Icarus and Daedalus on their wings. They are products of Amelia's imagination. It becomes clear that Amelia has serious unresolved emotional and psychological issues with the loss of her father that have been intensified by her pregnancy. In a flashback, she relives the moment her mother told her that her father had gone missing.

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