America, the 1940s

March 1942
A farmhouse on a Puget Sound island. An American veteran, Jim Crowley, and Eva, his new wife, have come to buy a home. A German Jew, Eva desperately wants her parents to leave Germany, where their lives are in danger. She hopes her family will find peace and sanctuary in this place so far from the war. Meanwhile, inside the home, a Japanese American family has heard that the FBI has been searching homes and arresting people of Japanese descent. The family burns their precious Japanese belongings, attempting to erase all ties to Japan in the hopes that they will avoid arrest.

Eva waits outside as Jim, knowing he has the upper hand, tries to convince Makoto Kobayashi to sell the house and land for a fraction of what it is worth. The FBI arrives at the home and tells Makoto he is under arrest; the FBI found some old dynamite in the shed out back, and they say this contraband makes him a threat. Makoto decides, under the pressure of the situation, to sell the house and the land to Jim. As the FBI agents take Makoto away, he and his teenage daughter, Setsuko, promise to meet at the farmhouse, the only home they know, after the war.

May 1942
Setsuko and her mother, Hiroko, have packed up the house. Setsuko holds her suitcase, ready to leave, when a postman delivers a letter. Setsuko sees that it is from Germany, for a woman named Eva. Angry that she is being forced to leave her home, she steals the letter.

A few weeks later
Jim and Eva move into their new home; they designate a room for Eva’s parents. Jim tries to keep Eva’s hopes up. When she finds a beautiful Hina-Matsuri doll hidden beneath a floorboard, Eva asks Jim about the previous owners. Jim tells her that they were “Japs, sent to the camps.” He tells her to throw away the doll, that it doesn’t belong in a room for her parents. Eva defies Jim’s wishes and hides the doll, promising to find its owner and return it at the war’s end.

May 1945
Jim and Eva hear an announcement on the radio of Germany’s surrender. Eva, who has learned about the Kobayashi family and their whereabouts, writes to Setsuko, telling Setsuko she has something that belongs to her.

Later that month
While still incarcerated, Setsuko receives the letter. When her mother, who is gravely ill, inquires about the letter, Setsuko lies and explains that the letter is from her father, telling them to keep hope because the war is nearly done.

August 1945
When a letter comes back to Eva from Setsuko, Jim intercepts it and tells Eva that Setsuko is not allowed in their home. President Truman announces the dropping of the atomic bomb.

September 1945
There is a knock on the door. It is Setsuko, returning to the home. She confronts Jim, reminding him that he coerced her family to sell their home for next to nothing. Eva asks Jim if this is true. Jim tries to explain his actions to Eva, but she can’t accept what he has done. She leaves to retrieve the doll she has promised to return to Setsuko. Jim confronts Setsuko, and she admits to another reason for coming. She is here to return Eva’s letter. Eva returns to the room with the doll, and Setsuko gives her the letter. From the stolen letter, Eva learns of her parents’ fate, and she collapses. The three are left to navigate their lives as the echoes of war surround them.

by Richard Gammon
An American Dream revolves around the relationship between two American families and a house in the Pacific Northwest in the 1940s. We approach the production with an eye toward realism, and wishing to honor the narrative, we employ a minimalistic aesthetic enabling us to dually focus on and open up the dialogue of American values. We choose to present the structure of the house simply, allowing primary focus to be on a home’s intrinsic qualities of safety and comfort. With this in mind, we also ensure opportunities to expand and contract when the story calls for more conceptual ideas or “magical realism.”

The parallels between the two families at first seem uncanny. But as each character’s history unfolds, we become further enveloped in their narrative and consequently discover similarities in our own inheritances as we grapple with definitions of ownership and identity.

With a banner proclaiming “I AM AN AMERICAN” flying behind her, Setsuko Kobayashi asks the question “Don’t you recognize me?”

In our current political environment, in response I pose this question: “Do we?”

by Kristin Shaffer
M.A. Musicology and
M.M. Voice Performance Student

“If you had to leave your home today and couldn’t return, what would you take with you, and why is that object—that connection to your past—so important?”
This is the question the Seattle Opera Belonging(s) Project posed to the community in 2014 in anticipation of a new opera commission. The company received dozens of written and recorded responses from opera-loving Washingtonians. These responses became the inspiration for a rich and compelling libretto by Seattle native Jessica Murphy Moo.

Moo previously served as senior communications manager and publications editor for Seattle Opera; her history with Seattle Opera combined with her gift for fiction writing made her the obvious choice for this libretto commission.
As Moo sifted through the numerous responses received by Seattle Opera, she encountered “two stories from the same period that had some resonance with one another.” Both stories came from World War II survivors—one who submitted a book, the other a pickle jar.

Moo’s libretto for An American Dream is set during the Second World War on an unnamed Puget Sound Island. It follows two distinct, although interwoven, storylines. In both storylines, female characters are central to the action. Inspiration for these female characters came directly from longtime Seattle resident Marianne Weltmann, who still has the book she brought with her to America when she and her family fled Nazi Germany, and Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, who kept a pickle jar full of shells she collected as a child when she and her family were relocated from Vashon Island to an incarceration camp by Tule Lake in Northern California.

Moo met and interviewed these two women and borrowed their stories for the central figures in the opera.

Self-proclaimed “Seattle Singing Lady” Marianne Weltmann is a German-born Jewish opera singer. Weltmann and her family fled to the U.S. from Germany immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War, leaving behind their Stettin home and moving to the Pacific Northwest in search of refuge from the National Socialists. Weltmann went on to become an award-winning, Julliard-educated coloratura soprano and linguist whose performance and pedagogical influence is lasting, especially in the Seattle area. Today, Weltmann is the owner of Chamber Opera Northwest, a touring opera company with the aim of employing Northwestern performers. Weltmann’s life story and influence have been immortalized as Eva Crowley in An American Dream.

Japanese American author Mary Matsuda Gruenewald grew up on a strawberry farm on Vashon Island in southern Puget Sound. She and her family lived comfortably on the farm until December 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when anxieties concerning Japanese Americans caused the United States government to instate harsh measures in a misguided attempt to protect its citizens. By 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, which “authorized the forced removal of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to ‘relocation centers’ further inland.”

The Matsuda family destroyed all their Japanese possessions upon hearing the news of Pearl Harbor. The Matsudas, along with over 100,000 other Japanese Americans, were forcibly removed and incarcerated in American-run concentration camps. After the war, Gruenewald became a nurse and wrote her autobiographical novel, Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps, in which she shared her family’s stories during World War II. Grunewald spent some of the most formative years of her life imprisoned at the Lake Tule camp; she even celebrated milestones such as high school graduation while incarcerated. Gruenewald’s memoir recounting those formative years, in addition to the various interviews conducted by Moo, became inspiration for An American Dream’s second female lead, Setsuko Kobayashi.

An American Dream is Moo’s first libretto, aided by her collaboration with San Francisco-based composer Jack Perla, who “offered his experience in developing opera, advising Moo on where to shift from aria to duet to recitative, where characters sing in an almost conversational style.” After Moo finished the well-crafted libretto, it was up to Perla to bring the story to life with expressive vocal lines and intimate orchestration. Perla’s idea for the opera was to create a “‘Northwest impression’ and evoke the Japanese heritage of some of the characters by using ‘clear transparent textures, colored delicately, and pastoral sonorities perturbed and unsettled by dissonance shifting in and out of focus like passing clouds.’” The Seattle Times attributes this stylistic contrast to a combination of influences from Claude Debussy and Philip Glass as it is “full of impressionist and minimalist impulses, with washes of color and repeated motoric elements.” An American Dream is a one-act chamber opera that Perla says is scored “almost identically to Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw” and calls for six voices, harp, piano, percussion, brass, and strings.

Despite Perla’s masterful composition and Moo’s careful narration, Perla admits that some moments of the opera are difficult to watch, especially when one considers the real-life implications of the story, including the American government’s role in the systematic incarceration of thousands of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. However, Perla and Moo, along with the hundreds of creatives from Alaska to Indiana who have programmed An American Dream agree: it is important to honor the lives and stories of those who have suffered injustice, even—and perhaps, especially—when ours is the country responsible for those injustices.

“Witness Trees”
(2022-23)
by Osamu James Nakagawa

The turmoil of the pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, and the increased anti-Asian hate crimes during the Trump presidency were a painful reminder to me of America’s deeply engrained systemic racism. Amidst all this, as I turned 60, I had to part with my parent’s home in Japan. Together these things forced a personal reckoning: I was symbolically severing my connection to the place my family has always called home, while questioning, yet again, my value in the eyes of my adopted country.

Am I American? Or Japanese? Japanese American?

This led me to wonder about the experiences of Japanese Americans whose ancestors immigrated prior to World War II. Unlike my family, who came to the United States during the post-war economic boom, these older generations of immigrants and their descendants seemed guarded, as if they were carrying a burden of an American experience that was too much to speak of—a dark experience deeply rooted yet just under the surface, inherent in the structures of their adopted nation.

Two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcibly incarcerating approximately 125,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, mainly in camps in the arid American West. Many families suffered the dual trauma of losing their land, homes, and businesses while being isolated in the camps’ harsh, desolate environments at the hand of their own government.

In 2022, I made a 15,200-mile pilgrimage to the sites where these camps had been in an attempt to understand how the racism inherent in my American experience had carried a former generation of immigrants to places of such desolation. These trees emerged from the thousands of photographs I took at the sites. I felt them staring at me with the weight of their unspeakable memories. As I inhaled the light, air, dust, wind, and smells of the former camps, I took their portraits, connecting past and present, positive and negative, analog and digital, to draw out their aura.

Now that I no longer have a home to return to, I have no other choice but to call the current climate in this country my home.

Composer and pianist Jack Perla is active in opera, jazz, chamber, and orchestra music. His music is widely performed, and he has played in the United States, Europe, India, and Japan. With his New York-based group Music Without Walls and subsequently in San Francisco, he has forged a reputation for cross-fertilization of jazz, improvisation, and classical music. He has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera, Opera Theatre St. Louis, Houston Grand Opera, Seattle Opera, The Paul Dresher Ensemble, TwoSense, MATA, and many other performers and organizations. His operatic commissions include Shalimar the Clown, based on Salman Rushdie’s novel (Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, 2016); An American Dream (Seattle Opera, 2015); Jonah and the Whale (LA Opera, 2014); Mich and the Moon (Opera Memphis, 2014); Love/Hate (San Francisco Opera Center and ODC Theater, 2012,); River of Light (Houston Grand Opera, 2014); and Courtside (Houston Grand Opera, 2011). Perla is a recipient of the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute Jazz Composers Award and has performed as a pianist at the Texaco New York Jazz Festival, Knitting Factory, Tampere Jazz Festival, Big Sur, Monterey and Pacifica Jazz Festivals, and the Millennium Festival in London. Perla remains active composing, performing, and recording jazz, chamber, and symphonic music. His jazz recording Poet’s Cabaret was released in 2015. Perla was artist-in-residence at ODC Theater from 2006 to 2009, and concurrently participated in American Opera Projects’ Composers and the Voice and Tapestry New Opera’s LibLab. His chamber and symphonic music activity includes Persistence of the Blues (2013), commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, and The Rhyme is Reason (2013), commissioned by East Bay Performing Arts with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Perla grew up in Brooklyn. He earned his D.M.A. in composition from the Yale School of Music, where he studied with Jacob Druckman, Martin Bresnick, and Lukas Foss. He earned his B.M. and M.M. from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with John Corigliano. He currently lives and works in San Francisco.

Jessica Murphy Moo is a writer, editor, and educator. She has written the libretti for two operas, and she is working on her third opera, Loving v. Virginia, in collaboration with composer Damien Geter, which will have its world premiere with Virginia Opera/Richmond Symphony in 2025. An American Dream, an opera written in collaboration with composer Jack Perla, was produced at Seattle Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, Maine Opera, Virginia Opera, Anchorage Opera, Kentucky Opera, New England Conservatory, Opera Santa Barbara, Idaho Opera, and Hawaii Opera Theatre. Moo also wrote the libretto for the youth/family opera Earth to Kenzie, in collaboration with composer Frances Pollock. Earth to Kenzie has been produced at Seattle Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, and Virginia Opera. She is adapting the libretto into a novel for young readers. A former fellow at Tapestry Opera’s Librettist Composer Laboratory Workshop, Moo is now the editor of Portland Magazine. She writes fiction and nonfiction, and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Image, Poets & Writers Magazine, Portland Magazine, and Seattle Opera Magazine, among other publications.

Equally adept at conducting symphony, opera, and ballet, Judith Yan has held staff conductor positions at San Francisco Opera, Canadian Opera Company, and National Ballet of Canada. A strong supporter of new works, she has conducted numerous world premieres, including An American Dream (Perla/Murphy Moo) for Seattle Opera, Dracula (Pastor/Kilar) for West Australian Ballet, February (Kaminsky/Moore), and Ours (Estacio) for Opera on the Avalon, where she is music director and principal conductor. Recent reviews include: “The superb conducting of Judith Yan was finely balanced, sensitively accompanying the vocalists, and at the same time, allowing the orchestra to soar when called for by the music,” George Dansker/Opera News (New Orleans Opera, Madama Butterfly), and “Judith Yan, in her Opera Omaha debut, conducted masterfully. The orchestra maintained tonal integrity even when playing delicately and softly, providing a secure foundation of support for the singers. Yan knew exactly when to pull the orchestra back and when to let it loose,” Kevin Hanrahan/Opera News (Opera Omaha, Suor Angelica). Recent performances include Suor Angelica with Opera Omaha, Madama Butterfly with New Orleans Opera, The Rape of Lucretia with San Francisco Opera (Merola), La Bohème with Vancouver Opera, Orfeo with Kentucky Opera, La Bayadère and Swan Lake with Korean National Ballet, Don Quixote with West Australian Ballet, and six symphonic programs for Saskatoon Symphony, with repertoire ranging from Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and Dvorak to Gipps, Richter, and Copland.

Richard Gammon is a Filipino American stage director whose productions include Der Kaiser von Atlantis and Gluck’s L’île de Merlin (Wolf Trap Opera); Gianni Schicchi and Ching’s Buoso’s Ghost (Detroit Opera); Perla’s An American Dream (Hawai’i Opera Theatre, Opera Santa Barbara, Virginia Opera, Opera Maine Studio); Madama Butterfly (Virginia Opera); the American premiere of Scarlatti’s Erminia (Opera Lafayette); Albert Herring and Wang’s Scalia/ Ginsburg (The Princeton Festival); La Cenerentola (Opera Columbus); the world premiere of Jorge Sosa’s electronic opera The Lake (ArtSounds, Kansas City); CARE Monologue Film Project (Cleveland Play House); The Life and Times of Joe Jefferson Benjamin Blow (National Asian Artists Project); Rorem’s Three Sisters who are Not Sisters and Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna (Manhattan School of Music); Sankaram’s Looking at You (Carnegie Mellon); Sweeney Todd and Puts’s Silent Night (University of Kentucky); and the workshop of Ziyan Yang and Briana White Harris’s The Song of the Earth (Tisch/ NYU Actors Lab). Creative positions include director of the Opera Maine Studio Artist Program (Williams’ Rocking Horse Winner, Glass’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Kaminsky’s As One, Heggie’s Three Decembers, Fairouz’s Sumeida’s Song); co-creator/director of Art with Arias (Portland Museum of Art/Opera Maine recital collaboration); associate director for Porgy and Bess (Greensboro Opera) and Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath (Detroit Opera); Wolf Trap Opera Directing Fellow, artist resident at Hewnoaks Artist Colony; and creative associate for Seán Curran Company’s world premiere of Dream’d in a Dream (BAM Next Wave Festival). He has been on the directing staff at LA Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Detroit Opera, Palm Beach Opera, Virginia Opera, Opera Maine, Fort Worth Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Opera North, and Lyric Opera of Kansas City.

Bloomington-based designer and scenic artist Mark Frederic Smith is director of scenic painting and properties for IU Jacobs School of Music Opera and Ballet Theater, where he has worked on more than 150 productions during the past 27 years. Design work for Jacobs School projects includes The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, The Coronation of Poppea, Hansel and Gretel, Bernstein’s Mass, last season’s world premiere of Anne Frank, and La Finta Giardiniera. His design for Florencia en el Amazonas was featured in San Diego Opera’s 2017-18 season. In addition to work for Indianapolis Civic Theater, Butler Ballet, Indianapolis Ballet, and Chicago’s Greenhouse Theater, area theatergoers may recognize his designs for more than a dozen Cardinal Stage Company shows, including Les Misérables, A Streetcar Named Desire, My Fair Lady, Oliver!, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Smith earned a Master of Fine Arts in Scenic Design degree from the IU Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance and was a student of former Jacobs faculty C. David Higgins and Robert O’Hearn. Upcoming productions include Sweeney Todd and Star on the Rise: La Bayadère . . . Reimagined! with Jacobs Opera and Ballet Theater.

Eriko Terao is a costume designer and technician. Originally from Japan, Terao has worked in the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, serving as a costume designer, assistant designer, coordinator, wardrobe supervisor, and technician in a variety of theatrical productions, concerts, and costume exhibitions. Past costume experience includes work with Santa Fe Opera, Utah Shakespeare Festival, American Players Theatre, Children’s Theatre of Madison, Williams College Theatre Department, Ally Theatre, Jacobs School of Music Opera and Ballet Theater, Imperial Theatre, Nissei Theatre, and Akasaka ACT Theatre.

Russell Long’s most recent design credits include Lunch Bunch, 45 Seconds from Broadway, The Music Man, Carrie: The Musical, Pippin, and the national tour of We Outside. He has also worked as the lighting supervisor/resident lighting designer for Aspen Music Festival and School, where he designed lights for Uncommon Ritual, ¡De Colores!, and Mathew Whitaker. Originally from Southern Arizona, Long studied at Northern Arizona University and has worked with Arizona Theatre Company, Peaks Productions, University of Arizona Opera, Aspen Opera, and Vail Ballet Festival. He is also a founding member of Spotlight Youth Productions in Oro Valley Arizona. He earned an M.F.A. in Lighting Design from the IU Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance. Locally, Long has worked with the African American Arts Institute and local music and performing group Ben & Winnie. Examples of his work may be seen at rlonglighting.com.

Yuki Izumihara (she/her) is a scenic, projection, and production designer born in Shimonoseki City, Japan, and based in Oakland, California. Izumihara’s work is influenced by years of martial arts training and is animated by a belief in discipline, ethics, and craftsmanship. Upcoming productions include projection design for the San Francisco Symphony’s Lunar New Year, production design for Inkwell with ODC Dance, and Madame Butterfly – A Farewell Ritual with Opera Philadelphia. Recent engagements include projection design for Cirque Musica’s Holiday Wonderland, production design for Semele and Tosca with Opera Santa Barbra, scenic design for INTERSTATE with East West Players, projection design for The Cuban Vote with Miami New Drama (winner of Carbonell Awards Outstanding Achievement of an Artistic Specialty for Projection Design), scenic design for The Capulets and the Montagues with Opera Omaha, Sanctuaries with Third Angle New Music, production design for QUANDO with Heartbeat Opera, and The Fall of the House of Usher and desert in with Boston Lyric Opera. Her work has been featured at LA Opera, the New World Symphony, the Adrienne Arsht Center, San Diego Opera, the Hammer Museum, Getty Villa Museum, and various theaters in Los Angeles.

Andrew Elliot is a makeup artist, wig designer, stylist, and cellist. His design and music work can be seen and heard with IU Jacobs Opera and Ballet Theater, Beef and Boards Dinner Theatre, Booth Tarkington Civic Theatre, Actors Theatre of Indiana, Phoenix Theatre, Zach & Zack Productions, Summer Stock Stage, and others. His work as a makeup artist and stylist can be seen locally and nationally in various publications, commercials, billboards, industrials, and editorials. He spent 2020 recreating icons of film, fashion, and theater, which gained national attention, with features in The New York Times, NowThis News, The Indianapolis Star, and Indianapolis Monthly.

Osamu James Nakagawa was born in New York City in 1962 and raised in Tokyo. He returned to the United States, moving to Houston, Texas, at the age of 15. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of St. Thomas Houston in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Houston in 1993. Currently, Nakagawa is the Ruth N. Halls Distinguished Professor of Photography at Indiana University, where he directs the Center for Integrative Photographic Studies. He lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana. Nakagawa is a recipient of the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2010 Higashikawa New Photographer of the Year, and 2015 Sagamihara Photographer of the Year in Japan. His work has been exhibited internationally. Solo exhibitions include OKINAWA TRILOGY: Osamu James Nakagawa, Kyoto University of Art and Design; GAMA Caves, PGI, Tokyo; Banta: Stained Memory, Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa, Japan; Course: Banta, SEPIA International Inc., New York, New York; Osamu James Nakagawa, Ma-between the past, McMurtrey Gallery, Houston, Texas; and Kai: Osamu James Nakagawa, SEPIA International Inc., New York. His work has appeared in a host of group shows, including A Shared Elegy: Emmet Gowin, Elijah Gowin, Takayuki Ogawa, James Nakagawa, Grunwald Gallery of Art, Indiana University; The Photograph: What You See & What You Don’t #02, Tokyo National University of Arts; and After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; among many others. His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; George Eastman Museum; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa; The Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and others. Nakagawa is represented by Sepia EYE, NYC; PGI, Tokyo; Pictura Gallery, Bloomington, Indiana. Nakagawa’s recent monograph GAMA Caves was published by Akaaka Art Publisher in Tokyo, Japan.

Soprano, Abigail McKay Cherry is a first-year master’s student under the instruction of Brian Gill. McKay Cherry hails from Holt, Michigan. This is her first production with the IU Jacobs School of Music Opera Theater. Past roles include Lady Harriet in Martha and Rose Maurrant in Weill’s Street Scene. Most recently, she performed with the Detroit Opera chorus in Aida in Concert. McKay Cherry attended Oakland University where she studied under Alta Boover Dantzler, earning a Bachelor of Music in Voice Performance in 2019.

Originally from Columbus, Indiana, soprano Emily Sipes is a second-year M.M. student in Voice Performance at the IU Jacobs School of Music studying with Tichina Vaughn. She graduated with her B.M. in Voice Performance from the Jacobs School in the spring of 2022. She recently made her professional debut in the chorus of Carmen with Indianapolis Opera in their current season. In summer 2022, She attended La Musica Lirica in Novafeltria, Italy, where she portrayed La Prima Sorella in Suor Angelica and participated in the chorus of La Bohème. She also sang in their opera scenes program as Asteria in Tamerlano and Alice Ford in Falstaff. Sipes performed in Jacobs Opera Workshop scenes as Cendrillon in Cendrillon, Laetitia in The Old Maid and the Thief, Isabel in The Pirates of Penzance, and Mrs. Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, all under the direction of Michael Shell. She also performed in Carol Vaness’ Graduate Opera Workshop as Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus. This is Sipes’ Jacobs Opera Theater debut. She is a current staff singer at the First United Methodist Church in Columbus, Indiana.

Baritone Alexander Kapp is a native of Louisville, Kentucky and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at the IU Jacobs School of Music studying under Jane Dutton. He was most recently an emerging artist with Virginia Opera, where he performed the roles of Fiorello and The Officer in their production of The Barber of Seville. Previous engagements include a return to Central City Opera as a Bonfils-Stanton Apprentice Artist, where he performed the roles of Pops and the Padua Priest in Kiss Me Kate and Mercutio in their Young Artist Matinee performance of Roméo et Juliette. Kapp previously attended as a member of the Bonfils-Stanton Studio Artist program, where he covered the role of Manfred Lewin in the regional premiere of Jake Heggie’s Two Remain in addition to performing in their studio artist scenes concerts. Other credits include Thomas (Cold Mountain) with Music Academy of the West and Ford (Falstaff) and Malatesta (Don Pasquale) with the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (UC-CCM) Opera Workshop and Summer Opera respectively. Past Jacobs Opera Theater credits include Dr. Pangloss and Martin in Candide and Ottone in L’incoronazione di Poppea. In competition, he has been a finalist in the Grand Junction Symphony Orchestra Competition (2023) and the Opera Grand Rapids Vocal Competition (2020), a semi-finalist in the Opera Index Vocal Competition (2022), and was also named an encouragement award winner from the Tennessee District of the 2020 Laffont Competition. Kapp earned an M.M. degree from UC-CCM and B.M. degrees in Voice and Music Education from the University of Louisville.

American baritone Aaron Murphy has appeared on opera and concert stages across the eastern United States, Canada, Ireland, and France. A native of Cleveland, Tennessee, Murphy is a doctoral student in voice at the IU Jacobs School of Music studying with Timothy Noble and a graduate of Lee University and McGill University as a student of Tony Deaton and Stefano Algieri respectively. He has appeared as Betto in Gianni Schicchi, Don Alhambra in The Gondoliers, and Ben in The Telephone with Lee University Opera Theatre, Guglielmo in Così fan tutte and the Mayor in Bizet’s Docteur Miracle with Opera Tennessee, The Origamist in the Canadian premiere of Michael Ching’s Speed Dating, Tonight!, Frank and Frosch in Die Fledermaus and Ramiro in L’heure espagnole with Opéra McGill, the title role in Eugene Onegin with Opera NUOVA, Count Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro with Jacobs Opera Theater, covered the role of Valdeburgo in Bellini’s La straniera with Teatro Nuovo at New York’s Lincoln Center, and created the role of Hermann Van Daan in the world premiere of Anne Frank by Shulamit Ran at Jacobs. His concert credits include the bass solos in Handel’s Messiah and Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music for the annual Lee University Masterworks Festival, the role of the Narrator in Charpentier’s Le reniement de Saint-Pierre with the Lee University Chorale, Beethoven’s Mass in C with the Cantabile Chorale de Ste.-Geneviève in Sainte-Geneviève, Québec, and Bach’s Magnificat at historic St. Michael’s Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Beijing-born Mongolian soprano Talinaiya Bao is currently a junior at the IU Jacobs School of Music pursuing a double degree in voice performance under the tutelage of Heidi Grant Murphy and piano performance with Arnaldo Cohen as well as a minor in French and Francophone studies. Over the summer, she attended Opera Lucca in Italy and the Summer academy in Mozarteum Salzburg for piano studying with Ya-fei Chuang. Bao has performed in the choruses of many productions at the Jacobs School, including Ainadamar, Roméo et Juliette, L’Étoile, and H.M.S. Pinafore. Setsuko in An American Dream will be her lead debut with Jacobs Opera Theater.

Soprano Siyi Yan, a native of China, is currently pursuing an Artist Diploma at the IU Jacobs School of Music, where she previously earned a master’s degree under the tutelage of Brian Horne and Gary Arvin, having earned her bachelor’s degree in 2021 from China Conservatory of Music studying under Jingjing Li. Yan has achieved notable success in numerous competitions, having reached the semi-finals in the National Association of Teachers of Singing Artist Awards Competition, MIOpera Vocal Competition, and Tri-State College Vocal Competition, where she earned First Place and Audience Favorite Awards from The Opera Guild of Dayton. Furthermore, she was recognized as the Bloomington Chapter winner in the National Society of Arts & Letters Voice Competition and as a finalist in the Premiere Opera Foundation International Vocal Competition in 2022. Last season, Yan portrayed Cunegonde in Candide with IU Jacobs Opera Theater. In the 2021-22 season, she made her debut at the Jacobs School in Puccini’s La Rondine as Yvette and sang in Opera Chorus in productions of Lehár’s The Merry Widow, Chabrier’s L’Étoile, and Verdi’s Falstaff. During her undergraduate studies, Yan showcased her talent at China Conservatory of Music, taking on the role of Königin der Nacht in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (2021). She also engaged in extensive scenes work, portraying Ophelia (Hamlet), Susanna (Le Nozze di Figaro), Frasquita (Carmen), Adina (L’elisir d’amore), Pamina (Die Zauberflöte), Violetta (La Traviata), Alice Ford (Falstaff), and Gilda (Rigoletto).

Mezzo-soprano Yuxuan Liu, a native of China, is a first-year master’s student at the IU Jacobs School of Music, where she studies with Michelle DeYoung. Liu earned her bachelor’s degree in 2023 from Nanjing University of Arts studying under Jie Zhou. She won second prize in the 2021 Hong Kong International Vocal Art Song Competition. Her opera scenes include Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Ursule in Béatrice et Bénédict.

Esther Yi-An Tien was born and raised in Tainan City, Taiwan. She is a third-year doctoral student studying under Brian Gill at the IU Jacobs School of Music. Her past roles include Edka in Out of Darkness, Satirino and Linfea in La Calisto, Grandma in Little Red Riding Hood, and Second Lady and Papagena in The Magic Flute. Her scene performances include Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro, Ormindo in L’Ormindo, Zulma in L’italiana in Algeri, and Novice in Suor Angelica. Esther received the Mayoral Award of Excellence in Arts from the Tainan Government and was a Japan Classical Music Competition finalist. Tien made her National Concert Hall of Taiwan recital debut in the summer of 2016. During a historic summit between the two nations, the Taiwanese Embassy invited her to perform as a soloist at the Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City in 2018. She was chosen as the commencement student speaker to represent the New England Conservatory Class of 2020, where she earned her master’s in voice performance with Dean’s Scholarship and Graduate Assistantship. She earned her bachelor’s degree and the George Woodhead Prize at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University. She is a dedicated educator who serves at Taylor University as an adjunct voice instructor, overseeing a full studio of students.

Muyuan Liu is a baritone from China in his first year of a master’s program in voice at the IU Jacobs School of Music, where he is studying under Patricia Stiles. He earned an undergraduate degree in vocal performance at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China, under the tutelage of Kangliang Peng. Liu has extensive experience on stage, having been active in artistic forms such as dramas, musicals, dances, and choral performances. He was part of the Magnificent Culture Co. Ltd. Acting Touring Company. In opera, he has played a variety of roles, including Onegin (Eugene Onegin), Don Giovanni (Don Giovanni), Leporello (Don Giovanni), Figaro (Le Nozze di Figaro), Guglielmo (Così fan tutte), and Don Magnifico (La Cenerentola). He has also participated in Heidi Grant Murphy’s Opera Workshop, where he performed scenes from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro as Figaro, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin as Onegin, Puccini’s Tosca as Baron Scarpia, and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville as Fiorello. He performed Mozart’s Coronation Mass as a bass soloist in February 2023 with the Indiana University Chorale and Conductors Orchestra. Most recently, he performed the role of Count Capulet in Roméo et Juliette with Jacobs Opera Theater at the Musical Arts Center and Butler Arts & Events Center Clowes Memorial Hall.