Located in the UK
Located in the USA
Located in Europe
- George Lewis
The Comet (2024)
- C.F. Peters Corporation (World)
From Signed Commission agreement: Commissioned by AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company) Originally staged in June 2024 by Supper Club, AMOC*, The Industry, and the Curtis Institute of Music NOTE: If additional names of funders are to be added, AMOC and CO-PRODUCERS shall provide such names to PUBLISHER prior to the Full Score delivery date of March 1, 2024
Commissioner exclusivity applies
Unavailable for performance.
Unavailable for performance.
- fl(pic,bfl)/perc/pf(hpd)/electronics/str(1.0.1.1.1)
- Soprano; Contralto; Countertenor, Baritone
- 45 min
- Kearney, Douglas
Programme Note
Set in 1920s New York City, The Comet is an experimental short story by civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois that depicts a Black man and white woman as the only survivors after a comet hits Earth. The narrative explores what could happen when what Du Bois called “The Veil” of white supremacy was suddenly removed through this extreme cosmic action. The wealthy young white woman Julia and the black worker Jim begin to envision the possibility of love and change, as well as the necessity to find effective solutions to the many problems of free will, agency, and systems of class, gender and racial hegemony that had been suppressed by the social world, right up to the onset of the catastrophe.
In its premiere run of performances, The Comet is paired with Claudio Monteverdi’s L'incoronazione di Poppea, an Italian opera from 1643 unfolding among the social divisions of ancient Rome. According to director Yuval Sharon, The Comet / Poppea explores exclusion in classical music by creating an uneasy tessellation between the Baroque and the contemporary and enacting the experience of double consciousness. The work begins as a critique of the institution of opera and ends as a justification of the art form’s radical potential. Presented on a turntable divided in two halves, the disparate worlds of The Comet and Poppea unfold simultaneously, with the stage’s rotation creating a visual and sonic spiral for audiences—inviting associations, dissociations, collisions, and confluences.
Scores
Reviews
"The ever-creaking set slowly turns, turns, turns. One minute, you see Nero up to his nefarious business, exiling his wife and removing or killing any who would stand in the way of him marrying his lover, Poppea. The next minute, Jim and Julia, from different worlds, are painfully coming to terms with what it means to seemingly be humanity’s only hope. Their profound attraction is procreative, searing beyond love and sex. Nero and Poppea reveal the essence of immorality. Jim and Julia are embodiments of morality.
[...]
It’s an experimental dialogue with history in a way that only opera, with its capacity to worm its way inside the minds of characters, might attempt. What is revealed here is that there are two sides to everything. Figures on opposite sides of history and society, who speak different languages and make different music, who abuse power or seek justice; oppressors and the oppressed are all in a way prisoners, all driven by a need for love and acceptance.
[...]
What Monteverdi perhaps needs is a little Lewis. His remarkable score has elements of experimental music that flows not along with Poppea but through Monteverdi, transforming all it encounters.
And what American opera needs most of all is The Comet / Poppea. It has huge ramifications for the wide world we now occupy, what with growing arsenals of potential Neros and nukes."
"[...] the two constituent scores found moments of synthesis, analysis, and genuine play in counterpoint, helped along by Douglas Kearney’s ingenious blended libretto. Only occasionally — at its most feverishly simultaneous — did the enterprise verge on cacophony.
[...]
Lewis’s additive score is distinct from his first opera, Afterword, in its embrace of aleatoric structures. In the program book, he refers to The Comet’s music as existing 'as potential rather than as a complete description of the experience.' But his music is taut as ever, inserting itself in agile and fluid dialogue with Poppea, and the assembled players handled Lewis’s gestural language with aplomb.
[...]
Animated figures burst from the apogee of the continuo band’s delicate ornamentation. Emi Ferguson’s bass flute added sinister heft, which did not cloud the admirable lightness from harpsichordist Gabriel Crist, Baroque cellist Eric Tinkerhess, and theorbist Jason Koji Yoshida — the corps responsible for Monteverdi’s accompaniment. And string textures like harmonic glissandos and high flutters past the upper reaches of the fingerboard added deft touches to several of the Baroque arias.
Moments of stylistic mimicry, almost in the style of punch lines, served to underscore loaded text. 'When I swear I’m fixed to leave, I know I’m nearly there,' sings Du Bois’s Jim against a burst of Aaron Copland-like Americana. It quickly sours to dissonance as he finishes. 'And yesterday they would not have served me here.'"
More Info
- Costanzo, Tines, and Sharon debut George Lewis' The Comet in LA
- 11th June 2024
- George Lewis and Douglas Kearney’s The Comet draws on DuBois’s 1924 science fiction story about a Black man and a white woman, who are the only survivors of an apocalyptic comet impact.