Broder/ Mulder/ Pell - Wives of the Dead

In 2008 the Erfurt Theater tasked Alois Bröder with composing an opera. For a long time the composer searched for the ideal opera subject until he found it in Nathaniel Hawthorne's story 'The Wives of the Dead.' The template offers everything that the operatic heart desires: "It requires almost no reduction, is ambiguous, irresistible, narrative broken and almost without an internal narrative," says the composer. First published anonymously in 1831 and then again in 1851, Hawthorne's 'The Wives of the Dead' is regarded as one of the most remarkable short stories in 19th century American literature. In the story, the wives of two brothers learn that both men have been killed abroad on consecutive days. In their grief, "sleep did not steal upon the sisters at one and the same time"; one woman slumbers while the other is awake. Far more than the tale of the grief of two widows, "The Wives of the Dead" deals with the "waking dreams such as Hawthorne explored again and again in fiction and in sketches like 'The Haunted Mind,' " notes scholar Arlin Turner, and the ambiguity of the boundaries between the widows' dream-worlds and their realities leaves readers wondering how much of the story the two women experienced and how much they imagined. Alois Broder's operatic interpretation is carried out here by the Opernchor des Theaters Erfurt and the Philharmonisches Orchester Erfurt.