Gilded…the Opera

Tucker Fuller's song cycle for tenor and string quartet is being adapted as a new chamber opera with libretto by Megan Levad.

Learn about and follow the project here.

Coming soon

Updated 4/8/24

SYNOPSIS

A charming, successful venture capitalist--the type who transforms cities through development, disruption, and gentrification--finds himself bored in his moneyed bubble. When he meets a cabaret singer who prioritizes passion, pleasure, and freedom, he falls hard for him.

Gilded: An Opera interrogates the eras-old conflict between systemic economic forces, and the impact of those forces on our most personal and intimate relationships.

Inspired by relocating the wandering Lieder of the Romantic era to a contemporary urban setting, Gilded, a romance for two tenors, marks the first operatic collaboration between Tucker Fuller and Megan Levad Beisner. Its sexy, politically-current story is told by a soprano-alto-baritone trio, a chamber orchestra, and tenors in each of the romantic leads: rapacious investor, and irrepressible artist.

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The Artists

Composer

Tucker Fuller

Works include a trilogy of song cycles in collaboration with poet Megan Levad: Murder (2010), Love (2011), and Labor (2014). For the Marigny Opera House and Marigny Opera Ballet: Salve Regina, for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra (Winner, 2014 Tribute to the Classical Arts Award for Best Performance of New Classical Music); Orfeo, a full-length ballet score (October 2015); Giselle Deslondes (November 2016). The Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra commissioned and premiered Louie the Buoy (2016). His music has been played by the Albany Symphony, New Resonance Orchestra, Polymnia Quartet, Musaica, Da Capo Chamber Players, and the American Symphony, among others. He studied with composers Joan Tower, Christopher Theofanidis, Evan Chambers, Bright Sheng, and Michael Daugherty, and holds degrees from Bard College (B.A.), Peabody Conservatory (M.M.A.), and the University of Michigan (D.M.A).

Poet

Megan Levad

Megan Levad’s writing has been praised as “surprising,” (San Francisco Chronicle), “exquisite” (Bombay Gin), and “odd, darkly funny, very smart” (Portland Mercury). Levad’s first musical collaboration was Murder, a song cycle with Tucker Fuller; one of the songs, “American Murderer,” was published in the Everyman's Library anthology Killer Verse. She has since collaborated with several composers. About her work on When There Are Nine, composed by Kristin Kuster and premiered at the 2019 Cabrillo Festival, San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “Librettist Megan Levad cannily seizes on snippets of Ginsburg’s interviews and writing and presses them into service as vivid, imposing poetry.”

A MacDowell Fellow, Levad is the author of What Have I to Say to You, which The Paris Review wrote is “one of the best poetry books of the last fifteen years.” Her first book, Why We Live in the Dark Ages, was the inaugural selection in Tavern Books’ Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Poem-a-Day, Granta, Fence, and London art and fashion magazine AnOther, among other publications. Born and raised in rural Iowa, she now lives in California.

- Tenor The Entrepreneur

Brenden Gunnel

The much sought-after Heldentenor Brenden Gunnell is renowned in opera and in concert. Born in the USA has gained an international reputation for his clarion and carefully nuanced tone, effortless upper tessitura, clear articulation, and intense acting style. A.er successfully completing his professional studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 2006 under artistic director KS Brigitte Fassbaender, and from 2011 to 2013 a member of the ensemble at the Den Norsk Opera and Ballet., Brenden Gunnell was a member of the ensemble at the Tiroler Landestheater in Innsbruck from 2007 to 2011 Currently he is an ensemble member of Oper Leipzig from the 2022/2023 season onwards. Here he is singing such roles as Herod in Salome and the title role in a new production of Peter Grimes.

Core roles of his opera repertoire include the title roles in Peter Grimes, Lohengrin, Parsifal, Idomeneo, Oedipus Rex and der Zwerg as well as Siegmund in die Walküre, Laça in Jenufa, Prinç in Rusalka, Sergei in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Erik in der Fliegende Holländer and Loge in das Rheingold.

The pivotal work of his concert repertoire is Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius (debut with Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Jeffrey Tate at Laeiszhalle Hamburg. Further core works include Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and Ninth Symphony, Britten's War Requiem and his works for tenor and chamber orchestra, Maler's Das Lied von Der Erde, Das Klagende Lied, and Eighth Symphony, Frank Martin's Golgotha, Franz Schmidt's Das Buch mit Sieben Siegeln, Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, and Verdi's Messa Di Requiem. Brenden Gunnell has worked closely with the conductors Sir Jeffrey Tate†, Ricardo Chailly, Antonio Pappano, Daniele Gar, Fabio Luisi, Juraj Valčuha, Ivor Bolton, Evan Rogister, Alpesh Chauhan, Jukka- Pekka Saraste, Jaap van Zweden, Steuart Bedford†, and Hartmut Haenchen as well as with stage directors Sir Graham Vick†, KS Brigitte Fassbaender, Stephen Langridge, Thaddeus Strassberger, Christoph Marthaler, François Girard, Paul Curran, William Kentridge, and Sir David McVicar.

Tenor- The Artist

Joshua Stewart

American tenor Joshua Stewart’s recent appearances include his debut as Rodolfo La Boehme with Columbus Symphony, his debut as Son in the highly acclaimed new work Blue at Seattle Opera, and his celebrated debut in the title role Albert Herring at Princeton Festival in the US. Current season engagements include his participation in Sanctuary Road with Chautauqua Symphony during the summer festival, the role of Valcourt (Joseph) L’amant Anonyme, the rarely heard work by Joseph Bologna at Theater St Gallen, an appearance at Oxford Lieder Festival, George Walker’s Mass and A Child of our Time, both with BBC Symphony Orchestra, and his return to Theater St Gallen for the role of Jonah The Time of Our Singing.

In recent appearances, the artist joined conductor Mira Gražinytė-Tyla and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on tour in the UK, to Paris and to Germany as tenor soloist in Tippet’s A Child of our Time. He traveled to the US to appear with Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in Das Paradies und die Peri under the baton of Paolo Bortolameolli and remained to revive the title role Charlie Parker’s Yardbird at Seattle Opera, a role he previously sang at Madison Opera, Atlanta Opera and Arizona Opera.

Previous season’s highlights include the roles of Zinovy Lady Macbeth of Mstensk and Lazarus in the world premiere of Giorgio Battistelli’s Wake, both at Birmingham Opera Company directed by Graham Vick. Concert appearances include Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with CBSO under the direction of Sir Simon Rattle. Collaborating with Peter Sellars, the artist sang the role of The Shepherd Oedipus Rex in performances staged by the director under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm, at Festival Aix en Provence, and in London at the Royal Festival Hall. He made his debut with Los Angeles Philharmonic as Narrator in Sellars’s Das Paradies und die Peri with Gustavo Dudamel on the podium.

Born and raised in New Orleans, Joshua attended the prestigious New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) Mr. Stewart is a graduate of Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and a former member of Munich’s Bavarian State Opera Studio, where he appeared in the productions of Christoph Loy, Richard Jones, Constantine Trinks, Kent Nagano, Dan Ettinger and Maurizio Benini. He has performed for several world leaders, including King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia of Sweden, and Presidents George H. W. Bush, William J. Clinton, and Barack Obama.

MEDIA

Excerpts from the 2019 performance of the song cycle for tenor and strings at a sold out performance at the Marighy Opera House with Brenden Gunnell, tenor and the Polymnia String Quartet.

Welcome Guest

00:00 / 03:50

It's been seven hours and seven nights

00:00 / 06:12

Everyone must be somewhere

00:00 / 03:17

Trodding the Boards October 8, 2019

October 8, 2019 By Brian Sands

Gilded at the Marigny Opera House

The Marigny Opera House fielded a full house for the recent world premiere of Gilded. That so many people would come out for a 45-minute song cycle on a Sunday evening following a Saints game was heartening indeed.

With music by Tucker Fuller set to a text by Megan Levad, Gilded is inspired by the wandering lieder of the Romantic era and today’s free market/neoliberal sensibility. In its nine sections, using three voices, it tells of the tortured search for love by a successful, powerful man, perhaps a tech entrepreneur. He cruises. He hooks up. He’s cast aside.

How noble to tell a story like this in such a classical form; Levad’s angsty, passionate text could just as easily have served as the basis for a glam rock extravaganza. And how interesting that Levad, a straight woman can, with only a few poetic overindulgences, so potently capture the emotional state of a gay man.

Though its title clearly conjures up images of robber barons, Levad uses references subtle (e.g., a phrase evoking Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U) and not so subtle (“a disco ball”) to place this tale in our own era. If her hero exhibits a refined yearning, she bravely makes him not the nicest or most sympathetic of people, a man who’s not afraid to admit to self-hate and who evinces a scary, almost Trumpian ruthlessness in his business dealings.

Fuller employs both an apt romanticism reminiscent of Beethoven and the astringencies of the Second Viennese School to convey the lovesick, tortured personality of the “Entrepreneur”. Fuller sets his music to Levad’s text well; there’s nothing arbitrary about the vocal line as it seems in some contemporary classical music. He gives us extended phrases of longing in a passage for viola and cello (“He Loved Him That Evening”), and switches from major to minor keys to bring out shifting moods.

There are tumultuous passages with tremulous undertones as well as intriguing dissonances as Fuller tries to musically answer the question “What does a person who seemingly has everything really want?”

While thoroughly accomplished from the start, I felt it wasn’t until the two-thirds mark that the music truly probed the emotional depths of the text and its characters. In total, however, Fuller and Levad deliver a subliminally affecting portrayal that captures these sad and scary times in which we live.

Though Gilded could conceivably be done with three singers (a possibility that Levad acknowledged could occur in future performances), for the premiere all three voices were taken by Brenden Gunnell, for whom the piece was written. Looking like a Teutonic James Corden, this young American heldentenor sang with clear tone and precise diction. He confidently hit all of Fuller’s high notes with a piercing and, at times, anguished self-awareness. I would be curious to see him in a staged performance of Gilded with two other vocalists and how that might add to the work.

The Polymnia Quartet (Benjamin Hart and Kate Withrow, violins; Amelia Clingman, viola; Philip Von Maltzahn, cello) played with their usual flawless expertise, bringing out all the colors of Fuller’s score.

At a time when glbt characters are finally getting a bigger voice on recital and operatic stages (the trans-themed As One, which New Orleans Opera presented last year, has been one of the most produced works of recent vintage), Gilded deserves to have a long life. Whether it does or not, the Marigny Opera House and all others involved with this performance can be justifiably proud for introducing it to the world.

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