As a scenario for a chamber opera, try this: two women of “ripe but well-cared-for middle age” (an enviable condition) reminisce as old friends but soon reveal themselves bitter rivals, each harbouring a shocking secret. Edith Wharton’s featherlight short story Roman Fever (1934) can nearly be lifted straight from the page to make a crisp two-hander libretto. The American composer Philip Hagemann (b.1932) did just that in his 1989 opera, set to lush, singable, musical theatre-style music. Wharton’s words remain intact, the levity of the conversation exposed as bitchiness exemplified.
Roman Fever was presented as part of a stylish double bill with Francis Poulenc’s La voix humaine (sung in English as The Human Voice) by Pegasus Opera, directed by Josette Bushell-Mingo and conducted by Rebecca Tong. Both shows were designed, with elegant economy, by Peiyao Wang. Pegasus’s credo, since its foundation in 1992, has been to provide opportunities “for artists from African and Asian heritage, promoting opera among people of all ages in underserved and culturally diverse communities”. In choice of repertoire, this open-minded company prefers the universal to proselytism. The two works here, based on texts by canonical writers (in Poulenc’s case, Jean Cocteau), plead no case except to explore the human condition.
