CHARLES WILSON
Kamouraska
A Canadian Opera with Orchestra
Saturday, May 15, 2027 (3 pm)
at Jeanne Lamon Hall, Trinity-St. Paul's Centre
A woman in 19th century Quebec recalls how she and her lover plotted the murder of her husband, a crime that haunts her through shifting memories and guilt. A rare example of a contemporary opera that is both structurally daring and emotionally compelling.
Robert Cooper, Chorus Director
Featuring
SYNOPSIS Opera in two acts Libretto by the composer, after the novel by Anne Hébert (1970)
Composed 1974-75
The story starts in1856, 18 years after the murder of Antoine Tassy, Squire of Kamouraska. Elizabeth D'Aulnières has now re-married and is known as Madame Rolland. She is not able to forget her past, and in a series of flashbacks, while attending her second husband at his deathbed, she re-lives events that lead to the murder of her first husband.
Her reminiscences, like in real life, are not sequential or logical. The young Elizabeth was in the care of her three aunts in Sorel. Her marriage to Antoine, on her 15th birthday, is one of convenience. A man of poor moral bearing, Antoine turns to be abusive and irrational. After their third child, Elizabeth is sickly and bruised, unable to leave her bed. She is introduced to Dr. George Nelson, a school friend of Antoine's.
Shortly thereafter Elizabeth and George engage in a reckless love affair. Trapped and obsessive, they conspire to murder Antoine, first with the help of Elizabeth's maid Aurélie Caron, and when that fails, then with a direct gun shot by George at a cove outside Kamouraska on an icy wintry day in 1838.
Slowly and painfully, the elder Elizabeth faces her terrifying memories at an English court, the foreign language of Dr. George Nelson. The damning testimony of witnesses and that of her own maid Aurélie reveal the sordid details of the murder and those of Elizabeth's adultery.
Although the people of Kamouraska are provoked to much conjecture, Elizabeth was ultimately acquitted of wrongdoing for lack of evidence while her lover evaded Quebec justice by fleeing to the United States.
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