Secret Agent--Work in Progress--UNC Gerrard Hall, Thursday, June 26, 8pm
A Darkly Comic Story of a Band of Anarchists in Early 20th Century London
About The Secret Agent
Michael Dellaira writes:
Set in fin-de-siecle London, the plot of Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent hinges on a group of anarchists' attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory--at the time a leading symbol of Western science, culture, and capitalism. The plan goes awry: an innocent boy is killed, dismembered beyond recognition. Subsequent police investigation uncovers not only the boy's identity but the ugly network that links the terrorist act to high government officials, on the one hand, and to radical chic on the other. It is chilling, (and on some level bizarrely reassuring) to think that a century ago Conrad could imagine characters capable of contemplating, as he said "blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought." And that what he imagined was just as abhorrent and perplexing, the "philosophical pretences so unpardonable" as what any one of us imagines today.
Michael Dellaira
Michael Dellaira's works integrate the classical and popular, opera and music-theater. His monodrama Maud was awarded First Prize from The Society of Composers (SCI), while his recording for rock group was a Billboard Magazine Top Album Pick. His opera Cheri (after the novel by Colette on a libretto by playwright Susan Yankowitz) was a finalist for the 2006 Richard Rodgers Award in Musical Theater (administered by The American Academy of Arts and Letters) and was developed by American Opera Projects, The Center for Contemporary Opera at Lincoln Center's Clark Theater and The Actors Studio, where it finished a run at its Lee Strasberg Theater last spring.
A guitarist and songwriter in several rock groups in the 60's and 70's, his first formal studies in composition were with Rober Parris; he then went on to study with Milton Babbitt at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D., with Goffredo Petrassi at L'Accademia di Santa Cecilia (Rome) and Franco Donatoni at L'Accademia Chigiana (Siena). He has received awards from the ASCAP Foundation, American Music Center, New Jersey Arts Council, Cary Trust, and the Ford and Mellon Foundations, was a Fulbright Fellow, and twice the recipient of fellowships to The Composers Conference (where he studied with Mario Davidovsky). He has taught music at The George Washington University, Princeton University, and Union College, and is recorded on CRI, Opus One and Albany Records.
He is currently Composer-in-Residence at the Center for Contemporary Opera (New York) and is at work on an opera based on Joseph Conrad.
J.D. McClatchy
Librettist J.D. McClatchy was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1945.
He is the author of five books of poetry: Hazmat (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), Ten Commandments (1998), The Rest of the Way (1992), Stars Principal (1986), and Scenes from Another Life (1981). He has also published two collection of essays: Twenty Questions (Columbia University Press, 1998) and White Paper (1989); has edited numerous books including Horace, The Odes: New Translations by Contemporary Poets 2003), The Vintage Book of World Poety (1996), The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1990), Poets on Painters (1988), and Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics (1978); and has written ten opera libretti, most recently Our Town for Ned Rorem, Emmeline for Tobias Picker, commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera and 1984 with music by Loren Maazel which premiered at The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in May and the libretto for Secret Agent for composer Michael Dellaira.
His honors include the Witter Bynner Award for Poetry of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Since 1991 he has been editor of The Yale Review, and he served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1996 to 2003. He lives in Stonington, Connecticut and New York City.