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| November 22, 2009 | May 5, 2003 |
 Calendar People Research & Teaching Notables CUA in the News
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 People
Faculty Husband-and-Wife Team Make Beautiful Music Together: Opera Is the First of a Trilogy
By Richard Wilkinson
The opera Agamemnon, recently given its full-stage premiere at Catholic University, was “told with concentrated power” in its music, and with a libretto indicating a “knack for poetry and drama,” said the April 28 Washington Post. When “undiluted Greek tragedy…is done properly, as it was in this production, it can have a shattering effect,” wrote Post reviewer Joseph McLellan.
This husband-and-wife team, ironically, have created an opera about a woman who murders her husband.
“I don’t believe I considered the potentially terrible example I was helping to set for Sarah,” Simpson quips.
In Aeschylus’ classic story, Agamemnon, king of Argos, returns home victorious from the Trojan War, only to be murdered by his queen, Klytemnestra. Her motive is revenge: Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter on the altar 10 years earlier to placate the goddess Artemis and to receive propitious winds allowing his army to sail to Troy.
Simpson and Ferrario met in 1993 while both were music students at Indiana University. She was an undergraduate studying the flute as well as Latin and Greek, and he was a pianist and trumpet player working on a doctorate in composition. They had both agreed to play a gig with a student ensemble, and Simpson first noticed his future wife when he arrived for that duty.
“I saw her and music started playing, and I heard violins,” Simpson says, playfully speaking both the literal, musical truth and what later became a truth of the heart.
During all their years apart, they communicated daily — by phone when they were in the same country, otherwise by e-mail. “When I was traveling around Greece and couldn’t e-mail, I wrote him a letter every day,” Ferrario remembers. “He didn’t receive them one per day like I sent them, but I still wrote daily.”
On Sept. 2, 2000, they were wed in a Chicago nuptial Mass embellished with original music composed by the groom. It was not until the 2001-2002 academic year, however, that the couple was able to live under the same roof seven days a week. And, appropriately enough, that academic year was spent in Athens, Greece. There, Ferrario studied under a Fulbright scholarship at the American School of Classical Studies, and Simpson composed music and did research on incidental music composed for 20th century performances of ancient Greek drama.
Then Came a Tragedy It was Ferrario who initially suggested Aeschylus’ tragedy as a possible topic for Simpson’s first opera. After reading it, he was bowled over by its passion and the universality of its themes of betrayal, jealousy, power and the consequences of its abuse. He also felt the text seemed like a ready-made libretto — the dramatic monologues becoming arias and the back-and-forth dialogue becoming “recitative” (a quickly sung passage that advances the plot rather than adding to an opera's melodic lyricism).
“When I first read it, the text seemed to cry out for musical setting,” he says. “So many elements of the staging and the speeches, to my mind, absolutely demanded music as a vehicle to convey their extreme emotions, and to express beyond words the violence and its consequences.” Simpson tried to get the rights to set a particular English translation of Agamemnon to music, but trans-Atlantic communication with the translation’s British publisher proved intricate and frustrating — so frustrating that Ferrario finally said, “I could translate the play into English myself.” She then did so, remaining rigorously faithful to the ancient text, while also working to keep the words singable.
The April 2001 workshop version of the piece was a success, according to those who experienced its two-evening run in Ward Recital Hall. Some audience members on the first night liked the opera so much they returned to hear it again a second time. The second night was sold-out.
The new operatic Agamemnon is “a success on every level — dramatically and musically — and keeps the audience on edge from beginning to end,” opines Claude Baker, chair of the composition department at Indiana University’s School of Music, who has heard a recording of the performance. Murry Sidlin, dean of CUA’s Benjamin T. Rome School of Music, calls the opera boldly dramatic, appropriate to the myth and often beautifully lyrical.
Simpson says he knew the opera’s tunes were working when he heard an audience member humming one of the choruses after the performance.
The opera received its full-stage performance last month, in a version scored for a full orchestra rather than the workshop version’s four-piece chamber ensemble.
The Play’s the Thing
Agamemnon is the first of three operas that Simpson and Ferrario are creating to set Aeschylus’ entire Oresteia trilogy to music. The trilogy’s second and third plays — The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides — will tell how Agamemnon’s son kills Klytemnestra and is acquitted by the goddess Athena and the citizens of Athens.
The Wedded Collaborators It was Ferrario who grew up as an opera fan, not her husband. The CUA instructor of ancient Greek language and literature remembers first turning the radio dial to the local opera station when she was 3. She also would dress up and pretend to sing opera — and later became part of the children’s chorus of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the town where she grew up.
Simpson, the faculty adviser for the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music’s composition division, “is a brilliant composer with a unique voice and a theatrical vision which rivets the audience,” says Dean Sidlin.
While her husband has focused on music since his college days, Ferrario became entranced by the Greek and Latin classics by the time she was a teen-ager. “What I originally fell in love with was the elegance of these marvelously complex languages, whose grammars allow a writer to be extraordinarily expressive,” she says. “What pushed me over the edge was reading Homer in the Greek for the first time. Incredible stuff. I’ve never read an English translation that does what the Greek can do.”
Both husband and wife will team-teach a CUA class this fall on the influence of Greek tragedy upon opera — a class listed under both the music school and the Department of Greek and Latin. As of April 23, 10 students had already signed up for the seminar, which allows no more than 15 students.
For the future, Ferrario plans to finish her Princeton doctoral dissertation, whose working title is “‘The Great Man’: The Evolution of the Individual as the Agent of Historical Change in Classical Greece.” Simpson will be marketing Agamenon by sending out CDs and DVDs of the work, seeking to get additional productions in universities and other venues. Both husband and wife also will be working on the second and third operas in the Oresteia trilogy.
The music professor had a love for ancient Roman history from childhood, but synchronicity with his wife seems to have increased that focus and passion. The American Composers Forum has recently commissioned him to compose two pieces on themes inspired by ancient Roman art. He will do this as composer-in-residence for Iowa’s Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, the Cedar Rapids Symphony and the Red Cedar Trio (the latter ensemble composed of musicians playing flute, viola and guitar). In conjunction with an exhibition of ancient Roman art at the Iowa museum, Simpson will compose an instrumental work for a chamber ensemble of the symphony and another for the trio; both pieces will premiere in 2004.
The commission and the collaboration on Agamemnon “lets Andrew’s interest in history merge with his work as a composer,” says Ferrario. Her own collaboration with him, in a sort of mirror image, lets her work in Greek history and literature fuel her love of music. |
