The Passion of Vincent Van Gogh

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 van gogh, passion, vincent, van and/or gogh:

    I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.
    —Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)

    I felt for my crime a just terror; I looked on my life with hate, and my passion with horror.
    Jean Racine (1639–1699)

    Parrots, tortoises and redwoods
    Live a longer life than men do,
    Men a longer life than dogs do,
    Dogs a longer life than love does.
    —Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

    I please
    To plant some more dew-wet anemones
    That they may weep.
    —Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.

    AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)

    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)