There are tales that insist on being rediscovered. They lie dormant—not misplaced, merely ready—till the appropriate voice stirs them again to life. Longing – A Love Throughout The Ages, a one-act opera by composer Craig Brandwein and librettist David Alan Sellers, is such a narrative. Set in a museum among the many hushed relics of antiquity, it unfolds just like the opening of a forgotten scroll: quietly at first, then with emotional drive that feels directly historical and eerily rapid.
Brandwein, whose profession spans 5 many years of music schooling, audio manufacturing, and composition for tv and movie, brings a uncommon sort of inventive maturity to the opera type. This isn’t the work of somebody attempting to show virtuosity. Relatively, it’s the work of somebody who has lived lengthy in sound—who has listened rigorously, taught generously, and now, on the intersection of craft and reminiscence, has one thing important to say.
The opera’s premise is mythic, but human. Elise and her father, Dr. Curtis, are making ready an Egyptian exhibit in Twenties New York. Amongst their findings: a cursed prince, entombed alive for hundreds of years, who has remained absolutely aware. He has listened to Elise from inside his sarcophagus, discovered her language, and—in opposition to all cause—fallen in love. What follows isn’t a fantasy, however a reckoning. The prince reveals himself. Love is said. The price, as ever, is loss of life.
What elevates Longing past its narrative conceit is how sincerely it treats its emotional terrain. Sellers’ libretto, elegant and unforced, sidesteps melodrama for readability. His traces are direct however lyrical: “I used to be rediscovered by you,” says the prince, summing up not simply their inconceivable romance, however the very coronary heart of the opera—what it means to be seen after centuries of silence.
Brandwein’s rating honors that very same precept of emotional transparency. Scored for chamber orchestra and carried out with intimate precision, the music breathes. It doesn’t push or pull. It listens. Motifs return like ideas resurfacing in grief. Harmonies lean tonal however by no means predictable. There’s a grace to Brandwein’s restraint—maybe the results of a life spent instructing others the best way to form sound, somewhat than commanding it outright.
The construction is tight: 5 scenes throughout just below 50 minutes. Scene 1 establishes tone with persistence and beauty. Scenes 2 and three enable like to unfold not by means of rhapsody, however by means of recognition. Scene 4 delivers its heartbreak with devastating quietude. Scene 5, the opera’s coda, provides not closure, however continuity. Because the prince joins Elise in loss of life, there isn’t any triumph—solely tenderness. “Shut your eyes and take my hand,” he says, not as a hero, however as a person lastly allowed to the touch what he has lengthy solely noticed.
What makes Longing – A Love Throughout The Ages extraordinary isn’t its ambition, however its intimacy. In a time when opera usually strains for relevance by means of reinvention, Brandwein and Sellers have as an alternative uncovered one thing older—and, paradoxically, extra enduring. The opera doesn’t ask us to imagine in curses or ghosts. It asks us to imagine within the ache of being recognized, the cruelty of time, and the fantastic thing about a hand prolonged throughout it.
Just like the artifacts it imagines, Longing feels timeless as a result of it speaks to one thing beneath the floor: the longing to be remembered, and the quiet hope that love, as soon as unearthed, would possibly survive us all.
Mindy McCall
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