There are tales that insist on being rediscovered. They lie dormant—not misplaced, merely ready—till the appropriate voice stirs them again to life. Longing – A Love Throughout The Ages, a one-act opera by composer Craig Brandwein and librettist David Alan Sellers, is such a narrative. Set in a museum among the many hushed relics of antiquity, it unfolds just like the opening of a forgotten scroll: quietly at first, then with emotional pressure that feels directly historical and eerily quick.
Brandwein, whose profession spans 5 a long time of music schooling, audio manufacturing, and composition for tv and movie, brings a uncommon type of inventive maturity to the opera kind. This isn’t the work of somebody attempting to show virtuosity. Moderately, it’s the work of somebody who has lived lengthy in sound—who has listened fastidiously, taught generously, and now, on the intersection of craft and reminiscence, has one thing important to say.
The opera’s premise is mythic, but human. Elise and her father, Dr. Curtis, are getting ready an Egyptian exhibit in Twenties New York. Amongst their findings: a cursed prince, entombed alive for hundreds of years, who has remained totally acutely aware. He has listened to Elise from inside his sarcophagus, discovered her language, and—in opposition to all purpose—fallen in love. What follows shouldn’t be a fantasy, however a reckoning. The prince reveals himself. Love is said. The price, as ever, is dying.
What elevates Longing past its narrative conceit is how sincerely it treats its emotional terrain. Sellers’ libretto, elegant and unforced, sidesteps melodrama for readability. His strains are direct however lyrical: “I used to be rediscovered by you,” says the prince, summing up not simply their unbelievable romance, however the very coronary heart of the opera—what it means to be seen after centuries of silence.
Brandwein’s rating honors that very same precept of emotional transparency. Scored for chamber orchestra and carried out with intimate precision, the music breathes. It doesn’t push or pull. It listens. Motifs return like ideas resurfacing in grief. Harmonies lean tonal however by no means predictable. There’s a grace to Brandwein’s restraint—maybe the results of a life spent instructing others easy methods to form sound, somewhat than commanding it outright.
The construction is tight: 5 scenes throughout just below 50 minutes. Scene 1 establishes tone with persistence and charm. Scenes 2 and three enable like to unfold not by way of rhapsody, however by way of recognition. Scene 4 delivers its heartbreak with devastating quietude. Scene 5, the opera’s coda, gives not closure, however continuity. Because the prince joins Elise in dying, there isn’t a triumph—solely tenderness. “Shut your eyes and take my hand,” he says, not as a hero, however as a person lastly allowed to the touch what he has lengthy solely noticed.
What makes Longing – A Love Throughout The Ages extraordinary shouldn’t be its ambition, however its intimacy. In a time when opera usually strains for relevance by way of reinvention, Brandwein and Sellers have as an alternative uncovered one thing older—and, paradoxically, extra enduring. The opera doesn’t ask us to imagine in curses or ghosts. It asks us to imagine within the ache of being recognized, the cruelty of time, and the fantastic thing about a hand prolonged throughout it.
Just like the artifacts it imagines, Longing feels timeless as a result of it speaks to one thing beneath the floor: the longing to be remembered, and the quiet hope that love, as soon as unearthed, may survive us all.
Mindy McCall
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