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. As I write this, program staff are adjudicating applications for the 2025–2026 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, Greg Spears is one of the most imaginative and in-demand composers writing for the stage today. We will soon be hearing more from him in a work slated for next season! Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019, who currently serves on the faculty of Harvard University. Conductor George Manahan has led hundreds of world premieres at opera companies and orchestras across the U.S. 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: sustaining life in an unsustainable environment; anxiety over appearances; and the drive for companionship.

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 the WNO family—can say “I was there at the beginning.”

Thank you for joining us.

Warmly,

Our characters have been swallowed by Tati at different times, for different reasons. Connie, a progress-obsessed investor, was swallowed in pursuit of the completion of her life’s work: financing a program that attempted to bioengineer giant blue whales as a viable habitat for human beings. Maysoon, an intrepid marine biologist, was swallowed after chasing the rumors of Connie’s disappearance. And Osvaldo, a food sovereignty organizer who was captured by the police during a protest, was swallowed by Tati after he jumped overboard from a barge headed to an offshore detention center.

Our characters’ differing stories are based on real-life narratives. Yet, their differences are challenged by their failing environment, and their common goal to save the life of Maysoon and Osvaldo’s soon-to-be-born child.

When a woman’s “water breaks” it signals the dawning of a new era. So, too, does the breakage that Maysoon, Osvaldo, and Connie anticipate peering through the blowhole into a chaotic and uncertain landscape. Maysoon’s baby, born inside this strange world, represents hope in the midst of collapse: the power of optimism in spite of the most extreme circumstances.

The unbelievable-believable world of Tati is the result of our shared love of worldbuilding. Musically, we sought to evoke a Gothic cathedral, with our vocalists soaring in ascendant notes against crashing waves of instrumentals. Tati is a world of reverberating whale calls, floating detritus, sounds of labor, and ever-swirling water. We wanted to represent the dissonance of contemporary life by contrasting vivid physical sensations with an intellectually irrational situation. The grand scale of opera is also perfect for exploring the absurd: we played on the humor of Maysoon’s pregnancy cravings, and Connie’s maniacal, cosmetic rituals within the world of a whale.

As new voices in opera, our goal was to create a richly imaginative world that was accessible to our audience. We did so in a generous collaboration with each other as librettist and composer. We are both songwriters, so we share a sensibility in how we approach text, music, and time. Listening to Tati, we hope you can hear how much we listened to each other throughout our process.

We feel incredibly grateful to be paired together by our fantastic mentors and artistic directors who supported the development of our big, short opera. Knowing a year ago that Tati would premiere on the eve of the presidential inauguration, we thought deeply about the questions we could ask at this moment using this special art form: What are we trapped in? What risks do we take to free ourselves? What can we learn from nature? And how do we insist on a vision for the future?

—Kyle Brenn, composer, and Lex Brown, librettist

Turns out, she wasn’t alone. The phrase, popularized by white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, saw an increase in online use by 4,600 percent on November 6.

Cry, Wolf takes place in a college apartment near UCLA in 2013. That year, Reddit passed 56 billion page views, Twitter passed 200 million monthly users, and Facebook announced support for hashtags. If the previous version of the internet was an extension of our real-life friendships, this version began the replacement of them. The internet would now aggregate and amplify our ideas with anyone, anywhere who shared them. Those of us finding connection online that year shared cat memes, pasta recipes, selfies, the Harlem Shake, and in many corners of the internet, fear.

Those corners grew and festered, creating Nick Fuentes and thousands of other alt-right, neo-Nazi, incel-aligned, online commentators who can now launch their millions of young male followers on a campaign of verbal intimidation against women literally overnight.

So where are the women in Cry, Wolf? Well, it’s Friday night at UCLA. They’re probably out with friends. Or studying for a chemistry final. Or writing Harry Potter fan fiction (it was 2013). To us, it’s important to remember that these men aren’t reacting to the presence of women. The women in their minds, the rejection and humiliation they envision, are hypothetical. These men are reacting to fear.

Cry, Wolf is a show about young men and their choices. It’s about fear and the strange ways that it can become entangled with love, care, and friendship. Fear takes many ideas and concerns and morphs them into one ear-splitting roar.

The three men in this piece are different from one another, with different life experiences, hopes, and understandings of how to be a good person, but fear asks them to shed their differences because fear speaks in one voice. It yells over the part of us that wants to object. In the case of this piece, it howls.

—JL Marlor, composer, and Clare Fuyuko Bierman, librettist

Our opera, Mud Girl, spins a Marvel Universe parallel tale from this scenario. Young River is lonely; she builds Poly, a companion, out of the mud, plastic, and AI-infused trash that surrounds them. Maude, an ex-scientist who knows the dangers of this post-flood world (“smart water, smart bombs, smart garden gnomes”) tries to stop her. But for River, who’s known no other world, the desire to create something—and someone—pushes her to defiance. And then there’s her wild-card creation, Poly…

We were excited to explore this story, both for the operatic intensity of its characters’ struggle to survive, connect, and find solace, and because it pushed us to find hope in unlikely places. Hope is hard. It’s hard to fly in the face of despair as systems of all kinds collapse, and to insist on imagination as a condition of (re-)invention. What new forms and ways of being could arise in the ruins? Musically, Omar was inspired by the sonic possibilities of a natural world (water, birds, wind) in dialogue with a sound palette that reflects synthetic materials and synthetic life. Together, we spent many hours picturing our characters’ desires and needs in an altered world, especially with the writing and composing of Poly, our “mud girl” character. Opera is a passionate art form rooted in the human voice. Could we find this emotional core in a post-human character voiced by two separate singers?

Marianne Moore famously described poems as imaginary gardens with real toads in them. For us, the real toads in Mud Girl’s imaginary garden are both big and small. The giant toads are the 4 a.m. questions: Where to find hope? How can the long view sustain us in dark times? And then there are the small ones, hopping around River’s “circle of warm” under a broken bridge. These toads are our garden familiars. They are what they always are: love, grief, desire, hope, and the raw need to create, even among the ruins.

—Omar Najmi, composer, and Christine Evans, librettist

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 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, Kamala Sankaram, and Carlos Simon; librettists Deborah Brevoort, Mark Campbell, Kimberly Reed, and Gene Scheer; and conductors David Bloom, 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 2024–2025 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 percussionist 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.