Tesla’s Opera: The Real, Stranger-than-fiction Nikola Tesla is moving toward publication! We now have a cover design for the book I’m editing, which uses the opera inspired by Nikola Tesla’s life as a door to widening our understanding of the visionary inventor. The opera Violet Fire, with a score by composer Jon Gibson and my libretto, had a full production in Belgrade and New York on Nikola Tesla’s 150th anniversary. And here’s the cover!
I was able to work closely with the folks at Fomite Press on the cover design. The image is adapted from a video still, a single moment in the continuous projections that were an integral part of the opera. Media designers Sarah Drury and Jen Simmons created this wonderful stream of imagery to complement the opera’s music and narrative flow.
The video image here combines bars of light with a close-up of Tesla’s face. It’s a detail from a photograph taken in 1894 in his New York laboratory, and it’s said to be the first image ever taken by phosphorescent light—one area of experimentation for Tesla then. In the photos taken in his laboratory, his wireless lamps were the only illumination in the dark space.
Here, Tesla looks pensive and unguarded, focusing on the light he’s producing—very different from the confident, composed persona of his formal portraits. In the video, the bars of light pulse slowly around him. To me, this image offers a powerful visual equivalent for Tesla’s immersion in the mysteries of light and electromagnetism.
The projections in Violet Fire are full of moments where two elements converge and inform each other—Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower against a field of stars, or tree branches against a view of Bryant Park, where Tesla fed his favorite pigeon.
The book, Tesla’s Opera, includes many other images from the projections—some alongside production photos showing how they appeared onstage. I’m so excited to be able to share this aspect of the opera in the book, as well as the full text of my libretto, commentaries on Nikola Tesla and the opera by me, the director Terry O’Reilly, conductor Ana Zorana Brajović, critic Merilyn Jackson, and novelist/poet Andrei Codrescu, and more. The cover offers a view of an extraordinary visionary who will come to light in the pages of the book.
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