Sarah Van Sciver
School of Music – Alumnx – performer-composer
Collaborators: Kirsten C. Kunkle, librettist and soprano (Charlotte Corday); Ashley Becker, soprano (Olympe de Gouges); Alyssa Maria Lehman, mezzo soprano (Madame Manon Roland); Raffaella Lo Castro, mezzo soprano (Madame Germaine de Staël); Marisa Robinson, soprano (Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze Lavoisier); Tracy Sturgis, soprano (Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun); Melissa Brun, cellist; Thuy Nguyen, violinist; Sarah Van Sciver, composer and pianist-conductor; Wilmington Concert Opera, producer
Girondines is a new opera by Indigenous soprano and librettist extraordinaire Kirsten C. Kunkle and composer Sarah Van Sciver ’16. “Girondines” features vocal sextet, piano, and strings, sharing intertwined stories of real-life feminist, intellectual, radical, creative French Revolution women: murderess Charlotte Corday, writers Manon Roland and Olympe de Gouges, portraitist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, political theorist Germaine de Staël; and chemist Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze. These stories epitomize inequities, turmoil, abuse, and violence with which women continue to wrestle, struggling for autonomy of mind, body, and soul. Women worldwide pursuing science, literature, arts, and activism are still threatened. Opera itself is one of the battlegrounds on which women still fight to be fairly represented and treated in life and art. Vive la résistance!