Opera in three parts · 2024 · Music Tucker Fuller · Libretto Megan Levad Beisner
Gilded.
Opera in three parts. Libretto by Megan Levad Beisner.
The origin
Song
became
theater.
Gilded began as a 2019 song cycle for tenor and string quartet.
The 2024 opera expands the work to two tenor leads, vocal trio, dancers, and chamber orchestra.
Gilded: the song cycle
Tenor and string quartet. An intimate sequence of songs that supplied the musical DNA for what followed.
Gilded: the opera
Two tenor leads, three-voice chorus, dancers, and chamber orchestra. The private world becomes public, social, architectural.
The world
Love in a
glass city.
A venture capitalist falls for a cabaret artist while his development company buys the block where the cabaret stands.
The drama
Three
parts.
Encounter
After a decadent penthouse masquerade, the Entrepreneur wanders into a dive bar and encounters the Artist, a magnetic torch singer. Attraction is immediate and ambiguous.
Seduction
Pursuit becomes a lost weekend. Then business enters the room: Plan Z is buying the cabaret's block, and the promise of stability begins to look like erasure.
Inheritance
The lovers' argument exposes the Entrepreneur's pattern of turning artists into projects. The relationship ruptures, and the Artist is left confronting what power has transferred to him.
Inside the score
The city
starts in
the pit.
Chamber orchestra: winds, horn, percussion, piano, string quartet, and double bass.
The opening places the Entrepreneur in a glass-walled penthouse after a masquerade party, already performing himself for the audience. The opera's worlds of cabaret and capital begin as reflections of one another.
View full opera score ↗The title
What gets
gilded?
The Artist is dressed in the Entrepreneur's things and ultimately takes the place the Entrepreneur occupied at the beginning. The image turns the opera back on itself. The person who resisted a system may still inherit its chair, its objects, its view, and perhaps its habits.
Tucker Fuller
Megan Levad Beisner
Entrepreneur, tenor · Artist, tenor · soprano / mezzo-soprano / baritone chorus · dancers
Approximately 100 minutes
Opera in three parts · 2024
Production · workshop · score · recording
Enter the
glass box.
Gilded is available for opera companies, chamber opera producers, directors, conductors, and presenters interested in production, workshop development, score study, or recordings.
tucker.fuller@gmail.com ↗