Tragic kingdom? It's all Greek to area couple

by Chris Slattery
Staff writer

Did somebody say Greek tragedy?

"I wish I could say we had stormy blowups and knock-down, drag-out fights," says Simpson, 35, whose opera, "Agamemnon," makes its university premiere this weekend. "But we got along very well."

Putting his wife's translation of the original Greek text to music has been a labor of love for Simpson, who grew up happily heartland in Shelbyville, Ind.

"I came to music rather late," he says, "because I didn't come from a musical family."

In Shelbyville, 30 miles southeast of Indianapolis with a population of about 15,000, Simpson's dad was the local newspaper's circulation manager -- and tone-deaf, by his youngest child's account.

"My mother could sing," Simpson concedes. "When I was 13, I decided to play piano. We had an upright -- I have a vague recollection of my parents helping someone move and getting this piano -- a large, imposing piece of furniture in the dining room."

They tuned it so he could play, just as he had been playing the trumpet since fourth grade. And when Simpson's older brother came home from DePauw University bearing recordings of Brahms and Beethoven, something clicked.

"To me, it was a real revelation," he says. "I had only heard this music in small snatches."

Simpson says his experience of Greek tragedy also was limited to the basics: "Oedipus Rex" and "Medea." Now, though, he's all about Agamemnon.

"It's a very powerful story," he says. "I was attracted by the strangeness. It's a very dark story [of] a family with a curse laid on them.  This is an incredibly dark and violent story, but somehow you don't expect that from an ancient [tale]. You expect violence to be modern."

Not that violence is what this operatic version of the circa 548 B.C. story is all about.

"It's also very expressive," says Simpson, who holds a bachelor of music degree in music theory and composition from Indiana's Butler University, a master's in musical composition from Boston University and a doctorate in music composition from Indiana. "There are amazingly lyrical passages, scenes that seem to cry out for musical setting."

He provides that musical setting, but as a composer, he answers to a higher power: his wife.

Opera baby

Who can make a severely elite resume -- bachelor of science outside of field degree in flute, Latin and Greek from Indiana University; master of philosophy in Greek and Latin languages and literatures from the University of Oxford, England, acquired as a Marshall Scholar, master of arts in classics from Princeton University, Fulbright Scholar at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece, and doctoral candidate in the Department of Classics at Princeton University -- feel like nothing out of the ordinary?

Ferrario can.

"I've been busy," she giggles modestly, when presented with a list of her accomplishments. But it's not about what she has done and where she has been -- a year in Greece to translate Aeschylus is nice work if you can get it. It's about what the average Joe might take away from this opera.

"This play gets plenty of attention in the scholarly community," the 28-year-old observes, "but other people deserve to see it, too."

But it's ancient Greek tragedy! Why?

"The music is vivid, there's dance involved. It's multimedia," she exclaims. "It will be a very rich theater experience -- we hope!  That's how we designed it."

Ferrario met Simpson at Indiana University, Bloomington, when they played in an ensemble together. She delivers their romantic in terse terms:

"We met in 1993, started dating in 1995," she recites. "Two months after we started dating, Andrew finished school."

That took him away to upstate New York, but his beloved had warmer climes in mind.

"We never actually lived together," she says, "even after we married. We celebrated our first anniversary by moving in together."

They moved to Greece, where she Fulbrighted amid the ruins, and he (on academic leave) did his best to bend her words into music.

It all proceeded according to plan.

"I was surrounded by classical music from the time I was a small child," Ferrario admits. "When I was 3, I learned to work the stereo so I could listen to the opera station."

She saw her first opera, "Don Pasquale," on a school field trip and "not only did I come home completely sold," she says, "I brought home a flyer for the Lyric Opera of Chicago's Children's Choir."

She tried out and sang with them -- and then grew over their 5-foot height cutoff -- and despite the rich musical scene at home, she settled on the mysterious sounding "BSOF," an acronym for bachelor of science outside of field.

It's enough to make a girl want to murder her husband and the woman he, oh wait: that's not Andrew and Sarah. That's "Agamemnon."

Greek for dummies

You can surmise that Simpson and Ferrario, no matter how benign they might seem to their neighbors, have the kind of passion that sets them apart. They don't seem at all, for example, to think Aeschylus is anyone who might frighten modern-day fans.

"One of our goals is to give people the chance to experience this magnificent play that gets less exposure than it deserves," she says. "'Agamemnon' doesn't get done frequently."

She notes that their opera offers an unusual fusion of scholarship, art and theater, and puts a modern audience in touch with an ancient tradition.

"We don't really know what an ancient production looked like," admits Ferrario. "In this play, everything is contemporary."

Six principal characters, each with a speech -- and every speech has been translated with care into a "lift aria" -- something that could travel.

"I wanted to design it so that each aria could be used on its own," says Simpson.

There's more to it than that.

"Subjectively speaking, this is one of my favorite works of ancient literature," says Ferrario, "and I've read a lot of it in Greek!  It's tremendously powerful," she says. "No line is wasted, there's a huge group of images: liquids that flow, fertility and animals.  We wanted to produce a libretto that brought the richness of the original to the audience."

And the audience need not be Greek scholars to enjoy it. Simpson and Ferrario will give a pre-concert lecture an hour before curtain to make things clear, and the text in English can be seen above the stage as "supertext." It's not simple and it's not for young children, but it's understandable. And it certainly was popular back in the day.

"In 458 B.C., this play was received as a masterpiece," says Ferrario. "It's the first piece of western theater the audience wanted to see staged again -- that we know of."

"Before that, they didn't do revivals."

"Agamemnon," a new one-act opera faithfully setting Aeschylus' ancient Greek tragedy, will receive its fully-staged university premiere at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday in the Hartke Theatre, The Catholic University of America, 3801 Harewood Road N.E., Washington, D.C. Tickets are $18, $8 for seniors and $5 for students. Call 202-319-5416.