Ex-Tucsonan's 'The Old Man and the Sea' opera to get ASU world premiere

To say that opera composer Paola Prestini is a big fan of Hemingway’s novella “Old Man and the Sea” would be an understatement.

She would go as far as to call it an obsession.

So much so that Prestini, who grew up in Nogales, Arizona, and Tucson, has composed possibly the first opera based on the book, Hemingway’s last major fictional work published during his lifetime. The contemporary opera will have its world premiere on Saturday, Nov. 4, at ASU Gammage in Tempe.

“I loved the book. I’ve been obsessed with the book,” she said. “It is like a perfect, simple — and by simple I mean so concise — study in kind of excellence in writing.”

The opera, which Prestini created with director Karmina Šilec and librettist Royce Vavrek, casts the story of Santiago and his young assistant Manolin through the lens of the author’s final fever dream in his last days.

Hemingway had not written a significant literary work in more than a decade when he published “The Old Man and the Sea” in 1952. In the opera, we see him questioning if the novella was indeed the “best thing I’ve ever written,” as he once told his publisher.

Portraits of his life mixed with images from the book flash before him in Šilec’s multi-layered interpretation of Hemingway’s most famous work. His flashbacks are interspersed with characters from the book, from Santiago, the elderly Cuban fisherman who goes 84 days without a catch only to wrangle with a marlin that’s eventually eaten by a shark; to La Mar, who owns the El Floridita bar in Cuba that is Hemingway’s regular haunt; and La Virgen del Cobre, a Santeria goddess found floating on a wooden board off the eastern Cuba coast in 1628.

Prestini said “The Old Man and the Sea” and Hemingway are ideal fodder for opera.

“I think his state of mind was so complex,” she said. “There were so many vivid tableaux in terms of what he was inspired by. He drew on letters that he had written to Marlene Detrich. What did that mean? The relationship between Santiago and Manolin, the young boy. What is that relationship? And also this idea of this man on the boat having the biggest challenge of his life and really having to face life’s biggest questions: ‘What did your life mean?’ ‘If you’re fighting for this one thing in life and you don’t get it, what does that do to you?’ I think everybody can relate to that existential struggle of life’s meaning.”

This is Prestini’s 10th opera, coming on the heels of her fairy tale opera “Edward Tulane,” which was commissioned and premiered by Minnesota Opera in 2022. Her 2015 opera “Aging Magician” was on Broadway, and her works have been produced in the U.S., Canada and abroad.

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Prestini’s interest in music started when she was learning to play piano as a kid. She started writing her own songs and soon realized she hated practicing unless it was her own music.

Her mother supported Prestini’s love of music and sent her to summer camps at the famed Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, where she went to high school. She went on to Juilliard, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Prestini lives in New York but comes home to Tucson for holidays.

“It’s definitely a place that I love going back to,” she said.

She also draws inspiration from her experience growing up in a border town. Prestini split her time between Tucson and Nogales, where her family had settled after emigrating from Italy when she was a baby. Her father relocated his family’s reed manufacturing business House of Prestini to Nogales, where it had been operating since 1974, to be closer to its cane source near Guaymas, Mexico.

“I think the kind of politics at the border, the music of the border, deeply influenced me,” Prestini said during a phone call last month to talk about the premiere of “The Old Man and the Sea.” “What I love the most about both living in Nogales and living in Tucson was the multicultural identity and the proximity to Mexico. The idea of life on the border and what it means to cross the border. The socioeconomic disparities. That really played a deep part of my life in terms of the work that I do and the places which I see inequity. And on kind of a spiritual level, there’s just such a beauty to the Southwest. That never leaves you.”

Her father’s lifelong love of the sea and fishing had always fascinated her, she said, which also played into her desire to tap into Hemingway’s story.

“This is really an homage to that (fishing) tradition in his family,” she said. “It was really exciting to do something that obviously means something to him, as well.”

Baritone Nathan Gunn, who was part of the 2013 Tucson Desert Song Festival, will sing the role of Hemingway and Santiago, while Chinese-Australian soprano Yvette Keong sings the role of La Virgen del Cobre. Mexican-American countertenor Rodolfo Girón makes his Arizona debut in the role of Manolin.

Prestini’s score is written for percussion, electronics and cello, performed by her husband, former Kronos Quartet cellist Jeffrey Zeigler. Mila Henry, who has made a name for herself conducting contemporary works from folk operas and rock musicals to reimagined classics, will conduct.