Life is a Dream (opera)

Life is a Dream is a three-act opera with music by Lewis Spratlan from an English-language libretto by James Maraniss which was based on the 1635 play Life Is a Dream by Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca. It was written in the 1970s, but did not receive a complete stage premiere until 2010.

Spratlan's collaboration with his librettist began in the 1970s while the two were friends and colleagues at Amherst College where Spratlan was a professor of music for 36 years and Maraniss was a professor of Spanish who greatly admired Calderon's play. Spratlan wrote the opera between 1975 and 1978 on a commission from the New Haven Opera Theatre, a company which closed in 1977. Spratlan's efforts to interest another company in staging the work failed until, in January 2000, he raised funds to finance two concert performances of the opera's second act–"the second act is where most of the drama of the piece goes on," said the composer–by the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, one at Amherst College and the other in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard's Paine Hall, where the Boston Globe reviewer greeted it as "a strong piece that would prove compelling in a full production." "The concert," said a later report, "required a forty-six-piece orchestra, six singers and a chorus. A combined recording of both performances was made. Spratlan submitted it to the Pulitzer Prize Board in March 2000, and to most everyone's surprise–especially Spratlan's–it won." The Pulitzer citation noted that Spratlan had "created a theatrical world in which the characters were given distinct musical thumbprints that were meant to embody their personalities, and in which the dissonances and angularities of contemporary styles were linked with traditional dance, march and madrigal forms."

In May 2002, New York City Opera presented another concert performance of the second act. There was still no interest in staging the work until early 2009 when Santa Fe Opera's General Director Charles MacKay approached Spratlan to propose a 2010 staging.

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Wikipedia