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Steve Rouse, composer
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THE MOUSEWIFE chamber opera....a musical story for young audiences for high soprano, lyric tenor, narrator, flute, 'cello, piano - 1996, c.45:00 Concert version for voices and piano available Optional audience participation singing Forever Free Based on a book by Rumer Godden. Adaptation: Steve Rouse and Joy Stephens, with six original song texts by Steve Rouse and Joy Stephens Publisher: Primal Press Commission / Premiere: Louisville Meet The Composer Residency, Steve Rouse conducting, Kentucky Center for the Arts, Louisville, April 1996 Libretto (Acrobat Reader pdf file) Promotion-only DVD or audio CD available on request. On April 24, 1996, at the Bomhard Theater of the Kentucky Center for the Arts, the Meet The Composer Louisville Residency premiered The Mousewife, a forty-five minute chamber opera, or musical story, by Composer in Residence Steve Rouse, with the composer conducting. Approximately four-hundred third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students from Martin Luther King Elementary School attended and participated in singing the climactic song, Forever Free, which they learned in music classes prior to the event. The Mousewife, designed for Kindergarten through fifth-grade students, is based on the book of the same name by Rumer Godden, with an adaptation and original song texts by Steve Rouse and Joy Stephens. Additional lyrics were contributed by Rumer Godden and Suzanne Willis. The Mousewife was written to help children focus in a comfortable, entertaining way on such issues as personal freedom, self-esteem, self-sacrifice, friendship, separation, and prejudice. The Mousewife is the story of a little mouse who is different from all the other mice...she has dreams. When a wild Dove is brought to the house where she lives and is put in a cage, the little Mousewife overcomes her fear of his strangeness and 'differentness' to become good friends with him. The Dove teaches the Mousewife all about freedom and the outside world, and she, in turn, summons her courage to free him from his cage, but not before struggling with the issue of what his leaving will mean to her. These issues and many others are presented in The Mousewife. An unstaged, concert version of the work has been adapted for voices and piano alone, for circumstances where cost and performance space are prohibitive. |
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