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What Belongs to Opera? Garth Greenwell’s Novel of Desire

Greenwell’s “What Belongs to You” reaches the opera stage with a team that includes the composer David T. Little and the director Mark Morris.

The composer David T. Little isn’t sure whether it was really his idea to write the opera “What Belongs to You.”

Nine years ago, he was given an advance copy of Garth Greenwell’s debut novel of the same name by his friend and fellow musician Alan Pierson, from the group Alarm Will Sound. As Little read the book, a finely hewed account of desire and shame, and their resonances in an American’s dangerous love for a Bulgarian hustler, he thought: This is a song cycle waiting to happen, if not a full-length opera.

He said as much in an email to Pierson, taking the first step that led to the premiere of “What Belongs to You” on Thursday at the Modlin Center for the Arts in Richmond, Va. Now, Little said, “I suspect Alan masterminded this thing from the beginning.”

In the years since Little was sent the book, Greenwell has become a critical darling, the author of “Cleanness” and “Small Rain,” which was released this month. Little and Pierson brought on more artists: the Grammy Award-winning vocalist Karim Sulayman, for whom the opera was written, and Mark Morris, the choreographer and director, who is staging the work’s premiere.

Pierson conducting during a rehearsal of “What Belongs to You” at the Modlin Center for the Arts in Richmond, Va.Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times

And, yes, this is exactly what Pierson was hoping would happen.

“This is a book that I’ve been deeply connected to from the beginning,” he said. He and Greenwell, a former singer, were students and collaborators at the Eastman School of Music, and remained close friends as Greenwell became a poet, a teacher and then a prose writer, whose style seemed to reflect the different phases of his life. Pierson read early versions of “What Belongs to You,” which Greenwell dedicated to him.

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Source: Music - nytimes.com


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