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Cynthia Opera: While There’s Light

An opera with Music by composer and violist Sarah Sarhandi and libretto by poet and translator Vincent Katz based on his award-winning translations of the love poems of the Ancient Roman poet Sextus Propertius.

The Church of San Lorenzo in Miranda built within the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, Roman Forum, 2002, photo by Vivien Bittencourt.

The Roman poet Sextus Propertius (c. 50-15 BCE) is best known as the writer who perfected the genre of Latin Love Elegy, a technical as much as a psychological and cultural feat.  Propertius has been admired by such influential cultural figures as Ezra Pound for both his metrical genius and the modernity of his narrative flow.  Ovid's love poems were written with Propertius' example in mind.  A.E. Housman was a devotee.

Many of Propertius' poems pay tribute to Cynthia, his romantic obsession, but the scope of his 107 elegies is broad.  Propertius's poetry addresses social, political, and historical subjects.  A contemporary of Virgil and Horace, Propertius has influenced scores of poets — from antiquity to today. In Katz’s translation, Propertius's difficult mix of vernacular and high literary allusion lives anew in contemporary language:

Cynthia was the first. She caught me with her eyes, a fool
who had never before been touched by desires.
Love cast down my look of constant pride,
and he pressed on my head with his feet,
until he taught me to despise chaste girls,
perversely, and to live without plan.
Already, it's been a whole year that the frenzy hasn't stopped,
when, for all that, the gods are against me.

Longtime collaborators and Cynthia Opera co-founders Vincent Katz and Sarah Sarhandi present their current project: While There’s Light. Katz transformed his translation of Propertius’ poems, published by Princeton University Press, into a libretto, for which Sarhandi is composing a complete score that contains classical structures and also draws from dance music. Voices, instruments and Sarah’s distinctive viola combine with and are contrasted against electronica. There are intimate interludes and large layered soundscapes created by Sarhandi. Her joint British and Pakistani heritage also informs the palette she uses, the shapes, timbre and cadences of the music.

“… [Propertius] was part of [a] process of change in Latin words and Roman selves, and he is maybe its wildest and most vivid specimen: a mad lexicon joyously dismantling itself. That distinguished feat needed for its performance a showy, nervous style, part self-cartoon, part slam-bang irreverence, part sheer postmodern nerve. It needs for today the superb fusion of slang and elegance and esprit that Mr. Katz provides for it.” W.R. Johnson, foreword to Charm.

“This work is a consummate labor of love, which has managed to translate the ageless sophistication of the Roman poet Propertius (50 to 16 BC) into the distracted dissonance of our own perilous times. Himself an accomplished poet, Vincent Katz has found both an idiom and a cadence specific to his master's art.” Robert Creeley, poet.

The opera contains arias, choruses, duets, trios and musical pieces. It moves from the raucous, martial sounds of what is going on outside in the streets as the Romans prepare to wage war in another section of the world, to the intimate, erotic, encounters that fuel the poet's life and poetry. Composer and librettist are working to make this opera a combination of ancient and contemporary in all senses. This is true from the phraseology of the spoken poems to the musical style and sonorities. Sarhandi and Katz have found a timeless voice for the torturous paths of passion and rendered it into the verbal and musical language of today.

The above videos are of arias from While There’s Light performed at King's Place in London, December 2013, with vocals by Jamie McDermott (left) and Sarah Buechi (right). In “The Roman Callimachus,” Propertius sings of his origins and poetic ambitions, while in “Lucky me! Radiant night!” Cynthia sings of a night of love.

Anthea Eno writes about Sarah Sarhandi’s music, “Sarah makes new sounds while drawing on her classical inheritance. Her music is characterised by a layering of strong themes and rhythms, sounds that are both acoustic and programmed, vocals and the geometric shapes of her viola. The complexity of the composition offers a different experience each time they are heard, so that the listener explores new moods and emotions, different areas of time and space.”

Cynthia Opera will present a selection of pieces from their opera, While There’s Light, to be performed on August 4th, at 7 pm BST, at The Cockpit, London, as part of Tête-à-Tête’s Opera Festival 2021. The performers will be Loré Lixenberg, mezzo-soprano, Rosie Middleton, mezzo-soprano, Ebe Oke, tenor, Mark Sanders, percussion, and Sarah Sarhandi, viola.

You can make a tax deductible donation to Cynthia Opera through our fiscal sponsor, A Gathering of the Tribes.

Cynthia Opera co-founder Vincent Katz is a poet and translator based in New York City.



Cynthia Opera co-founder Sarah Sarhandi is a composer and virtuoso violist based in London.