The opera Madame Theremin spans three worlds: the real, the unreal, and the surreal. First, the real: Lavinia Williams, an African American ballet dancer (at a time when Blacks were barred from ballet companies) married Leon Theremin, the brilliant Russian inventor of the eponymous electronic musical instrument. Leon was ordered back to Russia and then sent to the gulag, while Lavinia went on to open a school of dance in Haiti. The opera takes place on the night of Leon's arrest in 1938. The unreal is Lavinia’s imagined journey that night, from a near lynching to an underground sanctuary of ancient African music, art, and religion. Here we encounter the surreal: a vodou priestess maintaining the ancestral traditions of the first Africans brought to the Americas in chains. Powerful forces set Lavinia on a new path, but she is unable to save her husband, a victim of “progress”. Through a real and imagined past, this work is a dramatic commentary on our present.
Madame Theremin was the recipient of an Opera America New Works Exploration Grant and has been selected to be part of Snapshot 2024, a presentation of excerpts by San Francisco's West Edge Opera Company. A full-length orchestral/vocal workshop in the fall of 2024 is in the works, with a tentative world premier performance in 2025. We have set a fundraising goal of $10,000 by June 2024 to help pay for singers, musicians, and other expenses related to the fall workshop. On the way to this goal, we are aiming to raise $3,000 by the end of 2023.
The creators of Madame Theremin, composer Kennedy Verrett and librettist George M. Kopp, have been working together since 2021. Kennedy has an extensive background in composing and arranging for film, and has more recently been working in the genre of eco-acoustics. 2022 saw the premier of his SoundCheckEarth: A Desert Symphony in Joshua Tree National Park. He is the creator of the groundbreaking music project Mad Composer Lab in Portland, Oregon, conceived in the spirit of innovation which inspired the likes of Julius Eastman, Lou Harrison, Pauline Oliveros, and others. George is a former cartoonist, actor, and director who pursued writing as a business journalist, editor, and technology marketer. He has a degree in Philosophy from McGill University and an MA in the Humanities from California State University, Dominguez Hills. He wrote his thesis on the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s, the same era that saw Leon Theremin's electronic musical invention.
