Some Graphics

by Roger Brunyate

All these were designed to illustrate various productions of the Peabody Opera Department. These and others appear in different places on the peabodyopera.org website.
		The Alien Corn   An opera based on the Somerset Maugham story of the same name. It concerns a young man who seeks to become a concert pianist as a means to get back to his Jewish heritage, hitherto repressed.   Based on found materials. The portrait is of Somerset Maugham as a boy.
		Berlin/Munich   A double-bill consisting of Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel and Udo Zimmermann’s Die Weisse Rose, about German student resistance to the Nazis.   Collage of found materials. The entire production was accompanied by similar photo-collages, which can be seen at Mahagonny or Weisse Rose.
		Contrafact, Contrafiction   A program of new one-act operas involving imaginative takes on real events. Three of the operas are suggested here: a piece about Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, an opera about Galileo and his daughter, and a treatment of the relationship between Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky.   Van Gogh self-portrait, with public-domain additions. Click here for examples of how we used similar collages as backgrounds for the shows.
		Facets of Freedom   Another program of new one-act operas, loosely linked by the topic of freedom.   Own close-up photo of a lily blossom, simplified and color-enhanced, with the stamen portion enlarged and superimposed.
		The Reunion   A one-act opera by Daniel Crozier and Roger Brunyate, dealing with the ten-year reunion of five friends who were classmates at a liberal arts college in the seventies, the revelation of the rifts that have sprung up between them, and their first attempts to make them good again.   Found glamor picture, segmented.
		The Tales of Hoffmann   Peabody Opera Theatre production of the Offenbach opera, with designs by Matthew Saunders.   Collage of found images (Venetian architecture, violin, and Vesalius anatomy text), reworking motifs used by Saunders in his projections.
		The Angel’s Sarabande   A one-act opera by David Sullivan and Roger Brunyate, about the reconciliation of two estranged friends, formerly co-directors of a ballet company, and the reconstuction of their greatest success, a ballet about the Annunication, by the late husband of one of them.   This is the only picture which uses somebody else’s artwork; I do not remember where I got it from. The background is from an early Renaissance Annunciation sculpture.

 
 

The following are small thumbnails used in index screens:
		Where Angels Fear to Tread   Opera by Mark Lanz Weiser and Roger Brunyate, based on the novel by E.M. Forster, set in a thinly-disguised version of San Gimignano, Italy.   Early 20th-century photo of San Gimigniano, textured and colorized. Forster describes the towers at sunset as being “…blood-red at their base”
		A Midsummer Night’s Dream   Opera by Benjamin Britten, after Shakespeare.   Production photograph of Ryan de Ryke as Oberon, in background computer-generated from stage set by James Fouchard.
		Ordo Virtutum   Liturgical drama by Hildegard von Bingen.   MS illumination by Hildegard von Bingen, computer-processed and cross of light added.
		Pastorale & Masque   Three stage works from the Seventeenth Century.   Detail from Poussin’s The Inspiration of the Poet, reprocessed and with lettering added.
		Transformations   Opera by Conrad Susa based on the poetry of Anne Sexton, which reinterprets fairy tales (in this case, the Sleeping Beauty) in terms of her own traumas.   Photograph of Sexton with figure from an advertisement.
		With Blood, With Ink   Opera by Daniel Crozier and Peter Krask about the Renaissance Mexican nun Suor Juana Iñez dela Cruz.   Black and white production photo, colorized.