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.
Famous quotes containing the words passion, vincent, van and/or gogh:
“A tranquil mind gives life to the flesh, but passion makes the bones rot.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 14:30.
“I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat—a boat which, to revert to Neurath’s figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after van Gogh’s stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)