PIAZZA Composer Adam Guettel at Work on Rip Van Winkel Opera

Adam Guettel the Tony Award-Winning composer-lyrisit of THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA is working on a new opera based on Washington Irving's 'Rip van Winkle.'

Guettel writes about the opera saying "In the epilogue of RIP, based on short stories by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle wakes up in a town he no longer knows. He is the only person speaking English. Everyone else is speaking a language made up of any possible configuration of the syllables of the name Rip Van Winkle. When you include switching consonants at the front or back of those syllables, and retrograde, the possibilities are in the hundreds of millions, and a new, completely unintelligible language is born."

Playwrights Horizons Theatre recently auctioned off a signed page from the score. The item had three bids and was sold for $130 on April 29. View the auction page by Clicking Here.

'Rip Van Winkle' was published in 1819 and tells the story of a lazy man living in New York's Catskill Mountains in the years before the American Revolutionary War. After wandering through the mountains he finds a group of strangly dressed men playing nine-pins, after drinking their liquor he settles down under a shady tree and falls asleep. He wakes and returns to his village, where he finds twenty years have passed. He finds out that his wife has died and that his close friends have died in a war or gone somewhere else. He immediately gets into trouble when he proclaims himself a loyal subject of King George III, not knowing that the American Revolution has taken place.

Photo Credit: Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.