The Passion of Vincent van Gogh is an opera in three acts and eighteen scenes by composer Christopher Yavelow. The opera was commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts and composed at the Camargo Foundation in 1983 during a Camargo Fellowship in Cassis, France. The English libretto by the composer is taken from the letters of Vincent van Gogh (with permission from the Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Paul Gauguin's journal, and additional official documents relating to Vincent van Gogh. Each line is footnoted in the score and libretto. A German translation by Monique Fasel appears in both the score and libretto. Research for the opera was supported by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) and by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. An abridged version of the opera premiered at the University of Texas at Dallas on April 14, 1984.
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“When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The great passion in a man’s life may not be for women or men or wealth or toys or fame, or even for his children, but for his masculinity, and at any point in his life he may be tempted to throw over the things for which he regularly lays down his life for the sake of that masculinity. He may keep this passion secret from women, and he may even deny it to himself, but the other boys know it about themselves and the wiser ones know it about the rest of us as well.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“I’m a junkie. I like drugs, I like the whole lifestyle, but it just didn’t pay off.”
—Gus Van Sant, U.S. screenwriter, and Dan Yost. Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon)
“Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.”
—Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)