On May 15, City Lyric Opera will premiere a unique double bill.

The two chamber operas, “Black Water,” by Jeremy Beck, and “Savior” by Amy Beth Kirsten, explore female agency across time. “Black Water” is an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novella of the same name, while “Savior” takes on the story of Joan of Arc from a contemporary lens.

The production opens on May 15 and runs through May 18. OperaWire had a chance to speak with Beck and Kirsten about their inspirations and process in creating the two works.

***Editor’s note: Beck’s answers are italicized for distinction and clarity. Kirsten’s are not. 

OperaWire: What was the inspiration for this piece?

Jeremy Beck: In the mid-1990s, when I was teaching at the University of Northern Iowa, I was searching for source material to create a new composition for a friend and colleague, Jean McDonald. I wanted to write an extended work that could be performed both on stage or in a concert setting; not a song-cycle, but a kind of monodrama.

When I read “Black Water,” this short novel immediately spoke to me as the source I had been seeking. By way of background, Chappaquiddick Island is a small island next to the larger island of Martha’s Vineyard, just off the coast of Massachusetts. The name Chappaquiddick comes from a Native American word, “cheppiaquidne” meaning “separated island.” In 1969, the dead body of a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, was discovered inside an overturned car in a channel on Chappaquiddick. The car belonged to Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy, who did not report the late-night incident to police authorities until the following morning.

After the discovery, Kopechne’s body was recovered from the submerged car and Kennedy gave a statement to police saying that during the previous night, she was his passenger when he took a wrong turn and accidentally drove his car off a bridge and into the water. After pleading guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury, Kennedy received a sentence of two months in jail, which was suspended. The incident became a national scandal, and may have influenced Kennedy’s decision not to campaign for President of the United States in 1972 and 1976.

Oates’s novel is a slightly-veiled fictional account of these events. With her permission secured, I completed this work in 1994, writing and shaping the libretto from her text. As designed by Oates and reflected in my adaptation, the soprano assumes multiple roles and states of mind. The piece is presented completely from the point of view of the drowning woman: in reality, in flashback, in dreams, and in hallucinations.

Amy Beth Kirsten: So the inspiration for “Savior” is Joan of Arc. I was intrigued by the fact that I felt like I kind of had a sense of who Joan of Arc was, but there was something before I started this project that was telling me that maybe I didn’t really understand who she was as a person. And so that, you know, the curiosity, really compelled me to do a deep dive and do research on her. And as I got into her story and read the trial transcripts, I got more and more interested in trying to tell her story through music.

OW: What were the particular challenges of creating your works?

ABK: Well, I think of “Savior” as a work of composed theater. So a particular challenge to creating works of composed theater is my need to weave, very intentionally together, music, sound, stylized movement in a way that each one of those elements leaves room for the other – so there isn’t a sense of redundancy, and so that the whole is kind of greater than the sum of the parts. So it’s an hour long piece that required workshop time and time to kind of get things wrong before I got things right. So for me, that’s always a particular challenge. But I think another challenge of composed theater pieces is when I’m directing one of my own productions, my interest is in not having a conductor – so building into the score ways that performers can communicate musically so that a conductor isn’t needed – so particularly challenging.

JB: Running approximately 30 minutes, it is a challenging work for the singer-actor, both musically and emotionally. The only accompaniment is provided by a piano, making the work purposefully focused and austere, reflecting the desperation of the young woman’s plight as we witness her struggle against inevitable death. In composing the work, I was deeply respectful of Oates’s writing, but knew I would have to pare her language down, to distill the book into a useable libretto for this work. I am ever grateful that she not only allowed me to work with her text in this way, but that she ultimately approved of what I had done. For outside of the context of the novel, I needed to find a balance between music and text, where the music would independently carry (as well as reflect) significant aspects of the emotional weight found in the book. And in the structure of the piece, I needed to find ways to create relief as it unfolded, not only for the singer herself, but for the listener.

OW: Tell me about the musical language that you chose to tell this story?

JB: As for the musical language, the piece is tonal, but in what I consider my particular tonal dialect. There are motives, rhythms, and harmonic elements that help to create links and continuity throughout the piece. And whether the music is more consonant or more dissonant at any given point may reflect the state of mind of the young woman or even the nature of the dark water in which she is submerged.

ABK: So, the musical language that I chose to tell the story of Joan of Arc kind of chose me. As I was researching and creating the libretto, I started hearing things. I was listening, also in the lead up to beginning, to actually create the piece – in all of my composed theater works, I always do a year or two of research on the subject, and so part of that research involves listening to music of the time period, to reading poetry of the time period, to reading about art and history, you know things that are sort of contemporary to the time period. So I was listening to a lot of early music when I was making “Savior.” I think that really comes through – the music is modal; it’s also expressionistic. It’s a real amalgam of who I am and what my interests are. You’ll also notice a lot of hocketing when trying to create a single character out of three sopranos. That was one of the compositional tools that I liked to use.

OW: What do you hope that audiences take away from the experience?

ABK: As with all of my works, no matter if it’s a concert piece or if it’s a composed theater piece, I think one of my aims is to create a sense of, for this spectator, a sense that time has stopped and that there is magic enough in the music and in the storytelling that allows the world outside to sort of melt away and simultaneously resonates with something in their life, but perhaps not directly. First and foremost, I think my goal is that for the spectator, time will stop, and that they’ll be really in the moment with me in the piece, and second is the idea that there’s something in the piece that will resonate in their own lives or the world today, and it will allow them to perhaps see things differently or clarify something. It’s pretty aspirational, but those are the things I hope for.

JB: With “Black Water,” we witness a struggle for life, against all odds. We see innocence being crushed and wish only for a better outcome, but the cruelty and cowardice of power here makes such a wish futile. It is my hope that this tragedy encourages an audience to confront and face such cruelty and cowardice wherever it may appear in their own lives or the lives of others, ultimately striving to achieve better results.