Kate Lindsey (Amelia) and composer Daron Hagen at a media preview event

There’s a lot of excitement at Seattle Opera around the world premiere of Amelia, coming up on May 8. To help people get to know the opera a little before they see it, Seattle Opera has also filmed a few, short intro-to-Amelia videos, along with a 7-part “The Making of Amelia.” If you want to forego supratitles, you can study up on Twitter: the entire libretto will be tweeted @AmeliaLibretto from May 3 to May 8. On Seattle Opera’s blog there’s an Amelia FAQ, and a 7-part Listener’s Guide.

Depending on when you begin counting, Amelia has been as long as eight years in the making. It’s general director Speight Jenkins’ first commissioned opera. It brings together the composer of Shining Brow, the stage director from Seattle Opera’s last Ring, and a librettist new to opera. In short, there’s a lot riding on these eight shows, performed between May 8 and 22, not least of which is the future of American opera, which concern appears in the actual fabrication of the work.

Kate Lindsey, who plays the lead role of Amelia, says, “If you’re doing an opera in English, for an American audience, with an American story, it’s really important for us to try to make these words as clear as possible. Thankfully we do have the supratitles, but our goal is that we can speak directly to the audience.”

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William Burden (Dodge) and librettist Gardner McFall

Librettist Gardner McFall’s book of poetry The Pilot’s Daughter supplied the seed that inspired Hagen, who had been musing on the mythic dimensions of the power of flight. From the beginning, McFall’s book juxtaposes the god’s-eye view of airliner flight with the more earth-bound human realities she learned as the daughter of a Navy pilot during Vietnam.

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Grief travels toward you this way,
out of the blue. It finds you
unprepared, as when you spy
your mother across the asphalt
basketball court where she’s come
to retrieve you from school,
and she puts her arm around you
somewhere between gym and world history
and says, your father is missing. 

While he was looking for an intimate, personal voice, Hagen wanted to transpose grand opera scale to something more suited to today than processions of elephants. McFall says, “When I was first called about this, Daron said, ‘Want to write an opera that will be a lyric sequence concerned with flight over the decades, in terms of history and myth?’ And I said, ‘Great.'”

The third collaborator (reserving the role of instigator for Jenkins) was Stephen Wadsworth, who, working from McFall’s book, drew up a six-page story treatment for her to turn into a libretto. (The Pilot’s Daughter, while it tells a story, is written in lyric stanzas, not epic verse. Wadsworth’s treatment provided the story’s structure.) McFall says Wadsworth “brought to this potential story very real situations and plot development that increased the dramatic effect.”

“This has turned out for me to be a living memorial for my dad,” McFall adds. “My dad’s name is not written on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington because he was lost in the Pacific and not in the theater of war, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think he wasn’t lost in the Vietnam conflict. [N]ow whenever Dodge appears, whenever his name is sung, whenever his letter aria sung–those are his words, from the last letters he wrote to my mother–so his name literally is sung, in the air, and will live on, so I’m very grateful for that. And I think he’d be too.”

Stage director Stephen Wadsworth and David McFerrin (Paul)

William Burden, who sings the role of Amelia’s father, Dodge, speaks to the craftsmanship that went into every detail of the opera: “Daron knew who the cast was even before he began to compose–he knew all of us–and really did write very specifically for our voices.” Discussing voice types, Hagen says he chose to make a mezzo soprano the lead, rather than a soprano, because it would be easier for audiences to understand the words she sings. Her husband had to be a baritone, for contrast with her voice, and for contrast with the baritone, Dodge ended up a tenor.

Stephen Wadsworth, who wrote the opera A Quiet Place with Leonard Bernstein, has a thriving career directing both opera and plays. It was his job, in the story treatment, to dramatize Hagen’s belief that the people of the past are very much with us: In the opera, Daedalus and Icarus, and an Amelia-Earhartesque character The Flier share the stage with Amelia, her mother Amanda, and Dodge as the time moves from the 1960s to the present. In Wadsworth’s hands, you do not need to worry about this being an aridly post-modern framing device. Even his Wagnerian gods are notably real personages.

Wadsworth, in fact, stage directs his way through the media preview, and tells David McFerrin not to worry about clueing the audience in on where he’s getting his acting choices: “That you are being specific is the key point. That is the screen onto which anyone in the audience can project their own stuff.” Wadsworth turns to the assembled group: “Because the theatre is for the audience. It’s our job to open up possibilities, open up all the doors in the characters, so you can fall into this reality with lots of opinions about what you think is going on. It’s not for us to tie it all down.”