The Dracula Opera Emerges from the Crypt

From an interview with composer Mark Adamo that must have taken place before 2006:

[Kathleen Watt:] David Gockley who takes over as general director of San Francisco Opera in 2006, has commissioned your third opera for the company. Can you tell us about it?

[Mark Adamo:] A grand-scaled free variation on Dracula: certainly for San Francisco, possibly with up to three co-producers. I believe (he said cautiously) I’ve located its fulcrum, but there are still a thousand questions to answer. The renown of the character is both a blessing and a curse—there are as many opinions as to what the myth is about as there people who know it, so I have a great deal of thinking to do. (I'll also have to steer between the Scylla of grandiosity and the Charybdis of kitsch.)

As we all know, what San Francisco Opera actually got was The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which was not well received, as you can see from my media roundup. At some point before the MM premiere, I'd asked Adamo in email about the Dracula opera, because it was mentioned in various places the internet, and he basically said he couldn't discuss it.

Now we know: he wrote the libretto, but the music will be written by Adamo's husband John Corigliano, and it will makes its debut at Santa Fe Opera in 2021. It's called The Lord of Cries, and apparently it will be some kind of mashup of Dracula and Euripedes' The Bacchae.

(Personally, I think the Stoker novel alone could be the basis of a really good libretto and opera!)