FULL CASSANDRA (William White) Shoreline WA 2024 Ellaina Lewis, Melissa Plagerman, Brendan Tuohy
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Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Cassandra
- Composer: White William
- Libretto: Jillian White, William White
- Venue & Opera Company: Shorecrest Performing Arts Center, Shoreline, Washington
- Recorded: April 6, 2024
- Type: Concert Live
- Singers: Ellaina Lewis, Melissa Plagerman, Brendan Tuohy, Zachary Lennox, Karen Dunstan, Nerys Jones, Chad Demaris, Gustave Blazek
- Conductor: William White
- Orchestra: Harmonia Orchestra
- Chorus: Harmonia Chorus
Information about the Recording
- Published by: willcwhite
- Date Published: 2024
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: yessubs, ensubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
William Coleman White was born August 16, 1983, in Fairfax, Virginia. He composed this work between September 2023 and January 2024; it receives its first performance this evening. In addition to 8 vocal soloists and chorus, the score calls for triple woodwinds (including piccolo, English horn, bass clarinet and contrabassoon), 5 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, harp and strings.
William White is of course familiar to Harmonia audiences as the ensemble’s music director. This is the second work he has composed especially for the group, the first being The Muses, which premiered at Benaroya Hall in April 2022. The composer has provided the following commentary about this newest work, Cassandra.
Plot Summary
Act I, Scene 1: Cassandra, daughter of the king of Troy, is a priestess of the god Apollo (also known as Phoebus). As a child, she had been given the power of foresight by Apollo. Now that Cassandra has matured to womanhood, she has caught the eye of Apollo, who descends from heaven to seek her physical favors as she prays in the temple. Cassandra rebukes him, and Apollo curses her: all her prophecies will be true, but will not be believed. Apollo departs and Cassandra sees a premonition of the horrors that are about to visit Troy via the Trojan horse.
Act I, Scene 2: In the court of Troy, Cassandra’s mother and sister-in-law (Hecuba and Andromache) sing in praise of Apollo, as the Greeks have left Troy, ending the siege. Cassandra runs into the palace to tell her family about the vision she has seen. Cassandra’s father, Priam, enters and barely has time to hear her prophecy before a herald arrives from the city gates to announce the arrival of the Trojan horse. Cassandra pleads furiously for her father to listen to her, but to no avail. The horse is brought in and Cassandra, in a last-ditch effort, grabs a spear to charge at the beast single-handed. She is removed to her temple annex. The chorus narrates the destruction of the city of Troy.
Act II: Cassandra has been taken captive by Agamemnon, and is brought as a prisoner across the sea to Mycenae. There, Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra lies in wait, having nursed a deadly grudge against her husband for a decade. Agamemnon celebrates his festive return, while Cassandra foretells his doom. Clytemnestra works up her nerve to murder Agamemnon, and when Cassandra tries to cool her rage, Clytemnestra rejects the notion that she won’t go forward with the murder. Cassandra tells Clytemnestra that she will soon die at the hand of a family member: her son, Orestes. This is the final straw for Clytemnestra, who tells Cassandra to proceed into the palace to receive the same fate as Agamemnon. Cassandra rips off her priestly headdress, rejecting the powers of Apollo, and walks calmly into the palace in acceptance of her fate.
Inspiration
It’s often hard to say how a piece comes to existence in its composer’s mind, but in this case, I can point to a moment when the swirl of ideas coalesced. It was in November of 2022 at my home studio, and I was coaching Ellaina Lewis in her solo bits from a new oratorio by one of Harmonia’s great collaborative composers, Huntley Beyer. Huntley had written a pair of soprano arias with (as far as I know) no particular performer in mind. When I heard Ellaina sing them, they seemed to fit like a glove. I had worked with Ellaina before (in Handel’s Messiah) but hearing her sing this wholly different sort of music, I got to thinking that it would be a great idea to write something for her specifically.
Ellaina is a high soprano, and her voice is at peak purity and resonance in the upper part of her range. With this in mind, I started thinking about what sort of music would best take advantage of this register, in which she can be both ethereal and dramatic. It occurred to me that something “incantatory” would work well. Then I started thinking, “Who does incantations?” Prophetesses and priestesses? I did a little Googling and came across Cassandra.
Like anyone else, I knew that “a Cassandra” was a female prophet, but I didn’t know the whole story, namely that her curse was to prophesy the truth and never be believed. With this, everything clicked into place.
Libretto
Once I had the concept in place, I ran into a problem: there’s no Cassandra text, no Ancient Greek or Roman play that treats her subject as its main theme. Cassandra appears as a character in several plays, stretching back as far as Aeschylus’ Agamemnon from the fifth century BCE, but her throughline was never given its own treatment — in spite of the fact that she’s one of the main characters to experience the Trojan War and its aftermath.
This was a wonderful challenge, because it meant the opportunity to create a dramatic piece that would be at once ancient and original. And the fact that there was so much Cassandra-based material — scenes, lines, poems — meant that it would be possible to assemble it into one story and create a Frankenstein’s monster of a libretto.
The task was daunting, because it would require one to know vast amounts about ancient literature. I don’t happen to possess that kind of knowledge, but luckily I knew someone who did: my cousin Jillian is a Classics scholar specializing in Latin, currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. I reached out to her asking for help, and she signed up immediately.
Quoted from harmoniaseattle.org