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    World-Class World Premiere by Kelley Reese
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New Orleans Bowl

Dorian Gray

What's Been Happening

 






   

Scene from Dorian GrayWith age comes triumph over the trials and tribulations of life — or if not triumph, at least experience or wisdom, or wrinkles.

Dorian Gray wants none of it. He'd give his soul to stay forever young and let his portrait grow old instead.

And recently, on stage at UNT, that wish came true for Oscar Wilde's Faustian character.

On Feb. 6, the UNT Opera Theatre and Symphony Orchestra presented the world premiere of Hans Schaeuble's Dorian Gray — an opera penned more than 50 years ago by a little known Swiss composer inspired by Wilde's novella.

It was the culmination of more than three years of work that called upon almost every discipline within the College of Music.

The first performance

Scene from Dorian GrayAnd the experience was invaluable for UNT's students.

"It is a great coup for our students to be involved in the original creative process for a new opera," says Stephen Dubberly, opera music director and associate professor.

"Because there is no previous performance — no point of reference to look to for guidance — this project forced everyone who worked on either the transcription of the original score or the performance of the instrumental or vocal music to not only shine as accomplished artists, but to create."

Brian Nedvin, the doctoral student who played the role of Dorian, says that creative freedom was both a great source of excitement and frustration.

"In the beginning, it was incredibly difficult just to really grasp how everything fit together," he says. "Even though I was singing complete sentences, I only had one part of the conversation."

The fact that the opera employs an unusual tonal structure did little to ease the challenge.

"I knew nothing about how Schaeuble wrote and why," Nedvin says. "It was a struggle just to learn his musical language and find the right pitches."

The challenge was met with great success.

Swiss origins

Scene from Dorian GrayThe story of how UNT came to present the world premiere of a Schaeuble opera begins in the Swiss Alps in 2000, when Timothy Jackson, UNT music theory associate professor, met Chris Walton, then director of the Swiss Schaeuble Foundation.

The pair agreed that UNT — with its world-class opera and symphony programs and a newly founded Center for Schenkerian Studies, which is dedicated to reviving and preserving lost music — perfectly complemented the foundation's desire to present and publish Schaeuble's opera.

So, in 2001, the foundation gave UNT $64,000, two copies of the original handwritten manuscript, and the libretto, which outlines the stage direction.

Jackson, with the help of students Jennifer Sadoff ('01 M.M.), Kevin Salfen ('97, '99 M.M.) and Edward Munguia, began the transcription and part extractions.

Their challenge was to perfectly blend the project's demand for scholarly purity with the functional needs of the performers.

"Since we were doing the first transcription of this work," says Sadoff, "we wanted to stay as true to the composer's vision as possible."

However, that was often complicated, since the writing was in German and in the composer's own hand. And since Schaeuble died in 1988, he could offer no guidance about his intentions.

"But that was when we used our training and knowledge to make the best judgments," Sadoff says.

And Dubberly says that was a primary point of the project.

"You really can't separate the academic from the performance because our job is to prepare our students so they can go do this in their careers."

But it is also their job to present captivating productions.

And Schaeuble's Dorian Gray, which explores the moral truth that even beauty can be evil, is absolutely captivating.


An aural experience

Good opera successfully combines musical sound with a dramatic story and visual presentation. In other words, good opera looks like theatre. That alone is hard enough. But when recording an opera, the cast and crew must work to infuse the visual aspects of theatre into the audio format.

The 60 members of UNT's Symphony Orchestra and the complete vocal cast of Dorian Gray learned all the lessons necessary to accomplish such a task when they recorded their production for Guild Music.

The recording means that, for a while at least, anyone who wants to hear Schaeuble's Dorian Gray will listen to UNT's students.

It's a point of pride that resonates even louder than the fact that these students — undergraduates and graduates alike — will forever be listed as the world-premiere cast.

 

 

 
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