Garden of the Finzi - Continis

Music by: Ricky Ian Gordon

Libretto by: Michael Korie

Duration: Two Acts- 170 minutes

Commissioned: The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene and New York City Opera Premiered: Edmond J. Safra Hall in the Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, NY, 2022

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With a text by Michael Korie and based on Giorgio Bassani’s acclaimed 1962 novel of the same name, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis takes place in Ferrera, Italy, on the cusp of World War Two. It tells the story of Giorgio, a working-class Italian-Jewish youth, and his relationship with a wealthy Italian-Jewish family, the Finzi-Continis, who, even as Italy forms an alliance with Germany and begins enforcing anti-Semitic laws, cling to the belief that they will be invulnerable to the impending devastation. Through the storyteller's recollections, members of the Jewish community of Ferrera and across Italy who perished in the Holocaust are immortalized, the certitude of their existence woven into the fabric of recorded history through written word.

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FORCES

Singers:

4 Sopranos

1 Mezzo-Soprano

4 Tenors

3 Baritones

1 Bass-Baritone

Chorus: 3 Trebles and 3 Basses

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Orchestration:

Flute (doubling piccolo)

oboe (doubling English horn)

Clarinet in Bb, Bassoon

Horn in F, Trumpet in C

Bass Trombone

Percussion (1 player)

Piano (doubling Celesta)

Violin 1,2,3

Viola

Violincello

Contrabass

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Project Statement

Royce grew up on a farm in Alberta, Canada. His dad committed suicide. Now, that doesn't happen in the book but the story still resonates with him because it’s about the embodiment of grief in the psyche and how it affects families," Gordon says. "Royce personalized the story in his own way. It's about how the father’s grief affects his relationship with his little girl, who is growing into a woman. She is an agonizing reminder of her mother’s death, and the death of Christmas for him. Christmas is about birth, but for the father, it’s about death. And the end of The House Without a Christmas Tree, it becomes about birth again: ‘My little girl isn’t who I thought she was.‘ That moment when she walks in and the father flips a switch and there is an exquisite tree in the living room, and the music goes up to a B-natural, it's just exquisitely beautiful. Just talking about it, I’m chilled.- Ricky Ian Gordon, Playbill, November 16, 2017

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Reviews

With his latest, Gordon brings in elements from other styles that provide audiences with a familiarity that draws the listener into the music, rather than away from it. Gordon has a lot of implements in his composer’s toolbox, and he’s not afraid to mix and match styles that engage the audience. -Chris Ruel, OperaWire

Gordon and Korie’s opera honors the fictional family that Bassani created and allows them once again, as operatic voices, to haunt and inhabit a garden in Ferrara that never actually existed but continues to resonate in memory and history. -Larry Wolff, Hudson Review

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MEDIA

Edmond J. Safra Hall in the Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, NY, 2022

Photos by Steve Pisano

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