Melissa C. Shiflett
"A contemporary composer who approaches her music with spontaneity, humor, and joy."
Opera, with an extra dose of fun
Born into a family dedicated to music, art, writing, and performance within the context of dream theater, Melissa approaches her music with spontaneity, humor, and joy.
Audiences are treated to rousing tales that are emotionally charged, smart and savvy, but depart from the tragic norm. Modern themes of empowerment and independence are strongly stated yet lightheartedly delivered.
Melissa's music provides the players with opportunities to shine, with poignant arias and a great deal of natural movement and emphasis on acting as an ensemble.
Featured Operas
Lisa's Room: A Dream
Can you dream true?
Lisa’s Room: A Dream is based on an actual dream by the composer. High-spirited and fun, the opera features themes of fidelity, emancipation, independence, and identity. Follow Lisa through her dream of being true to herself in a man's world.
My Undying Love: An Amusement
Play is serious business
Written for a cast of three women and three men, this work is funny, mischievous, affectionate, wicked and fantastical. Set in a timeless environment in the meadowland of a girl’s playroom imagination, the archetypal characters (Bear, Robin, Mother/Witch, Goatherd, Milkmaid and Girl) come to amusing and unexpected physical and emotional life.
Dora
Freud's only patient to reject his analysis
A dark and sensual opera, Dora is based on Sigmund Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, the study of a young girl who developed hysterical symptoms in an effort to extricate herself from the sexual “danse macabre” being performed by her father, his mistress, and the mistress’s husband. Freud unmasked the etiology of Dora’s illness, but did not support her resistance. For this reason, she broke off her analysis, becoming the only one of Freud’s patients who disobeyed him.
Cocktails
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Wine
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Beer
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Food
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More of
Melissa's Music: Operas, Chamber Music, and Art Songs
Ms. Shiflett’s other operas include The Wild Goose Circus, a two-act opera with libretto by Russell Davis, performed at The Pennsylvania Opera Theatre, and Without Colors, based on a story by Italo Calvino, libretto by Mac Wellman, produced by the Minnesota Opera New Music Theatre Ensemble.
Ms. Shiflett’s Songs on Sara Teasdale Poems and Water Dreams (text by Shauna Holiman) were premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2002 by soprano Shauna Holiman and can be heard on Albany Records. Her Lullaby Duets (to traditional lullabies) was performed at the DIA Center in NY, The William Ferris Chorale in Chicago, and on a concert of her songs at the 92nd Street Y on their Meet the Virtuoso series. Songs she composed for theater have been performed nationally and internationally in the plays Dracula by Mac Wellman and Tales of the Lost Formicans by Constance Congdon.
REVIEWS
Patty Dann, author, on My Undying Love: An Amusement:
"What a wonderful evening - surprising and delightful. I love how Shiflett wove the fanciful: the earnestness of play and the serious subject of death with challenging and compelling music and lyrics. The shifts of tone were beautifully done by a splendid cast, talented in both singing and acting, on a set that was startlingly fresh and deceptively simple."
Francisco Salazar, OperaWire:
"The new album on Navona Records showcases the lyricism that contemporary American serious music has to offer."
Jan Ewing, Hi Drama:
"Melissa Shiflett's My Undying Love: An Amusement is a small, intensely personal opera. It's peopled by the sorts of playmates we all imagine as children. Based primarily on our stuffed animals and puppets, they all talk or sing in English; they are married, or not, depending upon one's immediate understanding; they can be any sort of animal and still be friends (a bear and a robin, a bear and a little girl), and they're not always nice....Ms. Shiflett has combined these almost universal elements in a simple tale that takes place in the garden of a child's mind, one afternoon, long ago..."