Dear All, I present for you my 1976 opera;
"Augusteia"
Description
The Augusteia
is an opera named after Augee, one of its two main characters. I
began writing it in April of 1976 after completing a piano score for
"Hasty Recovery," a performance piece for a male and a
female vocalist. Because I was comfortable with the approach in
"Hasty Recovery," in which two voices represent shades of
one person, I invented two closely related characters, Augee and
Lisa, brother and sister, to feature in the main roles for a
three-act opera.
Act One:
The opera begins
with Lisa, an intense young lady, exclaiming, "Kin's dead!
Money's gone! Kin's dead. We must go on." She and Augee, her
even younger, autistic brother, are left to care for themselves.
While Augee, who is tense and disturbed, lays upon Lisa's lap, Lisa
calms him. Once sure he's asleep, she reveals her own insecurity,
asking,
How can I bear
such an earthquake of change,
An alteration of
all that I hold so dear?
So like a dress
that I'm expected to knit,
It is I it must
fit;
It is I
who must change.
Rather than fight
circumstance, she adjusts to it, on one condition concerning Augee:
That young boy,
he won't be lost
What e'er the
pain, what e'er the cost.
For him the
future will unpage the same
Despite these
several lines of change!
After declaring
her uncompromising stand on her brother's future well-being, she
falls asleep. Augee awakens.
Augee applies
creative analysis to his condition. So, too, did Lisa, but unlike
her, Augee sees his life as ruled by fate (which includes magic).
He sings,
"Someday when the clouds rub up against the moon, several charms
will shower upon this life of gloom."
Augee's words
invoke tensions which he hopes will snap. He can not stand
"Atmospheric Stillness," -- the subtitle of the song. What
he denies, and what the audience will not know until the climax of
this act, is that a tense situation has snapped and, at this
point, both he and Lisa are its leftovers.
By contemplating
suicide, Augee expects to bring to world attention the confusing life
of a boy unsure of whether he is a dominant or passive (sub-dominant)
personality (I wrote an essay which considers this phenomenon as a
choice between being an outlet and a socket, called "Horse and
Man".). In Augee's longings he has:
Seen some lovely
boys
And heard them
make soundless noises.
As the pendulum
swings. It wrecks their
personality.
Quite frankly
they really don't know
If they want to
be on
Top or on bottom,
Poke or be poked
at.
In conclusion, he
decides that, unlike anyone, masculine, feminine or otherwise, his
preference is "to walk through life like a Frankenstein."
He sees himself as an adolescent monster, befriending whoever will
tolerate him.
Lisa, her sleep
disturbed by the increasing noise of Augee's soliloquy, yells,
"That's quite right. You can't help but be stupidly insulting."
She announces a real course of action. In order to support them,
she is willing to get a job.
In scene 2, "...
Lisa secures herself a job." The pride she takes in having a
skill (she makes dolls) is expressed as follows: "Give me
stuffin', socks and buttons. The results are rather nice."
She visits the
town shoemaker and offers to set up shop with him. He is reluctant
but, with the assistance of a small chorus of customers, she
persuades him. He employs her as a cleaning lady who, if she has
time, can make all the dolls she wants.
A ballet sequence
parallels Lisa's outing with her family's outings of the past.
Having
accomplished the day's purpose, Lisa retreats home. Scene 3 opens
with her return. She is bushed, and she treats this unique day not
as a first, but rather as though it is part of an already intolerable
routine. However, Augee makes it all worthwhile because, through her
efforts, he will become her "professional dear," i.e.,
a doctor or a lawyer.
Augee is silently
enraged. To upset Lisa's plans, he mentions their father and their
elder brother, Matthew. Lisa cries out and a flashback begins.
Matthew appears as an invalid resting in a giant easy chair.
The flashback
answers the following:
1) How did Augee and Lisa come to live in a hole?
It is the burnt out cellar of their parents home,
2) How did they become orphans?
Their brother burned down the house the night before,
and
3) Why did they survive?
Matthew ordered them to leave before he torched the living
room.
An elderly next
door neighbor, Mrs. Crawdles, hears commotion and reports it to the
police. The police visit the ruins and find Augee and Lisa. At the
police station Mrs. Crawdles offers them her home while they await
adoption.
End of Act One
Act Two:
Mrs. Crawdles is
bursting with love for Augee and Lisa, because she is bursting from
within with a child which she has carried for 20 years and to which
she refuses to give birth. When Mrs. Crawdles finally does gives
birth (Augee falls on her.) she loves her offspring and snarls at
Augee and Lisa.
Meanwhile, Augee
and Lisa plan concurrent parties at Mrs. Crawdles house, Lisa, to
return the invitations of her many scholarship friends, Augee, to
exclude one of his many orphan friends, the one who never returned
his call.
Their friends
intermingle like oil and vinegar, so they occupy separate levels of
the house -- Lisa uses the living room; Augee, the basement -- but
the friends are forced to mix when the smell from Mrs. Crawdles
"nursery" drives Lisa's friends downstairs, and one by one,
drives everyone from the house. Augee and Lisa do damage to their
reputations by guiltily refusing to acknowledge any problem in the
house.
Lisa leads Augee
to the shoe store. They enter using her keys and sleep till morning
when the shoemaker arrives.
Act Three:
The shoe maker
advises Augee and Lisa to think for themselves, settle their estate
and depart. He is teaching them a lesson and, at the same time,
doing them the favor of denying them his company, because he likes
them and fears the horror in store for them as a result of his liking
them. Augee loves the shoemaker (He loves anyone with the patience
to instruct him) and grows dependent. Lisa wants to leave and asks
Augee to join her. He supports her plan but says no to joining her.
Sensing her anticipation of a free, unhindered life, he easily
persuades the shoemaker to help cripple her upon the moment of her
departure. Augee continues his actions, i.e., tripping and
kicking Lisa, even after they achieve his purpose and soon they
strengthen her. She sprouts jet engines and fins and departs on
schedule.
The shoemaker
warned that he was a bad influence, and that Augee and Lisa must
leave for their own good. Augee, lazy and weakened by his desire to
break Lisa, stays.
At the end of the
first two acts, external forces uprooted the growth of Augee and
Lisa. In Act Three, Lisa grows and Augee is uprooted.
