Dora

Commentary and 
Reviews

...The story and the lyrics held together and kept me involved in the entire action. The score was right on target, very well orchestrated and the lyrics allowed the characters to sing... The words were singable and were properly set to music. I have produced over 30 new American operas, from page to stage as they say, and ... Dora is about as close to perfection as one can get. I just really, really respect your work.

– Roger Cunningham, Encompass, New Opera Theatre, NYC

Dora, an opera composed by Melissa Shiflett to a libretto by Nancy Fales Garrett about a patient of Sigmund Freud’s, and given concert and workshop hearings during the 1990’s, is treated to a full-fledged production at the La MaMa annex during the early part of April, thanks to the joint efforts of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and the American Chamber Opera Company. A lyrical work focusing on three families, Dora boasts such set pieces as florid and dramatic arias, piquant ensembles, waltzes and other dances and brought Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, with its own memorable ensembles and complex liaisons, more than once to mind. With the death of a child near the end, though, Dora moves into The Turn of the Screw and The Medium territory. Conductor Douglas Anderson, guiding the small orchestra, and librettist Garrett, as stage director, presided over a fine cast, made up of no fewer than four leading sopranos, two tenors, a baritone, and two children.  

– Bruce-Michael Gelbert, TheaterScene.net

Recreated on the modernist, angled and nearly bare stage at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club with nine singers in Kate Herman’s authentic-looking late nineteenth-century costumes, Dora, the opera, seemed as compressed as a Greek tragedy, beautifully reflecting the strait-lacing and shortness of breath in private bourgeois life at the beginning of the last century…Dora was not played as a tragedy. If anything it came across as a sardonic slice of life, full of witty and startling juxtapositions of incompatible value systems, a comedy not in the sense that its ending was happy, but only in the sense that its class was not the nobility. Catharsis or resolution it had none, neither god-given nor man-made. At its beginning and end was only an aria in a minor key, “The Mind is a Curious Country,” sung by Freud. Melissa Shiflett’s music made it both modern and lyrical, combining American modernist melodies with fin-de-siecle Viennese forms (gypsy tunes, Schrammelquartets, waltzes and Landler), and Fales Garrett’s words made considerable poetry with colloquial diction; but it was the complex and exciting interaction of music and book that made Dora so extraordinarily beautiful. The action of the opera was not so much Freud’s analysis as it was the multiple relationships, dramatically shown, between Dora and her four seducers, one of whom potentially, of course, was Freud, sung in the romantic tenor register.

– Bill Everdell, author of The First Moderns, from The Saint Ann’s Review

When all the brilliantly sensational elements have fallen into place, you are left with a quiet inner truth that quite frankly both surprised and delighted me. I was fully prepared to see Freud as the villain of the piece, as the authors at one point had seemed to do. But (perhaps because I was lucky in the guest artist engaged to play the role), I found myself seeing him with sympathy, as the victim of his own theories, as much bewildered by what he does not understand as excited by what he does. And Dora herself, after being so long the victim, emerges with a quiet strength that never ceases to amaze me. The aria in which she recounts her second dream—close in detail but utterly different in tone from the version that appears in Freud’s book—is one of the most beautiful pieces of poetry and music that I can think of in contemporary opera. Suddenly we had opera putting aside all the things that it is notorious for—spectacle, sensation, and high drama—  and doing what it does uniquely well: taking us into the soul of a fellow human being. It was a moment that validated the whole undertaking and made it so eminently worthwhile.

– Roger Brunyate, Artistic Director, The Peabody Opera Theatre, Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute

Saturday’s cast gave Dora an excellent performance, with superlative singing and fine acting through the story’s considerable emotional range.   The orchestra likewise provided estimable support in their reading of the conservative tonal score.   Expert vocal writing showed the singers to effect in solo arias and ensemble numbers, with the sextet “What Do Women Want?” an especially well-constructed example.   The use of violin harmonics beneath the disturbing revelations of the K’s children was a notable touch of effective orchestration. 

– Mark A. Lackey, composer

Bill (Bill Nerenberg—director of Peabody Presents at the Peabody Institute) and I attended The Peabody Chamber Opera production of Dora at Theatre Project of Baltimore last night.   Neither of us felt like going out, but are we glad we did.   This is a new opera with a young and very professional cast, a live orchestra of Peabody students, and the direction of the very skilled Roger Brunyate. In total, this production proves that you don’t have to have a mammoth budget with live elephants in order to have first class opera.
The story is a very famous one, Freud’s first patient, a young woman, who is suffering from hysteria.  The two families involved from Victorian Vienna redefine dysfunctional.   Makes all the rest of our families look NORMAL!(?).  Music is superb, voices are great, staging is imaginative.​​

– Dorothy L. Rosenthal, MD, FIAC, Professor of Pathology, Oncology and Gynecology/Obstetrics, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions