AMELIA: A Listener’s Guide (Part 4 of 7)

The third scene of Amelia takes place in Vietnam. Whereas many of the other locations in the opera are places where we Americans in the audience might feel at ease--a suburban home, an urban apartment, an office--the Vietnam scene is not supposed to feel cozy and familiar. I expect Daron Hagen’s music for this scene will once again prove the old axiom: music always trumps picture. Set Designer Thomas Lynch and the Seattle Opera Scenic Studios have created a truly awe-inspiring set for this scene, with a dazzling backdrop where sunbeams break through the clouds onto verdant mountains and a river meanders away into the distance. But Amelia and her mother Amanda have come to this village to confront their worst fears, to try to find out what happened to Dodge; so the music destabilizes the beautiful location, helps us to feel their anxiety, their isolation, their reaction to the upsetting memory of extreme violence and terrible tragedy relayed to them by Huy and Trang.

Music possesses great power to reassure or to disturb. In this scene, Hagen only has to play three notes:

…and we are disoriented and troubled. This motive features the tritone of G-C#, or diminished fifth, the interval once known as diabolus in musica because of its demonic character: it’s as wrong as a sound can be, according to the old rules of Western music, and the prettiest set in the world doesn’t stand a chance against those three notes. Hagen uses that motive, plus another, a little musical curl:

…not to characterize Vietnam, or the Vietnamese, but to show us how out of place two affluent 1985 American ladies are in this North Vietnamese village.

Costume Design for Vietnamese Village Children by Ann Hould-Ward

Once upon a time, Western opera composers loved throwing together musical clichés about Asian countries for operas with ‘exotic’ locales. Much has changed since then, and nowadays an American composer like Daron Hagen wouldn’t presume to write music about the Vietnamese experience, although he does use a melody (for Trang’s startling final statement) from a well-known Vietnamese folk song. It was important to Hagen that his Vietnamese characters, Huy and Trang, be presented sympathetically in the opera; the audience must believe in them and like them. So he wanted to get their musical utterances exactly right.

David Won as Huy and Karen Vuong as Trang are among the eight singers in the production who sing in Vietnamese (Rozarii Lynch Photo)

A challenging task, when you don’t speak Vietnamese! Vietnamese is a tonal language, so the intonation of every statement is part of the statement’s meaning. The word “con gái,” for example, means “daughter”--if the speaker bends the pitch upwards on the second syllable. (If you don't pronounce the pitch bend properly, you could very easily end up saying “chicken” instead.) When Hagen wrote the music for the scene, he worked closely with several Vietnamese language advisors who helped him craft each musical utterance of the Vietnamese characters; they sometimes spent up to an hour on a single sentence, getting the ups and downs exactly right.

The Vietnam scene, with its flashback to a memory of horrific wartime violence, is probably the most gripping and dramatic scene in the opera from the point of view of plot. Musically, it never expands into lyrical beauty and release, because comforting music wouldn’t tell that story. Amelia was crafted, by McFall and Hagen and Wadsworth, as gesamtkunstwerk. That is, they chose to include in their opera only scenes which would have an emotional impact even in pantomime: losing a loved one, crashing a plane, escaping from prison, a nervous breakdown, resuscitation, death, birth, and this terrifying scene in Vietnam. The idea is, the story itself carries power: what you see onstage, the music you hear, and the words you understand are all ways of approaching that story, doors that can open to you its emotions.

This scene, with its morally impossible situation and agonizing dilemma of good and evil, may be the closest Amelia gets to the drama of Benjamin Britten. Hagen references Britten, as a matter of fact, twice in this scene. With his eclectic and allusive brain, he’s more than happy to quote or allude to other composers (indeed, he loves the operas of Richard Strauss because of this very feature), and here he acknowledges using a chord from Britten’s Billy Budd and a line from Peter Grimes. The ‘diad,’ a polytonal cluster juxtaposing Bb major with B natural minor, represents the struggle between good and evil, heaven and earth; in the soul of Billy Budd’s Captain Vere, the struggle between Billy and Claggart; in Amelia it indicates Dodge’s indeterminate status--alive or dead? Tragic figure, but because of fate or of human volition? Dodge’s solo line in the Vietnam scene, “I have faith in God, I have faith in my country, I will do my duty,” sung on a quiet monotone and marked by Hagen “Otherworldly,” similarly mimics Peter Grimes’s first line, “I swear by Almighty God,” referencing that character’s way of being beyond the reach of human events. In English and American opera, the most powerful, emotionally expressive moments can in fact come through restraint--when a character restricts himself to singing all his text on a single pitch.

A Chat with William Burden

In Amelia, the title character, on the verge of becoming a mother, is dealing with unanswered questions about her pilot father’s disappearance during the Vietnam War. Although it’s clear from the first scene that her father, Dodge, is already dead, he is an extremely prominent character in this story, appearing in flashbacks, memories, and dreams. Tenor William Burden (right), a familiar face at Seattle Opera, is creating this role and is here to share a little about the process of working on a world premiere.


When did you first hear about Amelia?
I first heard about Amelia several years ago when Speight started talking about a new commission to celebrate a particular anniversary in his tenure with the company. As a germ of an idea it was all rather mysterious and tantalizing. Then at the workshop two years ago I heard some of the music and the piece started to take real form in my imagination and my interest and excitement started to grow. I can't ever remember a time when I didn't want to be a part of this project—to participate in a production from its inception and to have the opportunity to sing a tailor-made role!

Burden as Nadir in The Pearl Fishers (2009)

You’ve performed in several world premieres. What do you enjoy about the process?
I have indeed performed a couple new pieces and the process is always interesting and exciting. To be a part of the original creative endeavor raises the stakes in ways that the creative process of more standard repertory doesn't. Direct interaction with the author, composer, and librettist allows for insight and inspiration that you just can't get from, say, Mozart and Da Ponte! There is also a wonderful sense of expectation that accompanies a world premiere—we are giving birth with this piece (in more ways than one!). The double-edged sword is, of course, that you can't ever really know what public reaction will be, so those raised stakes do keep you on your toes!

Burden as Lindoro in The Italian Girl in Algiers (2006)

Your character, Dodge, is a navy pilot who is lost during the Vietnam War. How did you build your portrayal of this character?
Though I have no personal connection to the Vietnam War or to the actual life of a pilot in the military, I draw on my experience as a father to connect to the character of Dodge. His love for his family is the strongest identifiable characteristic in each of the three powerful scenes he inhabits in the story. For our audience, the most challenging scene may be the flashback to Vietnam; but even there, though Dodge must maintain herculean focus on his duty as a soldier, his personal identification as a husband and father comes through. For me, the two incredible scenes with Amelia, both as a child and an adult, are the real payoffs. It is a personal indulgence to get to explore on stage the remarkable relationship that exists between a father and daughter—one that I will value forever!

Top photo © Rozarii Lynch. All other photos © Bill Mohn.

Making of Amelia Part VII: All Coming Together

With just over a week remaining before opening night, the finishing details for the world premiere of Amelia are coming together. In the final installment of our Making of Amelia video series, General Director Speight Jenkins highlights all the moving pieces in the 8-year journey to bring this work to the stage. Also, enjoy hearing the full orchestra for the very first time!

To watch more videos or learn more about Seattle Opera's production of Amelia, visit the Seattle Opera website.

AMELIA: A Listener’s Guide (Part 3 of 7)

Scene Two of Amelia takes place three decades after Scene One, in the ninth month of grown-up Amelia’s pregnancy. The scenes are linked by orchestral interludes, like scenes in Benjamin Britten’s great operas, and this first interlude, a sweepingly romantic piece based principally on Dodge’s soaring melodies about the allure of flight, tells the story of Amelia growing up.

One of the things that happened as she grew up: her voice changed. Young Amelia is a soprano, but adult Amelia is a mezzo. Says composer Daron Hagen of his choice to write the part for a mezzo: “The words of this opera are very important to me, Gardner has written beautiful words, and I want the audience to understand them coming from the singer’s mouth, even before they read the titles. That means Amelia has to be a mezzo. When a soprano goes up to where her money notes are, above the staff, it’s impossible for the audience to understand the words.” The decision to make Amelia a mezzo paved the road to other decisions: Amelia’s husband, Paul, is a baritone, because if he were a tenor his range would overlap with hers; while such an overlap might be OK in a Rossini comedy, it wouldn't work in a story about a mature married couple. And since Paul is a baritone, that means the other leading man, Dodge, is a tenor. What’s more, the minute Daron Hagen first heard the voice of Kate Lindsey, whom Speight Jenkins had engaged to create the role of Amelia, Hagen knew he wanted to use English horn, viola, and bassoon in the orchestra to resonate with the rich colors of Kate’s voice.

This second scene takes place in Amelia and Paul’s bedroom. But it opens with two characters who you might not expect to find in an American home in 1996: Daedalus and Icarus (left, as painted by Frederick Leighton). As happened with the shifting times and realities of the first scene, the music of this scene binds together the two disparate realities so that a pair of duets can become a quartet: Daedalus and Icarus are making wings out of feathers and wax, in order to escape the labyrinth, while Amelia and Paul’s discussion of her dream (of course she’s been dreaming about Daedalus and Icarus) evolves into flirtatious marital bickering. Hagen’s use of musical motives makes it clear that Icarus is just as much a projection of Amelia’s feelings about herself and her father as is The Flier. Icarus tends to use a motive that resembles fluttering wings:



Musical illustration by members of the Seattle Symphony

While The Flier uses this sound of rumbling engine and soaring airplane wings:

Amelia herself uses both these motives, as well as the SOS rhythm and the Navy hymn. Everything we hear in the opera is the musical landscape of her soul.

The bedroom scene features the four characters mentioned above (Icarus is a high tenor and Daedalus a bass), but it’s really Amelia’s scene. She sings a beautiful arioso to Paul about her dreams, and then (when he has left for work) an aria exploring those dreams further, “Why think of the blue canary I had at six?” The relentless descending scales of this aria contradict the surging motion of the many rising scales we hear elsewhere in the opera: Amelia, when we meet her in this scene, thinks more about how planes land (or crash) than how they lift off. Before she can be a mother, she must learn to rise up and gaze at the stars again.

Costume design for Paul by Ann Hould-Ward

A Chat with our Amelias

Throughout the course of Amelia, we see the title character both as a young girl (sung by Ashley Emerson) and as an adult (sung by Kate Lindsey). They may be playing the same character, but they agree that their Amelias are vastly different.

“My scene as Amelia is before her father, Dodge, goes missing, and this event is such a huge catalyst for grown-up Amelia’s tensions,” says Emerson (right). Lindsey agrees that the character “changes entirely” when she learns of Dodge’s disappearance. “I feel as though the childlike dreams of flying that Young Amelia has are completely crushed when she loses her father to the sky,” Lindsey says. “Thus, the older Amelia you see later has become disconnected from the child inside of her.”

One commonality between both Amelias, Emerson says, is that they idolize their father. “This sets the groundwork for the glimpses the audience has of Amelia and Dodge interacting (in my scenes), and also makes the fear that cripples Kate’s Amelia so believable.” (Below, Lindsey rehearses a scene with William Burden, who plays her father, Dodge.)

The character is based on librettist Gardner McFall, though the story is not 100% biographical. To prepare for their roles, both singers read McFall’s poetry and have talked with her extensively, but they’re not trying to make their portrayals of Amelia an impersonation of McFall. “I’m being careful to take what she says, and piece it together in the separate psyche of Amelia,” Lindsey says. “I would never want the essence of Amelia to come down to an imitation of Gardner.”

In addition to learning about McFall, both Emerson and Lindsey have done additional research for their characters. Because she’s playing a 10-year-old girl, Emerson has been reviewing videos of her grade school musicals and dance recitals. “Watching those has certainly helped remind me of my physical nature at that age.”

Lindsey has been reading up on the Vietnam War to understand the situation during Dodge’s second call to duty. She’s also been working with composer Daron Aric Hagen over the past few years to tailor some of her music to her voice, which she says “made all the difference in my ability to really sing into the music and try to get the words as clear as possible.”


Both singers have a history with director Stephen Wadsworth (shown at right working with Lindsey in a staging rehearsal), after training with him in the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, and they’re happy to be reuniting with him for this world premiere. “He allows you to follow your instincts,” Lindsey says of working with Wadsworth. “He cares very deeply that we, as the performers, are fully dedicated to the set intentions of the words or phrases.” Also, says Emerson, “Stephen really, really understands people. That’s part of why his storytelling is so clear and so moving.”

Staging rehearsal photos © Bill Mohn.

AMELIA: A Listener's Guide (Part 2 of 7)

Act One Scene One

Even though I wrote at length yesterday about musical motives, you don't need to analyze the motives in Amelia (or in any opera, for that matter) to enjoy its music. As you listen to the first scene, allow the many motives to get planted in the soil of your subconscious, so they can bloom later on, and instead direct your attention to the scene’s four big musical set-pieces:

Young Amelia’s Apostrophe to the Stars (“Oh, stars flung wide across the dome”)
The opera opens with a little girl gazing up at the starry sky. She sings a brief aria whose four-square poem and block chord accompaniment may remind you of the Navy Hymn; the music sings of her love for her father as well as the allure and romance of flight. Listen as her voice soars up to a high C at the words “Unbound by earth and troubles of day.”


Costume design for Young Amelia by Ann Hould-Ward

Dodge’s Lullaby (“Dear Amelia, may you sleep”)
We learn very quickly that the little girl’s father is missing in action in North Vietnam. Yet he is onstage, tucking her into bed, singing her a lullaby--a memory of the last time she saw him, the night before he left for his second tour of duty. Daron Hagen composed this piece, which showcases the beauty of a lyric tenor voice, after studying photos of Gardner McFall’s father--the real-life Dodge.


Photo of Gardner and Dodge McFall, senior courtesy of Gardner McFall

The Dream of the Flier
Young Amelia is a soprano, as is The Flier, and their two soprano voices overlap as Young Amelia falls asleep and dreams herself into the final moments on earth of Amelia Earhart. Hagen chose a high soprano for The Flier because the character is always way up in the clouds. The orchestral writing in this nightmare-scene also features wide open spaces between the rumbling mechanical sound of the engine, way down in the bass, and floating wings way up high. (The moment that always takes my breath away is when The Flier, recognizing the inevitability of her fate, sings the music Young Amelia used for the romance and beauty of flight.)

The Lullaby Doubled
The first scene closes, after Young Amelia wakes from her nightmare, with her mother and father reprising the lullaby from before as a duet. Since we’ve now learned that Dodge is gone, this is the first of the many surreal ensembles in the opera--when music makes the impossible possible.

Amelia’sopening scene does lots of work in less than 25 minutes: it introduces a lot of characters and themes, breaks our hearts, terrifies us, and reassures us. It also shows how this musical drama is going to work: layers of realities piling up on top of each other, rhyming with each other across time or from another dimension. When, in the space of one bar, The Flier (crashing into the Pacific) sings a high C and Young Amelia (waking from her nightmare) and her mother Amanda (distraught with grief over the loss of her husband) each sing a high A, we sense their connection--while reacting, more viscerally, to the threefold sound of those powerful voices.

AMELIA: A Listener’s Guide (Part 1 of 7)

Speight Jenkins has often said, “When we present a new opera, what we really ought to do is to play it through, take bows and applause, and then tell the audience, ‘OK, now we’re going to play the whole thing a second time.’ Because no one, no matter how musically intelligent you are, can possibly hear everything in an opera on a first pass through.” Listening to a new opera—or indeed, any piece of music—the first time is like laying down tracks for the railroad; that first time, your brain is busy mapping out “how the song goes.” Hearing it then a second (or third or fourth or—in the case of some Wagner fans—the fiftieth) time is more like enjoying a train ride along well-worn tracks.

That said, we’re only going to perform Amelia once a night! If you’d like to start thinking about it before opening night on May 8, keep your eyes on this blog; I’ll be looking through each of the opera’s six scenes, and hopefully give you a few things to listen for in each one. (My familiarity with Amelia comes from having access to the rehearsals, plus an unforgettable day when composer Daron Hagen showed me the inner workings of the score page by page.)

Speaking generally, Amelia is an opera in the tradition of Puccini, Strauss, and Britten, the most popular opera composers of the twentieth century. It’s full of arias and ensembles showcasing the emotions of the characters (and the beautiful voices of the singers); plus, the entire piece is built from a core vocabulary of musical ideas, terms, phrases, and images. But unlike our standard Seattle Opera fare, Amelia is an opera in the American language, about American lives and American issues. Librettist Gardner McFall and Composer Daron Hagen (pictured above with Speight Jenkins; Ken Howard, photo) are making poetry and music about their experiences: losing parents, having children, living through the Vietnam war. The musical themes—-which are also the poetic and emotional themes of the opera-—begin with composer and librettist, with how they think.

Daron Hagen, in particular, describes himself as having an ‘associative’ brain: one thing makes him think of another, which leads to another, and another in quick succession. Musical themes and motives, with their semiotic game of signifier-and-signified, are bread and butter to a mind like Hagen’s. For most opera-goers, motives register subliminally; but in the composer’s brain, everything operates at the level of conscious awareness.

For instance, one of the principal musical themes of Amelia is what we call the “SOS motive,” associated in the opera with characters in danger or distress. Rhythmically, it’s based on the Morse Code signal for S-O-S:


If (like Daron Hagen, whose father was a radio man for the Navy, or Gardner McFall, whose father was a Navy pilot) you have real-life experience with that rhythm, you’ll automatically tense up when you hear it in the opera. The libretto even comments on the use of Morse Code: The Flier (Amelia’s dream of Amelia Earhart), when crashing into the Pacific, admits that she never learned Morse code--not that knowing it would help her in her predicament!

And just as the SOS motive underscores moments of panic and distress, Hagen and McFall use the Navy Hymn to reassure their characters and promote emotional stability. Aunt Helen sings (Hagen and McFall’s arrangement of) the Navy Hymn in a particularly tense scene in Act Two:


But by the time Aunt Helen sings that melody, we’ve already heard the Navy hymn dozens of times, motivically. Sometimes Hagen simply uses steady progressions of reassuring tonic chords, a hymn-texture, as for example when he introduces the men in Amelia’s life (her tenor father, Dodge, and her baritone husband, Paul); at other times, he uses the tune of the Navy hymn’s cadence, or musical completion (the part that goes “For those in peril in the air”), often to comment on the frustrating lack of completion in Dodge’s missing-in-action status.

But it isn’t necessary to analyze the motives in Amelia (or in any opera, for that matter) to enjoy its music. Starting tomorrow, I'll be looking through the six scenes of the opera with an ear to the voices who star in the show and the arias and ensembles they sing.

Opera Singers Learn to Play Doctor

On April 7, 2010, volunteer doctors and nurses at Harborview Medical Center showed a team of actors and singers from Seattle Opera how to enact the "Resuscitation scene" in the upcoming world premiere opera, Amelia. It was an amazing night, an emotional experience ranging from tears to laughter.

First, Harborview staff performed a simulated Code Blue for a 12 year-old boy who suffered internal injuries after a great fall (the scene that happens in the opera). Following a discussion, performers and hospital staff broke into teams to practice CPR on dummies; things lightened up with the lesson that the best rhythm for CPR is the same beat as the BeeGees’ “Stayin’ Alive” (so singers and supers all performed CPR on their dummies while disco dancing). Finally the opera performers, closely monitored by hospital staff, practiced the resuscitation again, by then laughing and joking as friends.

To watch more videos or learn more about Seattle Opera's production of Amelia, visit the Seattle Opera website.

A Chat with Jennifer Zetlan

Jennifer Zetlan, a recent Juilliard graduate, is making her Seattle Opera debut as the Flier in Amelia. This character, based on Amelia’s namesake, Amelia Earhart, is a figment of the opera heroine’s imagination. As she’s working to create her character, Zetlan keeps a photo of the famous aviatrix close by for inspiration.

The image, which Zetlan has taped to the back of her Amelia score, is a photo of Earhart in her plane cockpit in December 1930, donning her classic aviator cap, goggles, and leather jacket.

“She is looking towards the sky, with a beautiful combination of joy and moxy,” Zetlan said. “Anytime I feel I am not quite ‘there,’ I flip to the back of my score and look at this photo. I feel it tells me who she is.”

When we first meet the Flier, she appears in her airplane above Young Amelia’s bedroom. As Amelia’s mother, separated in time from her father, learns of his disappearance, the Flier sings some of the actual words from Earhart’s final transmission before she disappeared. “It’s a fantastic juxtaposition of missing-in-action characters,” Zetlan said. “The music is searing, especially in combination with what is happening below.”

This opening scene is one of Zetlan’s favorite parts. The haunting words—“There’s the moment of realizations where I sing, ‘Soon, the shudder/And the hush of the sea’”—are paired with equally stunning music, a descending scale that starts at a high A and moves from fortissimo to piano. “I get chills all over,” she says.

Composer Daron Hagen’s music is part of what Zetlan loves about her role. Although Hagen tailored some of the music specifically to those who will perform in the world premiere, “Daron had not heard me sing when he wrote this role,” Zetlan says, “but I could swear it was written just for me. It fits like a glove.”

Interestingly, despite her character’s affinity for flight, Zetlan has always had a terrible fear of flying. As an opera singer, traveling is unavoidable, so her constant flights around the world help her deal with her fears, and so might Amelia. “I keep saying that with this opera and the repeated rehearsals of the crashing of a tiny plane…it will either get much better or I’ll be taking the train to my next destination!”

Photos: Jennifer Zetlan; Ann Hould-Ward's costume design sketch for the Flier.

Making of Amelia Part VI: The Rehearsal Process

In the penultimate installment of The Making of Amelia video series, the rehearsal process is underway. Catch the cast preparing their roles, staging, and Stage Director Stephen Wadsworth casting his vision. Amelia is almost here!

To watch more videos or learn more about Seattle Opera's production of Amelia, visit the Seattle Opera website.

Gardner McFall to speak at Richard Hugo House

Post by Amelia Librettist Gardner McFall (left)

On April 26, I will speak at Seattle's Richard Hugo House about autobiography as it appears in the personal essay and memoir. However, life experience has also influenced the poems contained in my two books The Pilot’s Daughter and Russian Tortoise. Most recently, it has informed the libretto for Daron Hagen’s Amelia, which Seattle Opera premieres May 8 with story and direction by Stephen Wadsworth.

While the story Stephen Wadsworth crafted contains plot elements that don’t correspond precisely with my life, those differences and, indeed Amelia herself, who became my mask while I was writing the libretto, provided the means by which I could explore and depict the emotional truth of my experience. And that is what the writer is really after: authenticity and discovery. I was fourteen when my Navy pilot father, who had served one tour in Vietnam, was lost at sea. Like Amelia, I lived for many years with questions, ambivalence, and a deep sense of life’s fragility. My journey from loss to recuperation is what I accessed when working on the libretto.

Richard Hugo writes in The Triggering Town: “Quest for self is fundamental to poetry.” It is also fundamental to forms like the personal essay, memoir, and, in my case, the libretto for Amelia. I look forward to meeting members of the Richard Hugo House community on April 26 at 7 pm.

A Chat with Nathan Gunn

Nathan Gunn hasn’t appeared at Seattle Opera since Florenica in the Amazon in 2005. We’re happy to have him back on our stage in May creating the role of Paul in Amelia.

Gunn first heard about Amelia while performing in the world premiere of Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy at the Met (with Amelia co-star William Burden, who's shown with Gunn at right in The Rape of Lucretia at Opera Company of Philadelphia). As a father of five, Gunn says he was “intrigued by the idea of pregnancy and birth being the catalyst for the drama.”

After some thought, he knew he wanted to join the cast: “I love Seattle Opera. I wanted to sing Daron [Hagen]’s music. I’d never worked with Stephen Wadsworth as a director and I wanted to, and I love creating new roles.”

In addition to the world premiere of American Tragedy, Gunn has been involved in new productions of Peter Eötvös’ Love and Other Demons at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival and André Previn’s Brief Encounter in Houston, and he relishes the opportunity to do it again. “I enjoy the expressive freedom involved in creating a character,” he says. “I’m allowed to sculpt the character in many more ways because the history of the opera is in no way determining how we think about it.”

Gunn is playing Paul, Amelia’s husband (he's shown at left with his onstage wife, Kate Lindsey). He describes Paul, an aerospace engineer, as “realistic” and “down to earth.” Gunn says he feels a connection with the character. “He’s able to focus on the task at hand…to put aside fear in order to pursue a goal. We are very similar in that way.” Gunn can also relate to the concerns of a first-time parent. “I know what it’s like to be an expecting dad and what all the worries are that he might have.”

When Amelia questions the reason for bringing a child into a world that’s dangerous and filled with pain, Paul tries to reassure her that bad things don’t always happen. As he says to her in Act 1 Scene 2: “Not every flier flies too near the sun.”

And although the opera is mainly focused on Amelia’s journey, Paul certainly changes over the course of the opera, as well, Gunn says. “By the end of the opera, having almost lost Amelia, he realizes that loss is always a possibility, but the gain is worth the risk.”

Photos: Gunn (Tarquinius) and Burden (Male Chorus) in The Rape of Lucretia at Opera Company of Philadelphia, 2009 © Kelly & Massa Photography; Kate Lindsey and Nathan Gunn after a rehearsal for Amelia.

Covering Amelia

About a dozen singers are currently rehearsing roles in Amelia that they’ll probably never perform onstage. These singers are “covers”—they each know the music and staging for their role and can perform on short notice if their mainstage counterpart is indisposed. One of the Amelia covers is Young Artist Marcy Stonikas (right).

Fresh off her starring role in Ariadne auf Naxos, Stonikas joins Amelia rehearsals covering the role of Aunt Helen, sung by Jane Eaglen. This means she (and this goes for all the covers in relation to their mainstage counterparts) attends all of the rehearsals to which Eaglen is called in order to learn the staging, and has private coachings to prepare the music. She’ll rehearse the staging with the other cover singers, because she needs to be 100% prepared to perform in Eaglen’s place, if need be. Some of the covers are covering, and therefore learning music and staging for, multiple roles.

Although Stonikas has been studying with Eaglen (left) at the University of Washington this year, it still feels a bit “surreal” to be working with someone she spent years listening to on recordings and watching perform. “I tried to play it cool upon meeting her for our first voice lesson, and I’m sure I was a bit of bumbling idiot,” Stonikas admits, “but she was just lovely.”

Stonikas has tackled some of Eaglen’s signature roles this season in YAP, including Brünnhilde in the children’s adaptation of Siegfried and the Ring of Fire and Ariadne. “Her help while I was learning Ariadne was invaluable to me—it was such an honor, too,” Stonikas said. “I have the utmost respect for that woman, and have for about as long as I’ve known anything about opera.”

Because of their relationship, Stonikas feels she will be able to work closely with Eaglen to develop her understanding of the character. “I do feel comfortable asking her about choices she’s made and any other questions about the role.” If she were covering a singer she’d never met instead, Stonikas said she might be hesitant to do much more than observe rehearsals.

Overall, Stonikas is excited to be working on this brand new opera. “It’s a pretty big deal,” she said. “And the importance of being involved in a world premiere production does not escape me, even if I never set foot on the stage.”

Staging AMELIA with Assistant Director Mary Birnbaum

I had the chance the other day to yank Amelia assistant director Mary Birnbaum (right) away from rehearsal and check in with her about the process. No stranger to Seattle Opera, Mary first visited the company in the summer of 2001, when she saw Stephen Wadsworth's first RING cycle. Since then she’s studied English at Harvard and theatre at L’École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, founded her own theater company in Manhattan, and worked with Wadsworth on his production of Verdi’s Falstaff at The Juilliard School. When Stephen asked her to read Gardner McFall’s book of poems The Pilot’s Daughter and consider whether she wanted to come to Seattle and work on Amelia, Mary was “immediately hooked.”

JD: If you look at the synopsis of Amelia, the opera doesn’t proceed in a linear, chronological direction. They’ve created an opera that moves backwards and forwards in time, and in and out of several different realities. How do you stage the action so that the audience can follow this non-linear storytelling?

MB: We’re working very hard to make sure the story of Amelia is clear; but I think modern audiences are more used to this convention than they know, as flashbacks and "flashforwards" happen all the time in television shows and movies. There is a poetic approach to shifting realities in Amelia; for example, Daedalus and Icarus, who come from mythology, and The Flier, who comes from history, come, in this opera, from Amelia’s dreams--we see them because they’re inside of her. In the same way, Amelia's father and mother, long since dead in the later scenes of the opera, continue to reappear in her consciousness. In a sense, I think the layering of multiple realities in Amelia resembles the experience of being pregnant, where there is, quite literally, an inner life as well as an outer one; and it’s also a bit like being on an airplane, where you’re sort of ‘outside of time’ for a few hours, although really you aren’t, life is going on down there on the ground. My advice to the audience is, although we are staging the action naturalistically, bear in mind that Amelia is a poem: each line in the libretto, all the musical ideas, what happens in the staging, everything has more than one meaning. Our set designer, Tom Lynch, has given us in almost every scenic location multiple levels, physically...so even the sets have more than one meaning.

I highly recommend reading the libretto before seeing the show, as it stands alone as a gorgeous piece of artwork. If not, here’s my attempt to explain what the opera’s about in one sentence: Amelia is trying to reconcile the circumstances surrounding the mysterious disappearance of her father with the fact that she is about to become a mother. There’s more to it than that...but that should get you started!

JD: It seems like every time I come down to the rehearsal studio, people are in tears. Is Amelia going to be one of those operas where you need to bring an extra handkerchief?

MB: It’s extremely intense, it’s true, because Amelia deals with people’s most desperate desires and deepest fears. Of any director, Stephen Wadsworth is the best equipped to deal with this kind of intense emotion. He’s been teaching acting for many years, and has a brilliantly disarming technique when it comes to emotional storytelling. He’s unabashed, emotionally, more than happy to ask his singers to explore the full expressive range of human emotions. You know, we—-in the age of cameras and close-ups--we love poker face. Most of us, in real life, do our best to avoid the full-blown intensity of operatic emotion, the kind of thing that makes you wave your arms and sing, very loudly, “Oh, my God, I LOVE YOU!!!” (Birnbaum demonstrates.) But that’s what opera is about; that’s what opera allows you to do.

Stephen--and in fact the whole team working on Amelia, including Gardner McFall and Daron Hagen--wanted to build a piece that can serve as a vessel for these large-scale emotions; but everyone is acutely aware of not wanting to cross the line into sentimentality. I think for us, sentimentality implies cuteness, and tends to fail to achieve universality. It’s like comedy, you can’t TRY to be funny. We certainly are not trying to make people cry, just to present the reality of these people's lives, which happen to be emotionally fraught.

JD: Speaking of comedy, Amelia is such an intense show, will there be any comic relief?

MB: Well...there’s lots of comic relief in the rehearsal studio! Everybody in the cast, and the creative team, too, has a great sense of humor, so we’ve been alternately crying and laughing! Generally, however, we’re trying to keep the dramatic tension pretty taut, which is consistent with most fiction and movies that concern the Vietnam War--it's not a laugh riot. These stories are really hard. You know, in Apocalypse Now or Platoon there are shots of guys being chummy, joking around or laughing, but it’s not very funny--they’re clearly doing that because they want relief from the stress and the horror of the situation. I think it’s interesting that Amelia explores a story that concerns Vietnam, but from a woman’s point of view. That frat-boy kind of forced hilarity is foreign both to Gardner, who wrote the libretto, and to Amelia, whose story is taken from Gardner’s life. Instead there’s a gentleness, a quality of observant quiet to Gardner’s writing, which I haven’t seen before in this kind of fiction.

Amelia Sneak Peek Event

Yesterday, we invited several local arts bloggers and critics to an Amelia Sneak Peek event at our rehearsal studio. They heard from the creative team of composer Daron Hagen, librettist Gardner McFall, and director and story author Stephen Wadsworth, along with a few of the singers: Kate Lindsey (Amelia), William Burden (Dodge), and David McFerrin (Paul, alternating with Nathan Gunn). The artists talked about the process of creating and rehearsing a brand new opera, and McFerrin sang a portion of the "Letter Aria," a beautiful piece that features actual text from a letter that McFall's navy-pilot father sent home before he was lost at sea.

Zach Carstensen of The Gathering Note liveblogged the event, and you may have seen his updates on Twitter, along with tweets from Michael van Baker of Sunbreak.com, Ron Holden of Crosscut and Seattlest, and Virginia Wright of City Arts online.


You'll get more great behind-the-scenes glimpses at Amelia, as we roll out our final "Making of Amelia" videos, which will feature the singers in rehearsals and a retrospective on the entire process. Stay tuned!

Photos: Kate Lindsey and Daron Hagen; Reporters listen to a discussion between William Burden and Gardner McFall. All photos © Bill Mohn photo

The Navy Hymn in AMELIA

Last night, in our conversation with Amelia composer Daron Hagen and librettist Gardner McFall (available for viewing at our livestream channel) Seattle Opera audiences got a window into the wonderfully collaborative relationship between this poet-composer team.

For example, it was the librettist's suggestion to incorporate the "Navy Hymn" into the opera, because the story concerns a US navy pilot, Dodge (played by William Burden). Hagen took McFall's suggestion and ran with it. Aunt Helen (played by Jane Eaglen) sings the McFall/Hagen arrangement of the Navy Hymn at a dramatic moment in the opera (Act Two Scene Two); but Hagen has included musical fragments of the tune as far back as the first scene, so that when Eaglen sings it for real, it will crystallize what we've been hearing all night long.

The text of the hymn, as sung by Aunt Helen:

Lord, guard and guide all those who fly
Through the great spaces of the sky.
Be with them always in the air,
In darkening storms or sunlight fair;
Oh, hear us when we lift our prayer
For those in peril in the air.

Aunt Helen's text is based on the second verse of the hymn (the first verse, "Eternal Father, strong to save", concerns sailors more than pilots). Many renditions of the hymn are available on YouTube; my favorite, musically speaking, is embedded below. They singers get to the second verse at 1:55.

Making of Amelia Part V: Taking Flight

The Making of Amelia continues with a look into flight’s role in the opera. The Amelia sets feature a fully-to-scale Lockheed Electra, and Master Scenic Carpenter Bruce Warshaw explains some of the unconventional materials used in its construction. Enjoy Warshaw’s guided tour and see why he promises “it will look exactly like the real thing.”

To watch more videos or learn more about Seattle Opera's production of Amelia, visit the Seattle Opera website.

What’s AMELIA About? War

The Vietnam War is part of the setting of Amelia. The opera’s libretto includes references to the Gulf of Tonkin, Yankee Station, the Delta, and the Haiphong power plant, and Act One Scene Three takes place in an unnamed village in North Vietnam. Amelia and her mother, Amanda, travel there in 1985, after receiving a letter from Huy and Trang, a couple who live in the village and who (in 1966) interacted with Dodge, the missing-in-action father of Amelia and Amanda’s husband. In that scene, the Americans communicate with the Vietnamese through an Interpreter--making it an extremely unusual scene, so far as language in opera and musical text-setting is concerned! (Vietnamese, like most Asian languages, is tonal, meaning part of the meaning of the word is carried by the pitch (or pitches) on which it is vocalized. Coming up in a few weeks on this blog: the pleasures and perils of creating and singing opera in Vietnamese!)

But the opera isn’t really about the Vietnam War, at least not from any political point of view. It’s about the impact that war—-any war-—can have on families, on those left at home. Composer Daron Hagen has pointed out that the same drama probably happened 2,500 years ago, during the Peloponnesian War, and Speight Jenkins, in his Forward to the published libretto of Amelia, refers to the wars in which America is currently involved.

Amelia herself, in the opera, has trouble finding meaning in her father’s death: “Daddy, why did you die? / I needed you more than your squadron did,” she asks in Act Two Scene One. “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,” she sings, quoting Hermann Melville’s 1861 poem “The March into Virginia.”

Yet it may be an oversimplification to say that the opera is anti-war. The climax of the story comes in a moment of magical or mythical realism, when Amelia’s husband Paul finds and sings aloud the last letter written by Amelia’s father, a letter that had been destroyed in Vietnam in 1966. Unlike his daughter, Dodge expresses no regret about his imminent sacrifice:

I am at peace within myself.
I have no fear, but write this for reality’s sake.
If I’m shot down, and should eject,
Please know I will bear whatever lies ahead.
If I am lost, do not despair.
Keep faith, go forward, never forget
How thankful I am, and how happy you have made me.

Like the opera Iphigénie en Tauride, which Amelia creators Speight Jenkins, Stephen Wadsworth, and Tom Lynch recently brought to Seattle (and to the Metropolitan Opera), Amelia is an opera set in a world where war is a terrible reality: an opera about characters who strive to find ways of breaking free of the cycle of violence.

Below, Nuccia Focile and Brett Polegato as Iphigénie and Oreste at Seattle Opera, 2007 (Bill Mohn, photo)

A Chat with Brian Garman

Ariadne auf Naxos, with its very distinct “Prologue” and “Opera” portions, is undoubtedly a difficult opera. And, acknowledges conductor Brian Garman, a rather unusual choice for a Young Artists Program. It’s “really ambitious—if not almost completely unheard of—to do in a Young Artists Program,” says Garman, who is also the YAP music director. “But we have these ‘crazy’ ambitious ideas from time to time and Ariadne was one that we were kicking around for awhile.” Garman and Artistic Director Peter Kazaras knew they had a great Composer in Vira Slywotzky and a thrilling Zerbinetta in Megan Hart, plus some talented men who could sing and act the comedian roles “like they’ve been performing together for years.”

“What sealed the deal, though, was Marcy Stonikas,” he says. Once she completed her aria at auditions last December, “Peter Kazaras and I looked at each other at the same time and said, ‘Ariadne?’ After a few days of consideration, we knew it was the right opera at the right time.”

This is Garman’s first time conducting Ariadne, but “it has always been among my very favorite Strauss operas. It has wit and humanity and charm and passion. And that music.... It's visceral and overwhelming—the last half-hour is so beautiful it could make a stone weep.”


As it was originally conceived, the opera Ariadne was performed immediately after an adaptation of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, written by Ariadne’s librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. But the original production was over six hours long, so Strauss and Hofmannsthal dropped the Molière play and wrote a prologue to set up the drama of what happens in the opera—that the opera company and the troupe of comedians are forced to perform simultaneously—and this revised version is what’s performed today.

“The prologue is essentially a pastiche of tunes from the opera interspersed with lots and lots of accompanied recitative. There are changes of tempo every few bars, and always dictated by what the dramatic moment is, not necessarily by anything musical,” Garman says. “The ‘opera’ itself is very, very difficult also, but it has a certain amount of musical and structural logic that’s sometimes lacking in the prologue.”

The music of the opera, Garman says, is distinctly Strauss. “It has a lot of Strauss's trademarks—many busy thematic lines happening in the orchestra simultaneously, and lots of conversational bits in the prologue. Similarly, the highly romantic music that Ariadne and Bacchus sing to each other is full of Strauss's typical melodic suspensions and horn solos, and is incredibly, almost unbearably, lush. It certainly more than rivals even the most beautiful moments of Rosenkavalier.”

Photo: Brian Garman conducting the Ariadne orchestra © Rozarii Lynch photo; Marcy Stonikas, Jennifer Edwards, Jenni Bank, Vira Slywotzky, Joanna Foote, and members of the Ariadne orchestra © Chris Bennion photo.

What’s AMELIA About? Parents and Kids

Seattle Opera has been celebrating the works of Giuseppe Verdi all season, a composer famous for his breathtaking music inspired by stories about parents and children: about Germont and Alfredo, in La traviata, about Azucena and Manrico, in Il trovatore, about Rigoletto and Gilda, Amonasro and Aida, Fillipo and Carlo, Miller and Luisa, Simon Boccanegra and his Amelia.

But it’s time now for another operatic Amelia. And Daron Hagen’s new opera is just as concerned with parent/child relationships as any work by Giuseppe Verdi. At the heart of Hagen’s new opera is the relationship between Amelia and her father, Dodge, and the journey of a daughter who has lost her father. But we also meet a father who loses his son, as in the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus; and a couple, Huy and Trang, who lose their daughter. The pain of breaking that bond between parent and child is one of the universal human experiences, those things opera can approach in a way that nothing else can.

But Amelia isn’t only about loss. The musical climax of the opera comes in the final scene, when Amelia gives birth to a daughter. I don’t know of any opera that puts the experience of birth front and center, musically, the way Amelia does. Librettist Gardner McFall and composer Hagen drew on their own experiences of becoming parents to create the scene, giving it a powerful authenticity. I’m not a parent, myself, but I’ve just recently been privileged to witness the miracle of birth, with my best friend. A week or two after the delivery, I shared some of Amelia with my friend and her family, a sneak peek at the poetry and music of the final scene. And even on paper, not yet realized by professional musicians, the opera touched a universal chord.


Above, Daron Hagen with Atticus, in Seattle in 2008

What’s AMELIA About? Flight

Ever had a dream in which you could fly? Or were going to miss your flight, or were being chased around an airport, and if only you could get to the plane you could get away? Do you like the experience of flying, or hate it? The human race has been flying for about a hundred years, during which time we’ve used aircraft both to fly to the moon and to drop bombs all over this planet. Is flying good or bad?

Most people have strong feelings about flight, feelings of (dare I say) operatic intensity. When Daron Hagen first had the germ of the idea that became his opera, Amelia, he wanted to explore those feelings musically, to use flight as a metaphor for the human condition. Originally, he pitched Speight Jenkins of Seattle Opera on a non-linear opera about the history of flight, which was to include Daedalus and Icarus, and the Wright Brothers and Amelia Earhart, and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon.

From that original pitch, images of both the uplifting possibility of flight, and its potential tragedy, made it all the way into the finished opera. Amelia Earhart, after whom the opera’s title character was named, appears in the opera, not as an historical character, but as The Flier, a fantasy of the romance of flight, its adventure, its ability to reach out into the unknown. The opera’s protagonist dreams of what happened to Earhart—after the historical record gives out. In Act One, we see The Flier speaking to her navigator, the heavy drinker Fred Noonan, who was in fact in Earhart’s Lockheed Electra with her when she disappeared; and in Act Two, we find out what The Flier thinks of the place where she lands.

Daedalus and Icarus, who (in Greek myth) escaped from the Cretan Labyrinth on wings made from feathers and wax, also appear in Amelia’s dreams. But they become real, later on in the opera, as The Father and The Son, whose family undergoes a tragedy counterpointing that of Amelia’s family. In the myth, young Icarus was so thrilled with the power and possibility of having wings, he soared too near the sun: the heat melted the wax that was holding his wings together, and he fell to his death.


We hope you'll join us on Saturday, April 10, at 2 pm, at the Museum of Flight (or on our livestream channel at the same time), for a panel discussion with Vietnam veterans who, like the character of Dodge in Amelia, flew in Vietnam.

AMELIA Frequently Asked Questions

What’s Amelia about?
Amelia is about flight, and it’s about war, and it’s about family and love. Watch this blog the next few days to learn more!

Is it an opera about Amelia Earhart?
No. Kate Lindsey plays Amelia, an American woman whose father named her after Amelia Earhart. Amelia (the opera character) loses her father when she’s a little girl. Her father, Dodge, played by William Burden, is a US navy pilot, MIA in Vietnam; he vanishes without a trace as did the real-life Amelia Earhart. So when she grows up, Amelia (the opera character) has an understandably complicated relationship to her namesake; when she herself is uncertain, she dreams of the terror and excitement experienced by a 1930s female pilot, known as The Flier (played by Jennifer Zetlan), a projection of herself onto the real-life Earhart.

Is it an opera about the Vietnam War?
Not exactly. Certainly the opera has no political agenda; instead, it explores the impact that war in general has upon families. Amelia looks at the Vietnam War from the perspective of someone who lived through it as a small child, lost the most important person in her life to the war, and is searching for ways to heal the scar now that she is older.

Where did the story of the opera come from?
It’s original. Although most operas (including Falstaff, Il trovatore, and La traviata, not to mention other contemporary American operas including Moby-Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Bonesetter’s Daughter) take their stories from pre-existing sources, the story of Amelia was created by Daron Hagen, Gardner McFall, and Stephen Wadsworth. Part of the inspiration comes from the real-life experience of Gardner McFall, who wrote the libretto after writing a collection of poems called The Pilot’s Daughter: McFall was a little girl when her own father, who was in fact a US navy pilot named Dodge, was lost over the Pacific during the Vietnam War.

What will the music sound like?
Hagen writes lyrical vocal music which showcases both the emotions felt by the characters and the beauty of the singers’ voices; Amelia features an orchestra of 45, including a colorful percussion section. His harmonic language varies depending on the needs of the drama, from reassuringly tonal to more complicated and chromatic. Structurally, Amelia uses the best principles from both the Italian and the German opera traditions: it’s full of emotion-packed arias and ensembles, like an Italian opera, but the entire piece is built from a core vocabulary of musical ideas, terms, phrases, and images, as are the great German operas.

How can I listen to a recording? You can’t! The opera hasn’t yet been played! At www.seattleopera.com you can hear vocal excerpts, with piano accompaniment, recorded at a workshop in May of 2008. Samples of Daron Hagen’s other music are available at his blog, and you can buy a recording of his opera Shining Brow here.

Making of Amelia Part IV: Creating a Village Scene

In this week’s Making of Amelia installment, visit the Seattle Opera Scene Shop and be amazed at the set for the Vietnam Village scene. Scenic Studios Manager Michael Moore walks through the construction and aging of Vietnam huts and Master Scenic Artist Kitty Kavanaugh and her team demonstrate the elaborate and fascinating process of creating an enormous, hand-painted backdrop.

To watch more videos or learn more about Seattle Opera's production of Amelia, visit the Seattle Opera website.

Glowing Reviews of ARIADNE

Opening night of Ariadne auf Naxos earned raves from critics who were in the house; Gavin Borchert wrote that "For sheer ear-gluttony, this production will be hard to beat" in the Seattle Weekly, and Bernard Jacobson of the Seattle Times said "For the Ariadne of Marcy Stonikas, only superlatives will do. The warmth, flexibility, and apparently inexhaustible power of her voice easily rode even the larger orchestral climaxes, and enveloped us all with its loveliness — most definitely, this is a singer with a big future."

We hope to see lots of you at the remaining three performances of this unusual and exquisite opera.

A Chat with Michael Krzankowski and Eric Neuville

We have two Harlequins in this year’s Young Artists’ production of Ariadne auf Naxos—Eric Neuville and Michael Krzankowski. These two young singers get a chance to play the young male leader of Zerbinetta's comedy troupe.

Michael is finishing his second year with YAP, after singing Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Siegfried in the children's adaptation of Siegfried and the Ring of Fire, and Guglielmo in Così fan tutte. Before coming here, this Chicago native studied at the University of Iowa and Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music, but his first inspiration came from the Rodgers and Hammerstein movie-musical Carousel. "No one can play Billy Bigelow better than Gordon MacRae. It's a role I hope to play someday."

Eric's first year in YAP is ending with his final role as a baritone -- this summer he makes his tenor debut as Beppe in I Pagliacci at Chautauqua Opera. He studied at St. Olaf College and University of Texas - Austin. This is his first Ariadne, and in fact, his first experience in a Strauss opera. "[Strauss's] harmonic vocabulary is superbly romantic and took several weeks for my ear to latch on to. He's no Mozart!"

Take a listen to a snippet of Harlequin's aria, sung by Stephen Genz, as he tries to cheer up the lovelorn Ariadne.

Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen,
Alle Lust und alle Qual,
Alles kann ein Herz ertragen
Einmal um das andere Mal.
Aber weder Lust noch Schmerzen,
Abgestorben auch der Pein,
Das ist tödlich deinem Herzen,
Und so musst du mir nicht sein!
Musst dich aus dem Dunkel heben,
Wär' es auch um neue Qual,
Leben musst du, liebes Leben,
Leben noch dies eine Mal!




Loving, hating, hopes and fears,
Cause for laughter, cause for tears,
In your heart all these must play
Today and every other day.
But you feel no joy, no pain;
Your broken heart beats on in vain.
To this grief do not succumb.
You must not let your heart go numb.
I will bring you back to life,
though your path be dark with strife.
Life is ours now; you must live,
Must move on, forget, forgive.

This is also Michael's first Ariadne, and he's really enjoying the comedy aspect. "There's a camaraderie among the actors playing the troupe, which has easily transferred onto the stage," he said, and he's looking forward to seeing how the audience reacts. "There have been plenty of laughs and tears during rehearsals, even among the cast members."

Once Araidne closes, Michael heads to Glimmerglass Opera to cover Almaviva in Il nozze di Figaro. He also recently joined the roster of Hubbard-Levine Management, and is moving to New York City to pursue his opera career. After Eric performs with Chautauqua Opera, he's coming back to YAP in the fall as a tenor to sing Guglielmo in Viva La Mamma and Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni. He'll also make his mainstage debut at Seattle Opera as Normanno in Lucia di Lammermoor and return as the First Priest in The Magic Flute.

You can see Michael perform Harlequin on April 9 (he also performed last night), and you can catch Eric on April 3 and April 11. Whichever night you go, you'll see a great comedic Harlequin!

Photos: Michael Krzankowski; Megan Hart and Eric Neuville. Both photos © Chris Bennion