Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer's grand opera Moby-Dick was a stunning success in the world premiere production by the Dallas Opera in 2010. Robert K. Wallace attended the final performance of the Dallas production and has written this book so readers can experience the process by which this contemporary masterpiece was created and performed on stage. Interviews with the creative team and draft revisions of the libretto and score show the opera in the process of being born. Interviews with the principal singers and the production staff follow the five-week rehearsal period into the world premiere production, each step of the way illustrated by more than two hundred colour photographs by Karen Almond. Opera fans, lovers of Moby-Dick, and students of American and global culture will welcome this book as a highly readable and visually enthralling account of the creation of a remarkable new opera that does full justice to its celebrated literary source. Just as Heggie and Scheer's opera is enjoyed by operagoers with no direct knowledge of Moby-Dick, so will this book be enjoyed by opera fans unaware of Melville and by Melville fans unaware of opera.
After earning his Ph.D. from Columbia, Robert K. Wallace began his career at Northern Kentucky University, USA where he is Regents Professor and teaches courses in Literature and the Arts. Wallace's books include Jane Austen and Mozart, Melville and Turner, Frank Stella's 'Moby-Dick, and Douglass and Melville.
"it is rare, indeed, that an opera production as brilliantly conceived as Scheer and Leonard Foglia's functions so seamlessly with score and libretto to form a unified whole. . . . [Wallace's] scene-by-scene and, at times, moment-by-moment analysis not only reveals the author's remarkable facility with the work but provides numerous specifics to listen for in Moby-Dick."--Opera News "Wallace really gets the piece, he really loves the piece and every aspect of that is evident. This is a wonderfully scholarly work, but there is great heart in it as well. I was fascinated."--Darren K. Woods, General Director, Fort Worth Opera "Wallace's account is both detailed and insightful, with dozens of illustrations that trace the evolution of the opera from page to stage. Interviews with the composer, librettist, and members of the cast and creative team are included at every turn, providing personal recollections that reinforce and enhance Wallace's own commentary. . . . Accessible to opera lovers or anyone who has read Melville's original novel, Wallace's book will be the perfect companion volume when Moby-Dick is eventually issued on DVD or Blu-ray."--Opera Now "Wallace's book is at its best where it gives a sense of the sheer scale of the enterprise and of the many obstacles that Heggie, Scheer, and their creative team had to overcome in rendering Melville's vision. . . . Heggie and Scheer's Moby-Dick is a richly detailed account of how the book often regarded as the Great American Novel came to be a Grand American Opera."--Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies
