COMPOSER: Evan Fein
SINGERS: soprano, mezzo, tenor, bass baritone
SCORE: piano
LENGTH: 1 Act/60M
A spooky romance spawned by the age-old duel between Love and Death. Based on a true story from the American South.
On the night of a stormy winter solstice, seven sisters are abandoned on an island in the small farming community of Eusebia. Rescued the following morning by kindly Aunt Alice and Uncle Henry, they refuse to tell their names or their story. They are the ugliest women anyone has ever seen, and because they have the faces of demons neighbors fear them. Nephew Luc, however, falls in love with the youngest. Love makes her beautiful, and he gives her his late mother’s name, Sophronia. Their romance, though, is fraught, and when mysterious deaths begin to mount Sophronia confesses that not only are she and her sisters Death’s familiars but Luc is next to die. To save his life, the sisters die instead, leaving him heart-broken until Sophronia in an unexpectedly happy ending comes back to help him through the veil.
HISTORY: The Island of the Ugly Sisters was commissioned in 2011 by the Opéra de Poche and premièred at Paris’s Théâtre Adyar on 18 October 2013. It has been performed three times.
