FULL Death of a Little Girl with Doves (Jeremy Beck) San Francisco CA 2024 Rayna Mia Campbell
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Death of a Little Girl with Doves
- Composer: Beck Jeremy
- Libretto: Text written and arranged by the composer, adapted and inspired by the life and letters of Camille Claudel Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, San Francisco, California, San Francisco Conservatory of Music
- Recorded: May 10, 2024
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: Rayna Mia Campbell
- Conductor: Martin West
- Orchestra: San Francisco Ballet and Conservatory Orchestra
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: JeremyBeckComposer
- Date Published: 2024
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Death of a Little Girl with Doves is an operatic soliloquy based on the life of the French sculptor Camille Claudel (1864-1943). Claudel was an accomplished and celebrated sculptor in late-19th century Paris, where she was known as the talented and original young apprentice to Auguste Rodin. In addition to her own powerful work, Claudel assisted on many of Rodin’s most famous sculptures, including his “La Porte d’enfer” (The Gates of Hell). Claudel and the much-older Rodin became lovers, and their breakup precipitated Claudel’s mental and physical collapse. After ten years of intense creative activity, in 1913, she was committed to the psychiatric hospital at Ville-Évrard against her will. Claudel died in 1943, after thirty years of seclusion, in the asylum of Montdevergues, near Avignon. Hers is a story of Art, love, innocence betrayed, and the tragedy of a young woman’s persecution for being imaginative and independent during a time when such characteristics were viewed as inappropriate and dangerous for women.
Death of a Little Girl with Doves is in two parts, subtitled “In Paris” and “In the Asylum.” Each of these two parts is then also divided into two movements. The music and text often move rapidly through different moods and time frames, reflecting the instability of Claudel’s life, and its ultimate dissolution.
This composition is a fantasy. It was inspired by the life and letters of Camille Claudel; however, the depictions of the characters who appear in it are fictional, as are many of the events described. The overall title of the work is taken from the title of one of Camille Claudel’s own paintings, the painting to which she refers in movements one and four. Although created as a concert work, the subject