The idea arrived, as these things often do, as a question about a deadline. In the run-up to the nation's 250th birthday, Stefanos Koroneos, artistic and general director of the New York-based Teatro Grattacielo, suggested to Tucson composer Daniel Asia that someone ought to write an America 250 opera. Asia, founder and president of the Tucson think tank Polyhymnia, said yes — and then set about assembling the people who could actually make it.
The result is "Jefferson Lives!," a one-act chamber opera that gets its first complete workshop performance on Thursday, Oct. 29, at 7:30 p.m. in Holsclaw Hall on the University of Arizona campus. It runs 50 minutes, and it arrives in Tucson roughly a week and a half before its world premiere, Nov. 7 and 8 at The Flea Theater in New York City, where Teatro Grattacielo will pair it on a double bill with Puccini's "Suor Angelica." After New York it travels to Opera Roanoke in Virginia on Feb. 27, 2027, and then to Arizona Opera's New Works Festival in Phoenix on April 10 and 11.
For a piece built around the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the creative chain that produced it is unusually specific. Asia thought immediately of Polyhymnia's chief operating officer, James R. Harrigan, a historian and political theorist who had written a dissertation a quarter-century earlier on the dozen or so years leading up to the Declaration. Harrigan's narrative became the basis of the libretto, which Koroneos helped write. Asia then turned to Joshua Daniel Nichols, his former student at the University of Arizona and now Polyhymnia's composer-in-residence, to set it to music.
"He was really probably the most talented guy I'd ever come across in my career," Asia said of Nichols, who studied under him during the 35 years Asia taught at the university before retiring in 2024.
The opera's frame is not a straightforward costume drama. As Teatro Grattacielo describes it, the story unfolds through the ghostly presence of John Adams and a modern-day narrator who is drawn unwillingly into the past. Through them, the work traces how political ideas move from thought into action — the moral pressure, doubt and consequence behind the colonies' break with Britain. The historical sweep reaches back to the Writs of Assistance, the broad search-and-seizure powers that let British authorities enter colonial homes and businesses at will, and forward to Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," the pamphlet that helped push the colonies toward independence. Jefferson serves as the eyewitness to all of it.
The piece presents Jefferson as both visionary and man of contradictions, though Asia is emphatic that it is not a partisan document. The opera, he said, "takes no side in today's political arguments and campaigns." It "asks audiences to think — and trusts them to reach their own conclusions."
Polyhymnia's own description of the score promises a musical language "at once historical and strikingly fresh," freely integrating distinctly American styles with a contemporary vocabulary and drawing on melodies rooted in the nation's past, with the Founders' words set directly to song. The organization frames the opera as an attempt to embody "the freedom, excellence, and vibrant artistic spirit that shaped the nation's founding imagination."
The Tucson performance will feature actor Peterson Townsend and tenor Brian Jeffers with a small ensemble led by pianist and conductor Saverio Alfieri. The players are violinist Ellen Ensey, flutist Alexander Lipay, cellist Robert Chamberlain and clarinetist Melissa Frisch. Koroneos directs.
Holsclaw Hall, a 204-seat chamber music hall within the Fred Fox School of Music, is a fitting room for a workshop: intimate enough that an audience can hear a new score being tested rather than merely presented. Tickets are $25, sold through Ticketmaster.
The path to that stage says something about how the project came together. Polyhymnia began about fifteen years ago at the University of Arizona, then under the name Center for American Culture and Ideas, where it developed a course called Human Achievement and Innovation in the Arts covering music, visual art and dance across history. It later left the university — "trading security for freedom," as the organization puts it — and reorganized as Polyhymnia, describing itself as a forward-facing think tank devoted to culture, liberty, beauty, philosophy and civic life. Its fellows include composers, scholars, writers and critics, and its projects range from opera and chamber music to books and listening courses.
Teatro Grattacielo received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to support the world premiere, and the New York company has billed the evening as part of its America 250 commemoration. The pairing with "Suor Angelica" is deliberate: one work looks outward at an empire tightening its grip on its colonies, the other inward at a convent demanding obedience, and both ask what it means to seek freedom inside systems far larger than oneself.
For Tucson audiences, though, the Oct. 29 date is the one that matters — a chance to hear a brand-new American opera in a 204-seat hall, played by a handful of instruments, before anyone in New York has heard it at all.