Get a preview of Lucidity, the new opera about music, memory loss, and human connection

Lucidity, the new chamber opera from composer Laura Kaminsky and librettist David Cote, opened this week at On Site Opera in New York City and arrives in Seattle one week later. The opera explores the connections between music and memory loss by following the entangled lives of four musicians at different stages of their lives and careers.

In conjunction with Lucidity’s premiere, NPR and The New York Times each sat down with the opera’s creators and performers to learn more about how this trenchant new work came to be.

A Conversation with Mezzo-soprano J'Nai Bridges

Photo by Todd Rosenberg

J’Nai Bridges is among the world’s leading mezzo-sopranos performing today. She has been heralded and praised by critics at The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, to name only a few. J’Nai is a principal cast member of the 2022 Grammy Award-winning recording of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten produced by The Metropolitan Opera. In this conversation with Seattle Opera, J’Nai talks about growing up in Lakewood, WA, a suburb of Tacoma; her love of basketball; and returning home to perform in our 2023 concert production of Samson and Delilah.

This interview was originally conducted in 2022.

Alzheimer's, Music, and Memory

by Rui M. Costa, DVM, PhD

An image showing the charting of brainwave trajectories of individual neurons using the Expansion Selective Plane Illumination Microscope (ExA-SPIM).

The opera Lucidity delves into the fragmented, bewildering world of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, a space where memory dissolves and identity blurs. It confronts a cruel paradox: characters who know that they don't know, those who don’t know that they don’t know, and others who are painfully aware of the knowledge lost by those around them. Amid this narrative of memory loss and fading recollection, one aspect remains untouched—music. Music cuts through the fog of memory loss, reaching into the deepest parts of the human brain, stirring something enduring even when other aspects of cognition fail.