Art credit: Dane Suarez

The Diary of One Who Vanished
Music by Leoš Janáček
Libretto based on From the Pen of a Self-Taught Writer by Ozef Kalda
Songs of Madness and Sorrow
Music and text by Daron Hagen
January 22 | 7:30PM
January 24 | 2:00PM

Performances at The OperaDelaware Studios
Sung in English and Czech with English supertitles
Running time:  1 hour

Written in Secret pairs Janáček's The Diary of One Who Vanished, a dark confession of forbidden love, with Daron Hagen's Songs of Madness and Sorrow, a fractured chorus of obsession and paranoia voiced entirely by a single performer. Company Artist Dane Suarez, who thrilled audiences last season in the title role in Andrea Chénier, brings raw intensity to this rare and intimate program. Don't miss this limited studio engagement, January 22 & 24, 2027, at OperaDelaware Studios.

Forbidden love, obsession, and paranoia.

Songs of Madness and Sorrow - There is no plot in Daron Hagen's Songs of Madness and Sorrow, only a single voice, channeling the pain of an entire fractured town. Drawn from period newspapers, mental health records, advertisements, and suicide notes, the piece resurrects the collapsing psyche of small-town Upstate Wisconsin at the close of the nineteenth century, as market panic and epidemic disease pushed ordinary people toward two kinds of madness: relentless ritual, or raw paranoia. What makes it unforgettable is the twist that not all paranoia is delusion.