Benjamin Perry Wenzelberg - Nighttown (2022)
libretto by the composer
Students of Dutch National Opera Academy and the Classical department of the Royal Conservatoire
Benjamin Wenzelberg, conductor; Robert Chevara, director; Matthijs van Bergen, design; Jasper Nijholt, lighting design
A married couple in bed: one asleep, the other awake and thinking—and as she thinks, her imagination runs wild. This daring, visceral new opera accessibly retells one of the most monumental novels in the English language through the consciousness of women and non-binary characters still finding their voices 100 years after its publication. The narrative of Homer’s Odyssey — as retold through James Joyce’s earthy modernist portrayal of a single day in Dublin, Ulysses — is infused into the interior lives of interconnected characters rocked by grief. Nighttown presents the raucous “Circe” chapter of Joyce’s book through the perspective of opera singer Molly Bloom’s (Joyce’s “Penelope” character) famous closing soliloquy. The opera portrays the events of this episode as Molly’s own odyssey — rife with contemporary angles and themes that resonate strongly in our present world — launching from dreamy musings in bed next to her sleeping husband into a wild world of her own imagination. Through dramatic forays into sexuality, sedition, collision, confrontation, transgression, and ultimately, profound loss, Nighttown shows us how to lose, and then once again find, a sense of home — not where, but who, that is.
