BREAKING NEWS — 10 Days in a Madhouse, by composer Rene Orth and librettist Hannah Moscovitch, is the winner of the 2024 Award for Best New Opera conferred by the Music Critics Association of North America. The honor, which recognizes both musical and theatrical excellence, is given annually to an operatic world premiere presented in North America the previous calendar year. Commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Tapestry Opera, 10 Days, directed by Joanna Settle and conducted by Daniela Candillari, had its world premiere on Sept. 21, 2023, at Opera Philadelphia as part of Festival O23.
The opera was selected by the MCANA Awards Committee co-chaired by Heidi Waleson, opera critic of The Wall Street Journal, and George Loomis, longtime contributor to the Financial Times and Musical America. The committee is rounded out by MCANA president Arthur Kaptainis, contributor to Ludwig van Toronto and former music critic of the Montreal Gazette; John Rockwell, former critic and arts editor of The New York Times and a regular correspondent for Opera (UK) and Musical America; and Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker.
The Awards Committee stated: “Drawing from reporter Nelly Bly’s exposé of conditions at the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island), this searing chamber opera explores how insanity has been used as an operatic trope and as a way to control non-compliant women. The ingenious libretto structures the narrative in reverse: It opens with Bly’s 10th day in the asylum, where she went undercover, and over 90 intense minutes reassembles the disordered elements of her institution-induced breakdown into a recognizable story. Text fragments, choral hazes, and electronics are among the techniques used to unmoor the narrative from rationality; yet the characters remain strong and musically distinctive throughout. Taut, original, and affecting, 10 Days in a Madhouse works on multiple levels — theatrical, thematic, and human.”
Orth and Moscovitch will receive the award July 26 during the MCANA annual meeting at Tanglewood.
With its third MCANA Best New Opera Award, Opera Philadelphia confirms its status as a source for new works. The company’s Opera Lab, launched in 2011, has incubated an impressive array of premieres, including Breaking the Waves and The Wake World, MCANA’s awardees in 2017 and 2018. The Opera Lab paired composer Orth and librettist Moscovitch as potentially compatible partners, and the team clearly proved compatible.
“Opera has a long tradition and fascination with madness and women, often resulting in watching women suffer trauma and eventual death,” Orth has said. “This opera is not that.”
Orth was named Opera Philadelphia’s composer-in-residence in 2016, not long after receiving her master of music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music. The position supported her development as an opera composer for three years.
Moscovitch, a prize-winning and widely produced Canadian writer for theater and television, earned viral fame for her work on the 2022 cable series Interview with the Vampire — her writing colleagues dubbed her “the dark princess of Canadian theater.” She had already worked on two operas by Lembit Beecher at Opera Philadelphia, giving voice to characters with mental health conditions: Sky on Swings, about a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, and I have no stories to tell you, about a character suffering the after effects of war. In 10 Days, Moscovitch also responded to the feminist angle. “There was absolute authority of these male doctors over these female patients,” Moscovitch told Canada’s The Globe and Mail before the premiere. “They were treated abominably — they didn’t go in there mad; those conditions created madness.”
Orth and Moscovitch “set out to write something surprisingly rare in the operatic tradition — a work that didn’t focus on women suffering trauma and death but rather strength and perseverance against the continued societal biases working against us,” the composer told The Globe and Mail. She discovered the remarkable Nellie Bly and her writings while scrolling through social media and thought, “It just screamed opera.”
Orth and Moscovitch workshopped a 20-minute excerpt of 10 Days, leading to a commission for the full opera, which they completed in 2018. It was Orth’s idea to reverse the chronology of the book, and Moscovitch structured the narrative, working with Orth’s unusual scoring, which incorporated electronic enhancement into the vocal writing. In an email, Orth wrote, “Hannah…[is] super collaborative, open to taking risks, a literal genius with words and drama, and still leaves the composer plenty of space for their music to complete the storytelling.”
The original book 10 Days in a Madhouse, published in 1887, established the reputation of Nellie Bly, pen name for “stunt girl” journalist Elizabeth Cochrane. She was only 22 when she was assigned to go undercover for The New York World to investigate conditions in an insane asylum for women. Feigning madness, she got herself arrested and then committed to a notorious facility in the East River, after having quietly arranged for someone to have her released after 10 days.
Bly experienced first-hand and reported on the appalling conditions inflicted on the women, all charity cases, who had the bad luck to land at Blackwell’s: bad food; no heat; inadequate clothing, bedding, and sanitation; icy baths; abusive nurses; enforced inactivity; and virtually nonexistent medical care. It became clear to her that a woman could be pronounced insane simply for being sick, poor, foreign, or too emotional, like Lizzie, a single mother grieving the death of her child. Once confined to this purgatory, a return to the outside world was unlikely, and illness, mental disintegration, or death became almost inevitable. Still concealing her identity, Bly dropped her mad act once in the asylum; she quickly realized that, despite her apparent normalcy, she was assumed to be insane by a staff invested in their own power. Bly detailed the dehumanizing treatment in simple, precise prose; a reader feels the writer’s indignation and senses her empathy but never fears that Bly herself will go mad. In the end, Bly’s articles in The New York World and the ensuing book led to a grand jury investigation and reforms to the carceral mental health system.
In the opera, the book’s chronology is reversed so that the viewer is plunged into the nightmarish last day of Bly’s confinement. In contrast to Bly-the-journalist’s detachment, Bly-onstage appears to be on the brink of true madness. An opening percussive rumble overlaid with a piercing electronic tone crescendos into a crash. Women’s voices join the instrumental and electronic chaos, and on the darkened stage a spotlight reveals a disheveled, terrified-looking woman, Nellie — called The Madwoman in the libretto, though later identified as Nellie — shrieking, moaning, and pleading for her release. In the background a woman, Lizzie, is heard, anxious to catch a boat that, we learn later, should take her to her dying daughter.
Orth’s score for string quartet, winds, brass, piano, and extensive percussion, augmented with electronics, creates a dynamic array of shifting moods. In the opening chaos, Nellie’s first desperate utterances alternate with fleeting vocalizations that recall the mad songs of bel canto heroines. Nellie, a coloratura soprano, and Doctor Blackwell, a baritone, sing in a mostly conversational style; more lyrical vocalism falls to Lizzie, a mezzo-soprano, the emotional heart of the work, whose powerful lament about her daughter is the opera’s affective climax.
During ensemble scenes, individual chorus members give distinct voice to the other inmates. The orchestra grows transparent during dialogue, with fragmentary instrumental solos insinuating subtext, like a leitmotif. The lucid exchanges between Nellie and Dr. Blackwell follow natural speech contours. As time scrolls backwards to the beginning of the story, Nellie’s voice grows more confident and her lines more lyrical (when she’s not pretending to be crazy). Novel stylistic juxtapositions include dance beats inserted into a sinister waltz, or the transformation of a choral hymn, sung deliberately out of tune by the inmates, into a jazzy gospel song, as the women gleefully rebel against the pious hymn the sadistic nurse forced them to sing. The music alternates between chaos and beauty, though the sense of unease never disappears.
Bly’s final aria, as she gives a post-confinement lecture about her experience, is her most lyrical moment. Beginning like a Schumann lied with piano, her speech grows in intensity as instrumental, vocal, and electronic forces join to create a powerful musical and moral finale.
10 Days in a Madhouse will be performed in a future season (to be announced) at Toronto’s Tapestry Opera, the co-commissioning company.