Ellen West
- Ana De Archuleta
- Nov 11, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: May 13
Music by: Ricky Ian Gordon
Libretto by: Frank Bidart
Duration: 75 minutes
Originally Commissioned and premiered: Opera Saratoga, 2019
Ellen West is a chamber opera-theatre work that delves into the true story of a woman struggling with disordered eating during the early 20th century, and the attempts of people around her to save her. Through the evocative poetry of Pulitzer Prize winner Frank Bidart and the beautiful music of Ricky Ian Gordon, Ellen West reveals the emotional roller-coaster of a woman fighting her own body and mind, battling starvation and obsessive control. Eventually she returns to the home she shared with her husband, where he and her doctors intervene in an exploration of the emotional, psychological, and physical challenges of her struggle with her perceptions of her body, her relationship with food, and her feeling of the world closing in around her. At the end of the opera, Ellen West is able to rise above her fettered circumstances by finding peace in death, finally freeing herself from the restraints that had gripped her in life.
FORCES
Singers:
Ellen West; - Soprano
Ludwig Binswanger; Baritone
Orchestration:
Str.4tet., Cb., C Bell, Pno.
Reviews
"Ricky Ian Gordon’s riveting one-act opera “Ellen West,” recently given its world premiere by Opera Saratoga at the Spa Little Theater, depicts the savage struggle of a young woman whose eating disorder is a war to the death between her soul and her body. Through an unusually powerful fusion of music and poetry, the opera soars beyond the clinical details into the realm of existential dread, yet never loses sight of the suffering human being at its center." -Heidi Waleson, The Wall Street Journal
"On this foundation, Gordon builds a rich work on a small scale, crafting a score for string quartet, bass, and piano that never loses its basic feeling of tension. Ellen West is not so straightforwardly melodic as some of Gordon’s other works, but it is no less expressive for that. In the taut, hard-edged lines of Ellen’s vocal part we hear a reflection of the psychology expressed so vividly in the text, grappling with existential problems and struggling to find resolution. The hardest-hitting lines of the poem come out in blazing musical climaxes, yet Gordon finds plenty of room to let the character have quieter moments of introspection, in passages that wander as she explores a new idea."- Eric C. Simpson, New York Classical Review
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