2021 . chamber opera for mezzo-soprano, baritone, string quartet, and piano . 28′ .
Three scenes for mezzo-soprano, baritone and piano (10′):
In 1830, Honore de Balzac published his short story A Passion in the Desert, a shocking tale of a love affair between the character of a solider and the character of a leopard. I first encountered this story at the Musee d’art Moderne de Paris in June of 2019, where I saw it represented graphically in a series of thirteen paintings, created in 1964 by the artists Gilles Aillaud, Antonio Recalcati, and Eduardo Arroyo, a group of painters belonging to the Narrative Figuration movement. I viewed each painting in order and read the accompanying narrative text, and I cried. I cried so hard that I actually had to sit down on a padded bench in the middle of the museum to breathe and try to disguise my puffy eyes from the museum-goers around me. The story was so simple and painful–a love that is cut short by misunderstanding and jealousy. It hurt in a way that was unexpected. A love story between a human man and a female leopard at first sounds obscene, some sort of explicit fanfiction (and yes, Balzac probably wrote this story in part for its ability to raise eyebrows of those reading it), yet it is so much more than just a voyeuristic telling of a forbidden, grotesque pairing. It is an allegory. When I returned home from Paris, I read Balzac’s story for the first time, and as I read it again and again, I realized what it was about the story that moved me so deeply. This was not a story about a human and an animal, but rather about a man and the way he sees women. Mignonne’s foreignness is what at first draws The Provencal to her because he is afraid of her. This soldier is a prototypical display of masculinity, and Mignonne frightens him in a way that he didn’t expect. When he kills her, it is a snap reaction out of fear of a being he does not understand nor can he control or predict. Afterward, The Provencal feels regret, yet he is able to live out the rest of his life. Mignonne does not have that chance. There is a colloquial saying I’ve often heard, how “men fear women laughing at them, women fear men killing them.” It was my desire to fully explore this dynamic through my opera.
Mignonne’s final aria explores her own feelings for the first time, something that is not at all present in the original story. In the final moments of the opera, she expresses her feelings through text instead of the cat-like melisma she adopted throughout the rest of the opera. She has a voice, which is something she didn’t have earlier, not because she couldn’t, but because she wanted the love she knew The Provencal would give her as a result of her silence. Both characters made their choices to get what they thought they wanted, and the result ends in tragedy, just as many love stories do. As the person telling the story, I knew I needed to be careful in imposing my own judgement on the actions of the characters. I hope that I have succeeded, and that the result will be a surprisingly relatable story, not about a human and a leopard, but about the collision of the masculine and the feminine.
Text by Lucy Shirley
Three Scenes from A Passion in the Desert
Act I, Scene 1: The Provencal
PROVENCAL:
Three fucking years
Three fucking years
Three years of fighting and failing and fear.
Look in the distance it’s always the same swath of
Desert deserted by desolate changeless-ness.
If we keep marching in scorching heats hotter than hell,
Then I swear I’ll go mad in the swell of the
Sun-scorched Sahara that steals your humanity,
Softly destroying all semblance of sanity.
Look in my eyes, God! I’ll cry you a river of tears
That will swallow the sweltering sorrow of
Three whole fucking years,
Three whole fucking years.
Sometimes at night I look up to the sky and I
Whisper a prayer for relief from on high,
But the desert is merciless, laughing in silence at
Headache and heartache and senseless violence.
In facing mortality, one must accept certain
Feelings surrounding one’s imminent death, but the
Pace keeps increasing and quickens my fear,
I’m becoming convinced that my life has amounted to
Three whole fucking years,
Three whole fucking years.
Act II, Scene 3: Love Duet
PROVENCAL:
I love you, Mignonne.
I love you, Mignonne.
PROVENCAL and MIGNONNE:
[vocalization]
Act III, Scene 3: Mignonne’s Aria
MIGNONNE:
[crying]
Look at me.
He he didn’t see me,
he didn’t hear me,
But what distraction I provide!
Laughing,
Fucking,
Oh what a comedy of sorts,
And I laughed so hard I cried.
Listen to me.
Winsome and winning,
Wordless and willing,
I played a part I knew he’d like.
Laughing,
Fucking,
Oh what a comedy of sorts:
The performance of my life.
All that I wanted:
Someone’s affection,
Something to live for,
Someone to love until I died,
To make the performance worth
the time it took to love him.
I love you.
LUCY SHIRLEY 