We have come a long way since the program’s beginnings. In the early days, we reached out to faculty at the 12 institutions that made up the Kennedy Center Conservatory Project for recommendations. Several years later, we opened the application process to anyone interested. This year’s cohort was chosen from more than 130 applicants, who came from 21 states, plus Puerto Rico. As I write this, program staff are adjudicating more than 150 applications for the 2024–2025 cohort. What an exciting time for opera!

The teams that are chosen for AOI work with expert mentors and WNO staff to write and refine their operas in a little less than a year. Among the mentors, composer Kamala Sankaram is herself an alumni of AOI, and one of the most imaginative and in-demand composers writing for the stage today. Deborah Brevoort, winner of the 2023 Campbell Opera Librettist Prize, is an experienced playwright, lyricist, and librettist who serves on the faculties of NYU and Columbia. Conductor David Bloom has conducted more than 450 world premieres, including more than 30 operas at companies across the U.S., and leads three orchestras that focus on new music (Contemporaneous, Present Music, and Queer Urban Orchestra). Director Chloe Treat describes herself as a director and choreographer of “big-ass-musicals and opera.” Pulling everything together are our own Christopher Cano, AOI director, and Kelley Rourke, AOI Artistic Advisor. 

One of the things I like about AOI is the short timeline from inspiration to premiere. Interestingly, I’ve found that stories that are most specific and timely for the writers often become the most universal, moving art. This year is no exception. The operas you will see tonight wrestle with topics that touch nearly everyone: conflict between generations; the struggle to hold on to tradition in a changing world; the search for love; pollution and climate change; and the desire to express one’s authentic identity.

As a director, I remember how hard it was for me to find opportunities to practice my craft. You can only learn to direct opera by directing opera, and it’s tough to get a foot in the door. The same is true of writing opera. With AOI, we hope to bridge the gap. Our composers and librettists learn to write for professional opera singers by writing for professional opera singers. They learn how to create characters that live and breathe by workshopping and discussing their pieces over several days. They learn about the potential of the art form by watching their work unfold in real time with the support of staging, costumes, and lighting. They learn to balance orchestra and voices by hearing their work played by members of the WNO Orchestra. They learn what an audience responds to by putting something in front of an audience. 

A 20-minute opera tests a creative team in all the ways a full-length piece does; in fact, some mentors have confided that they feel the 20-minute form is more challenging than a longer work. These teams have risen to the challenge magnificently, and I can’t wait to see what they do next. I look forward to the day when I—and all of us who make up the WNO family—can say “I was there at the beginning.”

A moment of crisis at the bakery forces the family members to confront their own and each other’s assumptions about how to save the business. What aspects of tradition are non-negotiable and where are they willing to innovate? Does a middle ground exist that would allow Panadería Gabriel to honor its traditional roots while making a step into the modern world? Generational perspectives further complicate the story. Oftentimes, older family members are rooted in tradition and are not always willing to change, while younger members may see modernization as necessary for survival. In essence, this can create pressure with families as they struggle to balance cultural preservation with the realities of the present. This exploration is particularly poignant for individuals from BIPOC cultures, in which power dynamics within families may be perceived as irrevocable, rooted in traditions dating back to ancient times.

Taking center stage is Gabriel, son of Helena and father of Julia, who feels responsible for navigating through his strengths and weaknesses to solve the crisis for his family. A Way Forward immerses the audience into the journey of this compassionate man, whose actions are often deemed weak according to the traditional concept of masculinity, in which men are expected to conceal their sensibilities.

In A Way Forward, each character embodies a psychological threat to another character’s sense of normalcy, igniting trepidation among them. The question emerges: will this internal friction cause a tectonic shift, and, if so, will they find the strength to navigate it? Despite the challenges, the characters, driven by the goodness in their hearts, courageously confront their own limitations, fostering a stronger bond between them. As writers, our aim is to share the beauty inherent in this quality, one that has contributed to success within our own family dynamics.

Also, we had each been wanting to address the environment in our work and thought this could be a good vehicle for it. The biggest problem was figuring out where to start. We didn’t want to make anything too heavy, because we felt that the environmental crisis (crises?) was already heavy in real life, and creating an exact replica seemed redundant and possibly depressing. 

Melisa grew up learning to cope with the general insanities of the world through humor, so this seemed like a natural point of entry to this subject. We agreed that comedy—tragicomedy, to be specific—seemed like the appropriate lens for this story, for both our audiences as well as ourselves. Additionally, Melisa spent some time working out whether it felt more “right” to address what could have been, what should have been, or what could be. It became apparent that rather than deal exclusively with the past or present, Melisa could project wildly into the future, and perhaps touch on all three. That’s how she wound up setting the piece at a superfund site in a post-human world, and how she decided our heroes would be a couple of microplastics and a particularly spellbinding tardigrade. 

In opera, there exists an immediate element of absurdity, as the characters dramatically sing their feelings in larger-than-life fashion, decked out in grand costumes and makeup, against an elaborate backdrop of often extremely sophisticated design. And, it turns out, the kind of humor we both gravitate toward uses absurdity to make sense of things—the more absurd the reality, the more outlandish the humor. To us, this is a way for the audience (and creators) to process whatever fresh madness is going on around them. Indeed, sometimes the clearest understanding we’ve gleaned of a subject has come from some bizarre rendering of it. So it is with Forever. 

What’s been an extra delight is getting to tell this story through music and sound. Elizabeth took the notion of addressing a serious subject with a light touch, and expanded upon the sound world with her dense, colorful orchestration. The score follows Melisa’s charming, poignant text which humanizes the characters, makes us laugh, and allows us to grapple with what little control we may or may not have at the world’s end. 

We discussed at length what the final gesture might feel like, and the proposition we landed upon is, perhaps, one that speaks to the anxieties and hopes for the future that all of us share. Our wish is that you enjoy experiencing Forever as much as we’ve enjoyed the process of making it. (And, just so we don’t feel utterly powerless, here’s a list of simple ways to reduce microplastic pollution and consumption in one’s daily life: https://bit.ly/lessmicroplastic.

Still, while the clientele may vary, everyone is driven by the same instinct. They want the world to see them on their own terms. They want their dignity.

When we got our AOI commission, we hit on our setting before we knew our story: a wigmaker’s studio. Why? It seemed rich, and richly operatic. Writing about wigs meant writing about tradition, gender, queerness, and the pain and promise of human connection.

The story soon came into focus. The queen of the studio, Esther, is a veteran wigmaker on the verge of retirement. She has no friends. With her failing eyes and fingers, she can barely fulfill her backlog of orders. What’s more, she sees no future for the craft itself; after all, off-the-shelf synthetic wigs—“quick, cheap, disposable”—are now a fraction of the cost of their hand-stitched counterparts. And if you see no future for your livelihood, how can you find meaning in your life’s work?

Then a young, gender-nonconforming stranger shows up at Esther’s door, with a synthetic pink wig and a story—and an unexpected alliance starts to emerge. We’ve tried to construct our opera like a wig. Numerous threads—musical motifs, lyrical echoes—are interlinked. Time folds back on itself; settings are stitched together. Just as a wig combines hairs of many hues, we try to combine many musical colors. Stylistic elements and twists on traditional operatic forms are intertwined to create a dense tapestry that reflects the at first disparate, then increasingly unified worlds of the three characters.

Esther often points out that each hairpiece requires “a hundred thousand knots, stitched by hand.” At heart, our opera is about these knots—the countless connections and inflections we all experience every day. By the end, the warp and weft of our characters’ lives have been irreversibly interwoven. And if there’s heartbreak along the way, there’s also hope.

A final thought. Opera itself is like wig making – an old art, shaped by culture but also a shaper of it, with an illustrious past and a more precarious future. Just as wigmakers learn their craft not through books but apprenticeship, we’re grateful to the Kennedy Center for fostering a new generation of opera-makers and letting the world hear our voice.

Each year, AOI commissions three 20-minute operas from teams of composers and librettists selected from across the country. Each team workshops its opera throughout the development cycle at the Kennedy Center and has the invaluable experience of witnessing its work performed on a Kennedy Center stage.

A key element of the American Opera Initiative is connecting the young composers and librettists to professional mentors who have successfully brought new American operas to the stage. Mentors have included composers Anthony Davis, Ricky Ian Gordon, Jake Heggie, Laura Kaminsky, John Musto, Kevin Puts, and Carlos Simon; librettists Mark Campbell, Kimberly Reed, and Gene Scheer; and conductors John DeMain, George Manahan, Anne Manson, David Neely, and Steven Osgood. The mentor team, which rotates from year to year, works closely with WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello and AOI Artistic Advisor Kelley Rourke.

A Year-Long Process

Around the beginning of each calendar year, mentors and program staff select the three composers and three librettists who will be offered commissions to write short operas that will premiere one year later. Members of this 2023–2024 cohort were selected from more than 130 applicants.

After the composer-librettist pairings are announced, each team develops and submits three “pitches.” With help from the mentor team, they consider dramatic and musical opportunities for each scenario, working within a 20-minute time frame. After deciding upon and refining a concept, they begin mapping out the “beats” of their opera, considering not only the dramatic action, but also the musical structures through which it is conveyed: aria, recitative, ensembles, recurring musical themes, etc. According to Rourke, this collaborative outlining process is new for many AOI participants, who may be playwrights without opera experience, or composers without dramatic experience. 

Once the team is satisfied with the outline, the writing begins in earnest. Each commissioned work is scored for a chamber ensemble of musicians drawn from the WNO Orchestra and singers from the Cafritz Young Artist program. First versions of the scores (with piano only) are unveiled in a four-day workshop with the Cafritz Young Artists and mentors, usually sometime in September, giving the composers and librettists a chance to hear their music performed and do some intensive rewrites from the feedback received. While in D.C., teams also meet with WNO Principal Percussion John Spirtas to strategize about creating a percussion plot that meets the needs of all three operas, and with WNO Librarian Shelley Friedman, who reviews guidelines for producing full score and orchestral parts.

The workshop is a learning opportunity for both creators and performers, says Rourke. So often, opera singers are performing works by dead composers; here, they have the opportunity not only to ask composers and librettists about their intentions for the characters, but also to articulate information about what makes a part challenging (or gratifying) to sing. The revisions that take place during the workshop may involve tweaking the vocal lines, developing characters more fully, clarifying dramatic beats, or even landing punchlines more clearly. (Not to mention, working on meeting the 20-minute limit in length.)

Revised piano-vocal scores serve as a basis for orchestrated scores, which are completed in the final months of the calendar year, with input from the conductor who will lead the world premiere AOI performances in January. Clarity in the score and libretto can ease the rehearsals that begin in early January—just as the incoming composers and librettists begin working on their pitches for a new set of mentors.

Cafritz Young Artists graduates have gone on to successful careers including performances with the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, LA Opera, The Glimmerglass Festival, Santa Fe Opera, Carnegie Hall, Bayreuth Festival, Glyndebourne Festival, Vienna State Opera, and Berlin State Opera, among others. For more on the Cafritz Young Artists, visit the WNO website at kennedycenter.org.

To take the audience into that world, the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater stage will be transformed into a Prohibition-era speakeasy that provides refreshment to members of the exclusive social clubs that organize parades and balls during Mardi Gras. An onstage band plays a fresh rendition of Offenbach’s score, arranged and orchestrated by James Lowe in the style of 1920s New Orleans jazz. The two peril-tested lovers will be played by Isabel Leonard, whose Carmen was an WNO audience favorite in 2022, and Ramin Karimloo, the dashing leading man of Broadway. It promises to be effervescent, fun, with just a tiny dash of nerve-racking. Pop that champagne!

Songbird plays March 9–23.