The multimedia opera Violet Fire centers on Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), the visionary inventor responsible for world-changing breakthroughs in electricity, radio, robotics, and computer circuitry. The creators of Violet Fire felt that only an opera could encompass Tesla’s unusual life and massive imagination.
Violet Fire received its first production in Philadelphia in 2004, followed by the world premiere in Serbia in 2006, as part of Tesla’s 150th birthday celebration, and the US premiere later that year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of its Next Wave Festival.
Tesla: The Opera, a book about Violet Fire, is forthcoming from Fomite Press, with publication planned in 2025. The book will include the libretto, images, commentary, and more. The studio recording is available from Orange Mountain Music.
The opera’s evocative score by Jon Gibson, a pioneering minimalist and longtime member of the Philip Glass Ensemble, and libretto by Miriam Seidel reveal Tesla as a prescient, transcendent figure, a man ahead of his time. In the opera, a white pigeon he befriended in a Manhattan park takes on the role of his great love, singing about nature’s mysteries. Together they encounter events and people from his life, including Mark Twain and the writer Margaret Storm, who asserted that Tesla was born on Venus.
Gibson’s score for Violet Fire calls for six principal singers and chorus, and 12 musicians, in a one-act performance that runs about 90 minutes. Gibson’s accessible and eclectic score features lyrical vocal lines floating over densely textured, groove-based sonic fields. His music integrates sampled and treated sounds from sources including lightning, cooing pigeons, and sound effects from early science-fiction serials. The opera was filled out with original costumes, choreography, and a full-length video projection score.