Thank you so much for the kind words about my plays. Might you be interested in creating one together? SEPT. Oh, about “longing looks back”: I have the same gene as every composer EVER, and I need to write an Orpheus opera.

I sensed instantly that you’re a poet - not in any highfalutin’ sense, but in a more practical one: It’s clear that you wrote (and write) poetry, and that poetry is a native tongue for you. Pardon my forwardness - and my ignorance, for not knowing your work until now! - but I’m overwhelmed by your lucid musicality. And then I happened to read an interview with you in which you said, “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him.” I thought, “I really want to make a great, horrible opera with this person.” Your plays “Eurydice” and “The Clean House” recently reduced me to a blubbering awe-struck wreck. These are edited excerpts from their correspondence and their present-day reflections. They recently looked back at those messages and discussed them in a joint interview.

The result premiered at Los Angeles Opera in February 2020, and arrives at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday, directed by Mary Zimmerman and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.Īucoin and Ruhl wrote to each other for several years about turning the poetry of her play into a libretto, building character through music, and understanding the strengths and limitations of opera. Instead they ended up adapting her 2003 play “Eurydice” - a yearning, fanciful treatment of the Orpheus story in which Eurydice is reunited with her dead father in the underworld. In 2015, the composer Matthew Aucoin emailed the playwright Sarah Ruhl to ask whether she would be interested in working with him on a new opera inspired by the Orpheus myth.

Met opera eurydice