Program Note:

The Seattle Opera premiered Amelia in 2010. An opera about love, honor, memory, and healing as they play out in the lives and dreams of three generations of an American Navy Family between 1966 and 1996, the narrative concerns Amelia, a first-time mother-to-be, whose psyche has been scarred by the loss of her pilot-father in combat over Vietnam. Unfolding in a series of non-linear flashbacks and forwards, the story interweaves her emotional journey, the American experience in Vietnam, and elements of the Daedalus and Icarus myth. The symphonic concert suite Sky Interludes from Amelia was premiered in 2012 by Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony. It consists of three movements and lasts nineteen minutes.

In reality, Sortie begins as the pregnant Amelia suffers a nervous collapse and is rushed to hospital. Unconscious, she fantasizes that she is with her father in his plane as he flies his final sortie. She imagines taking off from the aircraft carrier, flying over the target, encountering enemy flak, and then, the unknown. The interlude serves as a transition between Act Two scene one to two and combines several of the opera’s core musical ideas—the Morse Code “S-O-S” figure, the lullaby that her father sang to her as a child, and the soaring music she associates in her mind with her namesake, Amelia Earhart, on her fateful final flight.

Why Fliers Fly combines the prelude to Act Two of the opera and the Postlude to Act One to form a meditation tracking the thoughts of Dodge (Amelia’s father) as he composes his “Final Letter” prior to taking off from the carrier. It combines the lullaby he sang to his daughter with music drawn from his final moments after being shot down.

The music for Ayreborne is drawn from the fourth interlude and final scene of the opera. Two simultaneous narratives unfold: the first one takes place in the real world; the second inside Amelia’s imagination. Amelia associates her contractions with her father’s—and Amelia Earhart’s—planes struggling to achieve takeoff speed. In real life, her contractions signal to her that she is in labor. The music tracks her labor and the successful birth of her daughter, ending with her cradling newborn Amelia in her arms. The narrative in her imagination tracks the fall of Icarus with the disappearances of Earhart and her father. As in real life she achieves her child’s birth, her subconscious achieves ecstatic release: the movement ends in tender joy and saudade.