Gregory Spears / Greg Pierce - Fellow Travelers

FELLOW TRAVELERS (2016)
opera in two acts
music by Gregory Spears
libretto (Eng) by Greg Pierce, based on the
novel "Fellow Travelers" by Thomas Mallon
Developed and Co-Commissioned by G. Sterling Zinsmeyer & Cincinnati Opera

World Premiere: June 17, 2016; Cincinnati Opera
Aronoff Center for the Performing Arts
Director: Kevin Newbury
Conductor: Mark Gibson
Stage Design: Victoria (Vita) Tzykun  

Roles:
Timothy Laughlin · tenor | Hawkins Fuller · baritone
Mary Johnson · soprano | Miss Lightfoot · soprano
Tommy McIntyre · baritone | Lucy · soprano
Estonian Frank / Interrogator / Senator Joseph McCarthy · baritone
Senator Charles Potter / General Arlie / Bartender · baritone
Potter's Assistant / Bookseller / Technician / French Priest / Party Guest · bass

Instrumentation: fl.ob.cl(bcl)-2tbn-pno-str(min 33221)
For theaters with 1000 seats or greater: min str 44332

Duration: 111'

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Fellow Travelers in the press:

"What sets [Spears's operas Paul's Case and Fellow Travelers] apart is the intimate power of Spears’s musical voice, which is unlike that of any composer now working—a kind of shivery, fraught simplicity. Ultimately, opera hinges not on a composer’s passion for the subject but on his or her affinity with the material: there must be a sense that the story could be told no other way. Spears has an eerie ability to suggest interior landscapes that go unseen, interior lives that go unspoken. In giving us glimpses of hidden selves, his music becomes universal in reach."
– The New Yorker

"Originality in the arts is a vague and overhyped virtue. Few works are completely original. All creative artists borrow from others, both masters they revere and contemporaries they may be in competition with.  Still, originality just comes through sometimes, as the composer Gregory Spears demonstrates in his personal, boldly quirky score for the wrenching, and sadly timely, opera Fellow Travelers."
– The New York Times

A moving opera with a seductively beautiful score … A distinctive musical voice [with] a rare ear for subtle, arresting combinations and sonorities …The music has a flow, somewhere between Cavalli and Wagner, in which the vocal lines, without losing their melodic shape, blend into the instrumental textures, and the action moves subtly from recitative-like conversation to quasi-arias. It is all very beautiful. Internationally, maybe even nationally, Gregory Spears is the best unknown opera composer in America.
– Opera Magazine (UK)

"It is the latest and best among the newer American operas that have received their Chicago premieres in recent weeks. The remounting of Cincinnati Opera’s world-premiere 2016 production, courtesy of Lyric Opera’s education and outreach arm, Lyric Unlimited, must be reckoned one of the must-see events of the season.

His tonal, accessible, sometimes ravishing music combines the pulsing energy of minimalism with the sensuous melismas of ancient troubadour music and archaic dance forms. Particularly striking are the arioso-like set pieces that define key emotional signposts in the lovers’ relationship, most notably when Timothy rhapsodizes about his sexual awakening (“I died last night”), and Hawk laments the future he and Timothy will never share."
– Chicago Tribune

"This is a major talent, and the success of Fellow Travelers in New York underlines that fact."
– Financial Times

"It may be surprising that this subject has taken so long to arrive on the operatic stage, but in Spears and Pierce's hands, the romance, the politics, and the betrayal seem natural bedfellows. It is a testament to their vision, and to these performances, that the tale's emotional impact bored deeply into the brain and heart."
– Musical America

Spears’s work, while startlingly fresh—at times, almost radical—demonstrates a compelling reverence for its musical forbears. In other words, Spears utilizes the best practices of music history in order to create something original. He appears to be invested in the traditions of Western music, while at the same time pushing and prodding for new modes of expression.
– Parterre Box

"[A] heart-wrenching yet musically lucid drama ... The opening act is a near-perfect example of fast-flowing musical drama ... With its smart music and sharp-edged romantic drama, Fellow Travelers seems assured of lasting appeal." 
– The New York Times

Fellow Travelers elicits tears not because it demands them, but through its understated treatment of an impossibly sad situation ... Throughout, the precision of [Spears's] operatic technique is formidable: this is music that breathes along with the story it tells ... Fellow Travelers' delicacy came through in full, and so did its emotional wallop.
– OPERA NEWS 

... a ravishing musical score ... Provocative, well-sung and inventively staged, it is an important work, and the kind that invites dialogue.
– Cincinnati Enquirer

[Fellow Travelers] succeeds as a sad, tender love story of two men … Pierce’s taut, clean libretto keeps just enough of the political background to evoke the atmosphere of secrecy and paranoia of the period, but it zeroes in on the central relationship. Spears’s subtle, lyrical music is beautiful.
– The Wall Street Journal

Fellow Travelers is one of the most accomplished new American operas I have encountered in recent years. It deserves to travel widely ...
– Chicago Tribune

– Full Press Quotes –

Read the essay "Lavender Lament" by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

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For more information on 
Gregory Spears, visit
gregoryspears.com and
schott-music.com. 

AUDIO:
Click here for more information about the recent CD release from the 2016 Cincinnati Opera premiere performances of Fellow Travelers.

About the work:
 
Based on the best-selling 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers takes place in 1950s Washington, D.C., and follows Timothy Laughlin, a recent college graduate and devout Catholic eager to join the crusade against Communism. A chance encounter with a handsome State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Tim’s first job in D.C. and—after Fuller’s advances—his first love affair. As McCarthy makes a desperate bid for power and investigations focus on “sexual subversives,” Tim struggles to reconcile his political convictions, his love for God, and his love for Fuller—an entanglement that will end in a stunning act of betrayal.
 
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MATERIALS: 
Lavender Lament – an essay by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
One-sheet 
Full Score | Vocal Score
Libretto

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PHOTOS (Cincinnati Opera / Philip Groshong)
 
 
– Click here for more production photos –

VIDEO:

[Director Kevin Newbury discusses the Lyric Unlimited presentation of Fellow Travelers performed at the Athenaeum Theatre in March 2018]

Inquiries regarding Cincinnati Opera's physical production of "Fellow Travelers" should be directed to Kevin Newbury at: kevinleenewbury@gmail.com

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