Music Theatre since 1990 - Schott Music

Synopsis
Hopper’s Wife imagines American scene painter Edward Hopper married to Hollywood gossip
columnist Hedda Hopper with Ava Gardner as the artist’s model. The opera explores the conflicts
between high art and low art, gossip and pornography - through the prism of a crumbling,
competitive marriage.
Edward Hopper and his wife both began as painters at the New York Art Students League.
Competitiveness entered their marriage as Mrs. Hopper’s need for creative expression was
subjugated to her husband’s.
Though Hopper is strongly identified with cityscapes of urban America and landscapes of Truro,
Cape Cod, he also painted female nudes. He approached his nudes from a characteristically voyeuristic
stance, treating the female body as a screen on which to project unconscious desires.
For years, his only model was his wife.
Simultaneously, beginning in the mid-thirties on America’s opposite coast, the vituperative
Hedda Hopper became a Hollywood fixture from her radio gossip show, her syndicated column,
and her movie appearances in an ever-changing parade of flashy hats. Pandered to and fawned
upon by obsequious studios and frightened stars, she wielded great power and venom, eventually
cooperating with the reactionary forces behind the blacklist.
Hopper‘s Wife
1997 Long Beach Opera
Dazzling. Wallace and Korie use a peculiar kind of mythic-historic fantasy to heigthen the allegorical
dimension of Edward Hopper‘s real-life domination of his bitter and frustrated wife. With
its odd and sophisticated premise, the production makes a case for opera as a genuinely adult art
form, one able to confront and decry the current „dumbed-down“ state of American culture.
(Michael Duncan, Art in America)
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