Posts tagged Opera News
Coda: The Performance I Can't Forget

By Jamie Bernstein - Opera News
May 2015

What made it all so difficult for my brother, sister and me was that blurry, blurry line between work of art and life.

A Quiet Place came as a sequel of sorts to my father Leonard Bernstein’s 1951 opera, Trouble in TahitiT in T, as we call it, was my father’s processing of his own parents’ unhappy marriage. By the time I was old enough to notice, my grandparents seemed to me like a pretty mellow elderly couple. But my father had recounted growing up in an atmosphere of dinner-table acrimony, squabbles over money, icy silences. The names of the T in T couple were originally Sam and Jennie — his parents’ names. Later, he changed Jennie to Dinah — his grandmother’s name. I wonder what his parents thought of T in T; no record exists of their reaction.

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