"My first reaction was that Inman is such an internal character - that he hardly speaks," Frazier says. Eventually, though, Higdon found her way to the author, who initially couldn't see the story working on stage. "We had a hard time, even at first, getting a response to get rights to the story," she says. But Higdon says securing the rights was a challenge, because the company that held them was in the process of being sold. The story is based on Charles Frazier's debut novel, published in 1997, about the soldier W.P. That there was a way of inviting music in to really illuminate the story." "We both reread the book," Scheer says, "and after doing so we were convinced that this was really a great idea for an opera. One day, on the phone, Scheer suggested Cold Mountain. So I went to see a lot of new opera, and then I just started getting tons of scores and recordings, everything from standard repertoire to Puccini, Mozart, to even anything that had been written yesterday."ĭeborah Nansteel as Lucinda and Nathan Gunn as Inman in the world premiere of Cold Mountain at the Santa Fe Opera.
"I remember going to Vienna to see John Adams' A Flowering Tree, and I saw his Doctor Atomic.
But she was also struggling with how to write her first opera. A recording of her Percussion Concerto won a Grammy, while her Violin Concerto landed her a Pulitzer Prize. It premiered this past weekend, but its road to the stage was almost as difficult as the journey home of the main character. Now it's an opera, composed by Jennifer Higdon with a libretto by Gene Scheer. If that's starting to sound a little familiar, it probably should - it's the story of Cold Mountain, a best-selling novel and a star-studded 2003 movie. Only this story is set during the Civil War. It's a story that could have been taken from a breaking news report: A soldier, gravely wounded in a brutal battle, flees the fighting to try and make his way home.
Ken Howard/Courtesy of the Santa Fe Opera Isabel Leonard and Nathan Gunn star as Ada and Inman in the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon's Cold Mountain at the Santa Fe Opera.
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