Most people know Nikola Tesla as an inventor. His breakthroughs in electricity and wireless transmission helped to transform our world; that’s why his name is associated with a well-known electric car (more about that later).
But Tesla’s visionary side didn’t just express itself in the world-changing inventions he imagined into being. He also had actual visions, dating back to his childhood. To me, these two aspects of his life are intertwined.
Late in life, when his stream of inventions was mostly behind him, Tesla took to feeding pigeons at night in the parks of New York City. “But there was one pigeon,” he told reporter John O’Neill, “a beautiful bird, pure white with light gray tips on its wings… I would know that pigeon anywhere.”
No matter where I was that pigeon would find me; when I wanted her I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. She understood me and I understood her.
…I loved that pigeon, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me.…Then one night as I was lying in my bed in the dark, solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window and stood on my desk.…As I looked at her, I knew she wanted to tell me—she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes—powerful beams of light…a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than any I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.
In his biography of Nikola Tesla, Prodigal Genius, O’Neill commented, “It is out of phenomena such as Tesla experienced when the dove flew out of the midnight darkness…and flooded [his room] with blinding light… that the mysteries of religion are built.”
When I read this story it flooded me with a sense of wonder—that a scientist could also be a visionary in the religious sense. That was the moment when I felt I had to tell Tesla’s story in a way that would bring these two sides together. And the best way to do that, I thought, was through an opera. Opera, to me, has the ability not only to disarm us with intense emotion, but to open us to stories that are larger than our everyday lives.
Working on the libretto for the opera, I realized that the pigeon needed to be a character. Tesla, who never married, had confessed to loving her, and that love story needed to be a central element. And I had to let the pigeon sing. Birds sing, after all. For her lines, I went back to Tesla’s most lyrical writing for inspiration: the notes he kept on the sky, clouds, and light phenomena while he worked in Colorado Springs.
The libretto takes Tesla to the park where he encounters his pigeon for the first time, and later depicts her death. I included the author Margaret Storm as a character in the libretto; her book, The Return of the Dove, laid out a mythopoetic reading of Tesla’s relationship with the pigeon. In fact, the opera’s title comes from the name she bestowed on Tesla, Prince of the Violet Fire.
Terry O’Reilly, the opera’s director, was inspired to present the Dove in two parts—one who sang, and one who danced. He worked with the opera’s choreographer Nina Winthrop to represent the living pigeon, while the soprano sang the dove’s spiritual role in Tesla’s life. This, to me, conveyed an intuitive sense of Tesla’s pigeon as both bird and otherworldly figure. It’s how audiences saw the Dove in the opera’s performances in Belgrade and New York, with Jon Gibson’s incredible music bringing her vocal lines to haunting life. In my forthcoming book, Tesla’s Opera: The real, stranger-than-fiction Nikola Tesla, Terry discusses how his treatment of the Dove was inspired by a Noh theater tradition, and how he worked with choreographer Nina Winthrop to develop it.
Nikola Tesla’s extraordinary story can lift us up. We hope this book will remind people of the fuller dimensions of Tesla’s life and legacy, to help him shine out from behind the negative associations that have grown around his name. Let’s celebrate that Tesla.
Tesla’s Opera: The real, stranger-than-fiction Nikola Tesla
Fomite Press, September 2025
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