A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
Scene I - A seaside village
By Dylan Schneider
After a story by Gabirel García Márquez
For Six Singers, One Silent Actor, and Piano
Duration: 40 min.
Premiere: March 15, 2006
Amherst College Music Department
Dylan Schneider, Piano
Program Note:
The opera is my own adaptation of a story by Gabriel García Márquez, which received a production by the Amherst College Department of Music in 2006. The story is known to many as a quintessential example of the author’s hallmark genre of magical realism.
The curtain rises on a South American seaside village, revealing an unexpected visitor. Lying facedown in the muck of a courtyard, the stranger would have the appearance of a decrepit sailor—were it not for his monstrous bird wings. Márquez describes the old man as speaking in an “incomprehensible dialect,” which I chose to represent through elaborate, stylized whistling in my score.
A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings (2006)
a chamber opera in one act
Link to full opera recording
Press: Interlude.hk
A village couple stumble upon the winged senior. They wonder: is he an angel? Or just an “old, senile vulture”? Cautiously disregarding their neighbor’s advice to club the old man to death, they instead furnish the sickly creature with temporary room and board—in their chicken coop.
Quickly realizing that the old man’s otherworldly appearance betrays a robust potential for profit, they transform the coop into a carnival exhibition, with an admission-charge of five centimos. Just as business begins to boom, however, a traveling Spiderwoman, a freakish circus act in her own right, steals away their precious clientele.
By the opera’s conclusion, the old man has at last recuperated from his lengthy infirmity. He stands and takes flight.
Although told through a comical and surreal turn of events, Márquez’s parable poignantly reveals how greed and superstition blind us to the miracles before our eyes. Musically, I attempted to strike a balance in the piece between the dreamlike lyricism of the author’s tone and riotous invocations of the macabre cabaret. Punctuated by eccentric splashes of musical space-dust, hinting at the old man’s possible extraterrestrial origins, the score also makes a place for contagious grooves inspired by Latin-American dance music, ranging from the clave to the rumba.
LINK TO SYNOPSIS & FULL RECORDING
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