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Jefferson & Poe is a lyric opera in two acts with music by Damon Ferrante and libretto by Daniel Mark Epstein. [1]
The opera takes place at Monticello on a March evening in the early nineteenth century and portrays two love stories: one between an elderly Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and the other between a young Edgar Allan Poe and the daughter of Jefferson and Hemings.
The work received its premiere at Theatre Project in Baltimore and at Symphony Space in Manhattan in 2005.
Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States, and of American literature. He was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. Among the Committee of Five charged by the Second Continental Congress with authoring the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was the document's primary author. Following the American Revolutionary War and prior to becoming president in 1801, Jefferson was the first U.S. secretary of state under George Washington and then the nation's second vice president under John Adams.
Sarah "Sally" Hemings was an enslaved woman with one-quarter African ancestry owned by president of the United States Thomas Jefferson, one of many he inherited from his father-in-law, John Wayles.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, then included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story, a work of Gothic fiction, includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.
"The Oval Portrait" is a horror short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, involving the disturbing circumstances of a portrait in a château. It is one of his shortest stories, filling only two pages in its initial publication in 1842.
Daniel Mark Epstein is an American poet, dramatist, and biographer. His poetry has been noted for its erotic and spiritual lyricism, as well as its power—in several dramatic monologues—in capturing crucial moments of American history. While he has continued to publish poetry he is more widely known for his biographies of Nat King Cole, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bob Dylan and Abraham Lincoln, and his radio plays, "Star of Wonder," and "The Two Menorahs," which have become holiday mainstays on National Public Radio.
Jefferson in Paris is a 1995 historical drama film, directed by James Ivory, and previously entitled Head and Heart. The screenplay, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, is a semi-fictional account of Thomas Jefferson's tenure as the Ambassador of the United States to France before his presidency and of his alleged relationships with Italian-English artist Maria Cosway and his slave, Sally Hemings.
The Jefferson–Hemings controversy is a historical debate over whether there was a sexual relationship between the widowed U.S. President Thomas Jefferson and his slave and sister-in-law, Sally Hemings, and whether he fathered some or all of her six recorded children. For more than 150 years, most historians denied rumors from Jefferson's presidency that he had a slave concubine, Sally Hemings. Based on his grandson's report, they said that one of his nephews had been the father of Hemings' children. Before changing his mind following the results of DNA analysis in 1998, Jefferson's biographer Joseph J. Ellis had said, "The alleged liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings may be described as the longest-running miniseries in American history." In the 21st century, most historians agree that Jefferson is the father of one or more of Sally's children.
Thomas Jefferson is a 1997 two-part American documentary film directed and produced by Ken Burns. It covers the life and times of Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd President of the United States.
James Madison Hemings was the son of the mixed-race enslaved woman Sally Hemings and her enslaver, President Thomas Jefferson. He was the third of her four children to survive to adulthood. Born into slavery, according to partus sequitur ventrem, Hemings grew up on Jefferson's Monticello plantation, where his mother was also enslaved. After some light duties as a young boy, Hemings became a carpenter and fine woodwork apprentice at around age 14 and worked in the joiner's shop until he was about 21. He learned to play the violin and was able to earn money by growing cabbages. Jefferson died in 1826, after which Sally Hemings was "given her time" by Jefferson's surviving daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph.
House of Usher is a 1960 American gothic horror film directed by Roger Corman and written by Richard Matheson from the 1839 short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe. The film was the first of eight Corman/Poe feature films and stars Vincent Price, Myrna Fahey, Mark Damon and Harry Ellerbe.
The Monticello Association is a non-profit organization founded in 1913 to care for, preserve, and continue the use of the family graveyard at Monticello, the primary plantation of Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States. The organization's members are lineal descendants of Thomas Jefferson and his wife Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. The site is located just outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Thomas Jefferson was the designer, builder, owner, and, with his family, a first resident of Monticello.
Thomas Jefferson Randolph of Albemarle County was a Virginia planter, soldier and politician who served multiple terms in the Virginia House of Delegates, as rector of the University of Virginia, and as a colonel in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. The favorite grandson of President Thomas Jefferson, he helped manage Monticello near the end of his grandfather's life and was executor of his estate, and later also served in the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850 and at the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861.
Damon Evans is an American actor best known as the second of two actors who portrayed Lionel Jefferson on the CBS sitcom The Jeffersons. He also portrayed the young Alex Haley in the ABC television miniseries Roots: The Next Generations.
Elizabeth Hemings was an enslaved mixed-race woman in colonial Virginia. With her master, planter John Wayles, she had six children, including Sally Hemings. These children were three-quarters white, and, following the condition of their mother, they were enslaved from birth; they were half-siblings to Wayles's daughter, Martha Jefferson. After Wayles died, the Hemings family and some 120 other enslaved people were inherited, along with 11,000 acres and £4,000 debt, as part of his estate by his daughter Martha and her husband Thomas Jefferson.
Damon Ferrante is an American composer whose works have been performed in concert halls and performance venues throughout North America, most notably, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, Guild Hall, and Theatre Project.
Church Home and Hospital was a hospital in Baltimore, located on Broadway, between East Fayette and East Baltimore Streets, on Washington Hill, several blocks south of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, that also operated a long-term care facility. It was affiliated with the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland of the Episcopal Church . It closed down permanently in 2000 and was later re-opened as a unit known as the "Church Home and Hospital Building" of J.H.H.
The works of American author Edgar Allan Poe include many poems, short stories, and one novel. His fiction spans multiple genres, including horror fiction, adventure, science fiction, and detective fiction, a genre he is credited with inventing. These works are generally considered part of the Dark romanticism movement, a literary reaction to Transcendentalism. Poe's writing reflects his literary theories: he disagreed with didacticism and allegory. Meaning in literature, he said in his criticism, should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface; works whose meanings are too obvious cease to be art. Poe pursued originality in his works, and disliked proverbs. He often included elements of popular pseudosciences such as phrenology and physiognomy. His most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning. Though known as a masterly practitioner of Gothic fiction, Poe did not invent the genre; he was following a long-standing popular tradition.
Sandra Cecelia Seaton is an American playwright and librettist. She received the Mark Twain Award from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature in 2012. Seaton taught creative writing and African-American literature at Central Michigan University for 15 years as a professor of English.
From the Diary of Sally Hemings is a song cycle for voice and piano. The work, commissioned by mezzo-soprano Florence Quivar and Music Accord, is a collaboration between Pulitzer Prize winning composer William Bolcom and playwright Sandra Seaton. After being contacted by Quivar, Bolcom asked Seaton to write entries for a fictional diary kept by Sally Hemings throughout her life. Seaton's text for 18 entries of the imaginary diary were then set to music by Bolcom.
