Lewis Spratlan's Opera Life is a Dream Premiered at the Santa Fe Opera, by Charles Warren
Music by Lewis Spratlan
Text by James Maraniss, after Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Conductor: Leonard Slatkin
Director: Kevin Newbury
Cast:
Segismundo - Roger Honeywell
Basilio - John Cheek
Rosaura - Ellie Dehn
Clotaldo - James Maddalena
Clarin - Keith Jameson
Astolfo - Craig Verm
Estrella - Carin Gilfry
The story has been well told in the musical press by now about the delay in production of Lewis Spratlan’s great opera Life Is a Dream — commissioned in the late 1970s by an opera company that went out of business before the opera could be produced; rejected numerous times by other American and European companies; awarded the Pulitzer Prize a decade ago for a concert performance of Act II; more rejections for a full staging… Congratulations and thanks are due at last to General Director Charles Mackay and the Santa Fe Opera for taking a new look at this work, seeing its intrinsic worth and its great potential as staged music drama, believing in it, and now giving it a committed and brilliant production. This occasion is a triumph for all concerned. Here palpably, for the eyes and ears and mind, is one of the great American operas, one of the great modern operas, one of the great operas.
