Song from the Uproar

Along with the acclaimed ensemble concert:nova, we're pleased to present our first work by a female composer—the boundary-breaking Missy Mazzoli—and librettist Royce Vavrek. Inspired by the fascinating salvaged journals of early-twentieth-century explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, the 2012 chamber opera has been called “powerful” (The Wall Street Journal) and “a captivating multimedia spectacle” (The New York Times). Singing Isabelle Eberhardt is the performer who created the role, Abigail Fischer, praised by the Los Angeles Times as “enthralling…one of the rising stars of new music."

Isabelle Eberhardt was born in 1877 in Geneva, Switzerland. At age 21, after the death of her father, mother, and brother in quick succession, she travelled alone to Algeria. She dressed as a man, converted to Islam, and joined a Sufi order, roamed the desert on horseback, and fell in love with an Algerian soldier. After surviving an attempted assassination and a failed suicide pact with her lover, Isabelle drowned in a desert flash flood at age 27.

Her journals were salvaged from the wreckage. This is her song.