PROGRAM NOTES:

To See That Red Thing Flow is a mono-opera for baritone, double bass, and piano based on the 1885 short story, Diary of a Madman, by Guy de Maupassant. The creation of this new work was funded by the Austin Peay State University Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts.

In the 25-minute opera, we hear passages from personal diary entries of a prominent and well-admired judge. He lives out his insatiable desire to kill through his work as a judge, and also recounts two murders he committed, for which he was never caught. Maupassant’s text offers a lens through which we can consider violence in our contemporary world. The judge’s contorted point of view confronts our sense of morality. He sings, “For to kill is the great law set by nature in the heart of existence. There is nothing more beautiful and honorable than killing.”

The music of the opera embodies the judge’s duality as honorable magistrate and vicious killer. There is a marked difference in the music between when the judge justifies his behavior and when he recounts his killing episodes. The music becomes most angular and cacophonous as he progresses toward murdering, as if the normally composed judge feels a chaotic rush of desire and savagery. The most lyrical and consonant music emerges in moments when his desire for blood is satiated. There is also a frequent chasm between music heard in the high range of the piano and the low range of the bass, serving to both emphasize the two sides of the judge’s character, and for a more pragmatic reason, to avoid covering the baritone vocal range. The melodic lines and harmonic motion often fall downward like catabasis figures that foreshadow doom and portray the judge’s descent into lawlessness.

Maupassant’s judge seems an ideal character for an opera with his aberrant behavior and horrifically dramatic actions. It is unfortunate that this character is not larger than modern-day life. Although written over a hundred and thirty years ago, Maupassant’s 19^th century description is extremely similar to profiles of today’s serial killers, two aspects in particular being the judge’s unassuming position in society and killing an animal as a first experiment. Maupassant’s judge and this story is not unfamiliar to us. His original Diary of a Madman ends with the caution that, “…there are in the world many unknown madmen; as adroit and as terrible as this monstrous lunatic.” As news of deadly shootings or bombings committed by a lone perpetrator appears in our world news at an alarming frequency, To See That Red Thing Flow is chillingly contemporary.