How do we lament the end of the world?

Alma, an advanced singing robot, has been jettisoned atop a trash heap behind the ruins of an ancient opera house. Sifting through the wreckage for signs of life, she uncovers a music box and a collection of discarded musical clowns, whom she enlists to help recreate a performance she witnessed long ago—a great diva singing a lament, an appeal to the gods for salvation.

Drawing on Commedia, Buster Keaton, Méliès, and Monteverdi, among others, this dark comedy set amidst the wreckage of a destroyed civilization explores what it is to lament, to attempt to re-member lost worlds through the redeeming power of art, as tragic and comic collide to generate the fission of a one-of-a-kind work that looks back to some of our oldest operatic forms in order to create something completely new.

Duration: 1 hour
Forces: 1 soprano; quartet: flute, clarinet, violin, cello

Can be fully staged, or presented in concert performance

Developed with Hub New Music, and the support of Austin Opera