opera fusion: new works

Opera Fusion: New Works (OF:NW) is a dynamic partnership between Cincinnati Opera and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM). With support of the Mellon Foundation, OF:NW was created in 2011 to foster the development of new American operas, and has grown into a nationally recognized collaboration that is not only advancing in repertoire, but also serving as an inspiring example of a successful joint venture between an educational institution and a professional performing arts organization.

Process

OF:NW offers composers or composer/librettist teams the opportunity to workshop an opera during a residency in Cincinnati. Residencies utilize the facilities, personnel, and talent of both Cincinnati Opera and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM). The workshops are cast with a combination of CCM students and professional artists, and each workshop concludes with a public presentation of excerpts.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS

John Lewis: Good Trouble

Saturday, October 11, 2025 | 2:00 p.m.
Wilks Studio • Music Hall
1241 Elm Street • Cincinnati, OH 45202

Music by Maria Thompson Corley
Libretto by Diana Solomon-Glover

Congressman John Lewis famously said, “Get into good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.” John Lewis: Good Trouble explores the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of the heroic activist and politician. The opera weaves together two perspectives—Lewis as a young man, serving as a catalyst in the 1960s fight for civil rights, and Lewis as an elder statesman in 2012, considered to be the conscience of Congress by many on both sides of the aisle. Lewis’s journey follows his embrace of nonviolent resistance through the sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and the historic march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” Through it all, Lewis charged his successors and colleagues to come together to create a more just world.

Commissioned by Cincinnati Opera as part of its groundbreaking Black Opera Project, the complete work will receive its world premiere at Music Hall in the summer of 2027.

Tickets for the OF:NW workshop public performance of excerpts on Saturday, October 11, 2025, in the Wilks Studio at Music Hall are available for $15 (adults); free for full-time students (1 ticket per valid ID).

BUY TICKETS

Commissioning support for works in The Black Opera Project is provided by:

Jenny Koons, co-creator & stage director

Sleepers Awake

Saturday, November 8, 2025 | 2:00 p.m.
Wilks Studio • Music Hall
1241 Elm Street • Cincinnati, OH 45202

Music by Gregory Spears
Co-creator & stage director Jenny Koons
Inspired by the writings of Robert Walser and others

Composer Gregory Spears, whose music has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (The New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (The Boston Globe), creates a labyrinthine soundscape to accompany a dream-like rendering of the fairytale “Sleeping Beauty,” inspired by modernist writer Robert Walser. As the work’s chorus sings itself in and out of slumber, the voices pull us into a liminal space where time is both fractured and cyclical. Conceived with and directed by Jenny Koons, this new work activates a collective voice to question the fragile line between waking and dreaming.

Commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, the complete work will receive its world premiere in April 2026. Details>>

Tickets for the OF:NW workshop public performance of excerpts on Saturday, November 8, 2025, in the Wilks Studio at Music Hall are available for $15 (adults); free for full-time students (1 ticket per valid ID).

BUY TICKETS

recent WORKSHOPS

Laura Kaminsky // Composer (Copy)

Elaine Sexton // Librettist (Copy)

Isaac Selya // Conductor (Copy)

the post office

Saturday, March 22, 2025 | 7:30 p.m.
Corbett Opera Center • Music Hall
1243 Elm Street, 4th Floor • Cincinnati, OH 45202

Music by Laura Kaminsky
Libretto by Elaine Sexton
Conducted by Isaac Selya

The Post Office is set in a one-room post office, where three U.S. postal workers and a customer from disparate backgrounds take sides in a blistering conflict centered around same-sex marriage. The formerly collegial friendship between the postmaster, who is Black and straight, and his colleague, who is white and gay, turns foul when the latter happily announces to the former his upcoming wedding. Taking place in the present day, with increasing hostility, toxicity, and violence playing out in the news, everyday exchanges become fraught: civil rights, reproductive rights, and LGBTQIA rights are challenged and threatened, and the sanctity of the postal service itself is at risk.