Celebrating Tesla

Years ago I became entranced by the visionary inventor, Nikola Tesla, and I began to imagine his extraordinary life as an opera. It seemed to me that only an opera, with its grand scale and intense passions, could do justice to Tesla.

Tesla (1856–1943) helped create the bedrock of our technological world with his groundbreaking discoveries in alternating current, radio, robotics, and even computer circuitry. Born in Croatia to Serbian parents, he moved to the US and became a celebrated figure of New York’s Gilded Age. Yet Tesla was a loner, a scientist-prodigy who literally “saw” his inventions in his mind’s eye.

I went to work on a libretto, trying to evoke not only the scope of his scientific imagination, but the mythic dimensions of his life. Those dimensions included the white pigeon he befriended in a New York city park, and a woman who called Tesla “Prince of the Violet Fire”—both of them became characters who sing to him in the opera.

That was the beginning of an incredible journey. I was very lucky to connect with Jon Gibson, a gifted composer and multi-instrumentalist and longtime member of the Philip Glass Ensemble. Other collaborators came together, including theater director Terry O’Reilly, choreographer Nina Winthrop, and video artists Sarah Drury and Jen Simmons, among other talented theater artists and singers.

Ultimately, Violet Fire had performances in Philadelphia, New York, and in Belgrade’s National Theater as part of Tesla’s 150^th birthday celebration. It was incredibly meaningful to share the opera with audiences in Serbia, where Tesla is a revered national hero.

Now, there’s going to be a book about the opera.

Mark Estrin, co-founder of Fomite Press, came to me with the idea of reigniting the spark lit by Nikola Tesla many years ago. We shared the concern that even though Tesla’s name has now become a household word, his association with the electric car obscures his true legacy.

Tesla: The Opera will bring Violet Fire to life, with the full libretto, excerpts from Jon Gibson’s score, stunning performance photos, images from the full-length video “score,” and commentary by me, other collaborators on the opera, and poet/novelist/essayist Andrei Codrescu, whose novel Messi@h featured Tesla as a character.

We hope the book will offer an immersive experience of the opera and through that, a sense of the real, stranger-than-fiction Nikola Tesla who helped to dream our electrified, wired world into existence.

Tesla: The Opera will be published by Fomite Press, with a projected publication date of July 2025. I’ll be letting you know more as this exciting project develops.