Willow

In her 1927 review of Shelley: His Life and Work, Virginia Woolf wrote, “There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation, not that we have anything new to add to them, but because of some queer quality in them which makes them not only Shelley’s story but our own.” Willow takes Woolf’s own story and queers it, blending her reflections on love, support, and loss with a contemporary lens.

This chamber opera explores the relationship between two characters: one grappling with severe depression, and the other offering support and experiencing loss. Both characters are intentionally genderless, yet their roles are performed by male singers. This choice highlights the poignant reality that suicide remains the second leading cause of death among young men, with over half of young LGBT individuals reporting having considered it. Willow seeks to confront these issues with sensitivity and depth.

Woolf’s suicide note reveals the profound love and support she received from her husband, Leonard, even in her final moments. Inspired by this, Willow unfolds across five scenes, exploring themes of support, loneliness, absence, loss, and stillness. However, the audience will only hear four of these scenes, leaving the story incomplete. This deliberate omission invites the audience to experience the ache of unresolved grief, the absence of Willow’s acceptance or Oak’s pain without support.

Oak’s text is drawn directly from Woolf’s note to Leonard, while Willow’s words are newly written, shaped by my own experiences of losing friends and witnessing the impact on their loved ones. Additionally, two scenes are framed with spoken text from Percy Shelley’s poems “Love’s Philosophy” and “Music, when soft voices die.” By employing the rhetorical device of apostrophe, where speech is directed not to another character but to an absent or abstract entity, the opera transforms reality rather than depicting it directly.