Inheritance is a chamber opera designed for a lead soprano plus three additional voices and a chamber ensemble. This opera’s production will be housed within a multimedia environment that examines gun culture in America through the lens of Sarah Winchester’s life. According to popular belief, Winchester was an eccentric widow self-imprisoned in her labyrinth-like home and seeking refuge from the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles. The legend surrounding her life, impossible to extract from her actual history, is indicative of America’s inability to separate fact and fiction within gun-debate discourse. Although the libretto for Inheritanceis anchored in Winchester’s biography, this work explores her life and home as a metaphor for America’s violent legacy and deeply complex relationship with guns.

Created as a unique collaboration, Inheritance brings together four accomplished artists dedicated to raising probing questions about complicity, atonement, and gun violence in this country. Poet and essayist Matt Donovan has written an associative and imagistic libretto that interrogates Winchester’s life and the central metaphor of her labyrinth-like home. Its music, written by renowned Pulitzer Prize finalist Lei Liang, will forge a musical vocabulary that conceives of each instrument as a character, employing multi-layered exchanges between voice and instrumentation. The work will feature Grammy award winning soprano Susan Narucki, who has previously collaborated with Liang on the acclaimed chamber opera Cuatro Corridos, a work that tackles the topic of sex trafficking across the U.S. - Mexican border, and which served as a vehicle for artists and activists to hold public dialogues about this complex issue. And the opera’s sets and costuming will be designed by multimedia artist Ligia Bouton, whose works have been shown in museums across the U.S. and Europe, and whose recent interactive project “Understudy for Animal Farm” engaged over a thousand participants.

Inheritance premiered in 2018 at the University of California, San Diego and was supported by Creative Capital Foundation.