Opera: Amelia

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

Seattle Opera

(206) 389-7676

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Lest its title confuse you, Amelia “is not a bio-opera about Amelia Earhart,” said George Loomis in the Financial Times. The title character of composer Daron Aric Hagen’s new opera is obsessed with flying, but only because her missing father was a Navy pilot who left to fight in Vietnam and never returned. The production opens with Amelia as a young girl, bidding goodbye to her father. As she grows older, haunted by the loss, Amelia realizes that her dad’s disappearance has never adequately been explained by the military. Finally, in her 30s and pregnant, Amelia travels to Vietnam to search for answers. While all this may seem “unpromising material for an opera,” Amelia successfully pushes the limits of the genre, thanks to the “arresting syntax” of Gardner McFall’s libretto and a score of uncommonly “expressive range.”

The first work commissioned by the Seattle Opera in almost three decades is “heartfelt and unusual,” said Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times. Hagen’s “wistful, winding” score strikes a unique balance between “the post-Romantic styles” common today and “a harder-edged, more 20th-century sound.” McFall’s libretto also takes plenty of risks, notably in a section where the characters actually sing in Vietnamese. Soprano Ashley Emerson resonates as young Amelia, while mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey gives a “subtly charismatic” performance as the grown woman. Jennifer Zetlan, another soprano, adds an assist as an apparition of Earhart, who figures after all as the heroine’s namesake. The theme of Amelia—that “life is a flight worth the risk”—applies equally to this daring new opera.