Sister Carrie. The opera of the novel.
Sep 15, 2017
Sister Carrie, an opera by American composer Robert Aldridge, was first performed in 2012. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, the novel on which the opera was based, was written in 1900. It was one of the first American novels about social status which, for women around the turn of the 20th century, depended almost entirely on men. Marriage and motherhood were for the majority the only life options. For many today, such observations still carry varying degrees of resonance. Aldridge’s powerful music charges up the themes of social standing and the lure of money; a small-town girl’s tortuous path to fame and her lover’s abject descent into despair. Raymond Bisha introduces the work.