“It’s the only opera I know of that has a mummy as one of its romantic leads,” jokes Lawrence Rapchak about his new opera, The Lifework of Juan Diaz. Indeed, the unusual story, which is based on the Ray Bradbury short story and his 1964 Alfred Hitchcock Presents teleplay of the same name, is hardly typical fare for the opera house, but Rapchak, who is also music director of Chamber Opera Chicago, had a particular interest in the subject.
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Set in Guanajuato, Mexico, and centering around the Day of the Dead (November 1), the one-act opera concerns an impoverished man’s promise to his wife on his deathbed to provide for his family better in death than he could in life. When a greedy grave digger blackmails the family by threatening to exhume the man’s body, the widow must follow a plan of action that, as Rapchak says, “creates an ending where you don’t know if you’re supposed to be horrified or touched. That duality of poignancy and horror is what attracted me to setting the work. I was riding home on a train one day and remembered that old show and it seemed absolutely perfect for an opera–the locale, the small number of characters, the wonderful dialogue and fascinating relationships between the characters, perhaps a touch of fantasy, and something interesting to see onstage. Perhaps something lighter was expected of me, but I was determined that if Bradbury would give me permission, I would do it.”
Rapchak has been with Chamber Opera Chicago since 1986, though composing is his first love. Diaz gives him the opportunity to merge both worlds. “It’s strange in a way, because of the eight to nine hundred scores I have [collected], probably no more than 30 are operas. . . . I don’t regard myself as an opera conductor per se. You have to bury yourself exclusively in that and the repertoire is so small. It’s great fun but I have to be more diverse than that.”
