In these cataclysmic times it sometimes seems that, if we’re looking for leadership out of an existential crisis, we need artists more than we do politicians. That thought occurred to me two weeks ago, while wildfires ravaged Los Angeles and New York shivered through an Arctic vortex, and I sat in the auditorium of the Guggenheim Museum watching preview excerpts from a new opera, The Seasons. The program was part of Works & Process, a series that pairs performances of work in development and conversations with its creators — in this case its co-conceivers, the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and the playwright Sarah Ruhl, as well as choreographer Pam Tanowitz and Zack Winokur, who is directing The Seasons for a Boston Lyric Opera premiere on March 12.
A celebrated singer in his prime who is also an arts administrator (as the recently appointed general director of Opera Philadelphia) and producer-curator (of concerts, recordings, and festivals), Costanzo had been looking for a new project in the operatic scores of Antonio Vivaldi, and was frustrated to discover that their gorgeous music wasn’t matched with interesting or involving libretti. He invited Ruhl, a poet as well as a prizewinning playwright, to collaborate in creating a new work, plotting an original scenario and setting new text to existing Vivaldi compositions. Was it inevitable or ironic, given that the composer’s most familiar work is The Four Seasons, that the result is about how climactic chaos alters the lives of its characters forever?
The excerpts performed at the Guggenheim, to piano accompaniment by Dmitri Dover, included a turbulent aria about nature’s fury, for the soprano Whitney Morrison; a plea from the baritone Brandon Cedel that his fellow characters, and by extension his audience, ask themselves what their duty is to the world they have upended; and choreography by Tanowitz marrying conventions of courtly dance with modern-looking ports de bras and a distinctive kind of batterie that evoked the fluttering of a wounded bird. All this suggested, visually, aurally, viscerally, what is at risk if we and our fellow human beings ignore the signals that nature is giving us with floods, fires, tempests, and extreme temperatures.
And the point was carried home by Costanzo in the evening’s finale, a plaintive aria that was an extended lament. Singing with the dynamic control that gives his ravishing countertenor its limpidity — Ruhl calls it “the voice of an angel” — he sank slowly, imperceptibly, from a standing position to his knees, then stretched out on the floor, reaching the end of the gesture only with the aria’s final notes. He might have been an actor in a Noh drama; you never saw him move, but there he was. It was an extraordinarily eloquent statement, starker and more convincing than any speech, any position paper, any government report: this is the way the world will end, as T. Eliot prophesied a century ago: not in some spectacular conflagration, but in the deliberate accretion of disaster.
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photo credit: Works & Process / Titus Ogilvie-Laing
Amanda Vaill is a best-selling and award-winning biographer, journalist, and screenwriter with a focus on history, arts, and culture. Her next book, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution, will be published in October 2025.