About the work
Through-sung American opera in three acts by Leonard Bernstein to a libretto by Stephen Wadsworth, first performed on 17 June 1983 in Houston under John DeMain. The work continues Bernstein's short opera Trouble in Tahiti (1952), returning to the same family thirty years after Dinah's death. After a lukewarm reception, Bernstein and Wadsworth withdrew the original one-act version and reworked it into a three-act opera, which had its revised premiere in 1984 at La Scala and Washington Opera.
Plot
After Dinah's death in a car accident, her widower Sam, their adult children Dede and Junior, and Dede's husband François gather for the funeral, initially estranged from one another. Flashbacks show Sam and the young Dinah's troubled marriage in the 1950s. A letter from the deceased and shared memories move the family toward tentative reconciliation in the third act.
Cultural significance
Bernstein and Wadsworth, both recently affected by the death of a close relative — Bernstein's wife Felicia had died in 1978 — set out to write a through-sung, distinctly American opera about the life of a middle-class family. In 1986 Bernstein himself conducted the Vienna version, recorded by Deutsche Grammophon; wide critical acclaim for the long-underrated work came only with a New York revival in 2010.