Paul Salerni's Tony Caruso's Final Broadcast won the National Opera Association Chamber Opera competition in 2007. The libretto by poet Dana Gioia sets the opera in a radio station scheduled to drop its classical programming for an easy listening format and depicts its final classical show, Opera Lover, hosted by Tony Caruso, a tenor with a failed career. The opera addresses the tragedy of being forced to look back on a life of promise unfulfilled, opportunities missed, and possibilities squandered; in short, the nightmare ...
Read More
Paul Salerni's Tony Caruso's Final Broadcast won the National Opera Association Chamber Opera competition in 2007. The libretto by poet Dana Gioia sets the opera in a radio station scheduled to drop its classical programming for an easy listening format and depicts its final classical show, Opera Lover, hosted by Tony Caruso, a tenor with a failed career. The opera addresses the tragedy of being forced to look back on a life of promise unfulfilled, opportunities missed, and possibilities squandered; in short, the nightmare that just about every human over a certain age has pondered to at least some degree, if not to the agonizing extent that Tony Caruso does. Much of the opera is devoted to Tony's revisiting painful memories and to fantasies that torment him, but he achieves a kind of redemption at the end by embracing death in the form of a woman who seductively calls to him to abandon life and all its grief. In spite of the grim theme, the composer and librettist treat it with a light hand, and the...
Read Less