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:
“The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet, you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.”
—Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)
“Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.”
—Thomas Mann (18751955)
“Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palaces built upon the sand.”
—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)
“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)