“John Corigliano’s Dracula-infused opera, ‘The Lord of Cries’ … had its première last month at the Santa Fe Opera,” writes Alex Ross in the August 16 New Yorker. “The libretto is by Mark Adamo, Corigliano’s husband…. Adamo had been mulling over [Bram] Stoker’s tale for years, seeking to fuse Dracula with the figure of Dionysus in Euripides’ ‘The Bacchae,’ and in his rendition the vampire turns out to be a guise assumed by the pagan god as he seeks to unleash on Victorian England the same vengeful chaos that he once dealt out to Thebes…. ‘The Lord of Cries’ … contains some of Corigliano’s grandest, wildest, most exuberantly inventive music.… One of the most effective moments … comes … when Dionysus … calls upon his minions to ‘shudder the foundations of the world.’ The trumpets herald him with a halogen-bright E-major chord, which is then taken up by glockenspiel, crotales, xylophone, and sustained high strings. The result is a sound world reminiscent of Messiaen at his most celestial, except that it represents forces that Messiaen would have equated with evil…. Not, perhaps, since Verdi wrote ‘Falstaff’ has an operatic composer made so much mischief past the age of seventy-five.”
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