BREAKING NEWS — David T. Little‘s What Belongs to You, based on the novel by Garth Greenwell, is the winner of the 2025 Award for Best New Opera conferred by the Music Critics Association of North America. The honor, which recognizes both musical and theatrical excellence, is given annually to an operatic world premiere presented in North America during the previous calendar year. Commissioned by Alarm Will Sound and Modlin Center for the Arts, What Belongs to You, directed by Mark Morris and conducted by Alan Pierson, had its world premiere Sept. 26, 2024, at Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond.
The opera was selected by the MCANA Awards Committee co-chaired by Heidi Waleson, opera critic of The Wall Street Journal, and George Loomis, longtime contributor to the Financial Times and Musical America. The committee is rounded out by MCANA president Arthur Kaptainis, contributor to Ludwig van Toronto and former music critic of the Montreal Gazette; John Rockwell, former critic and arts editor of The New York Times and a regular correspondent for Opera (UK) and Musical America; and Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker.
The Awards Committee stated:
“Based on Garth Greenwell’s eponymous 2016 novel, What Belongs to You is a poetic and sensitive work that conveys the chaos of adult desire and the traumas of gay childhood. It takes the form of an extended monologue by an American schoolteacher in Bulgaria, who falls into an obsessive affair with a rough-living male prostitute named Mitko. The text is often raw and occasionally shocking, yet Little’s score is perhaps his most refined creation to date, blending recollections of Schubert and Britten with more experimental textures. The writing for voice is elegant throughout, the instrumentation intensely atmospheric. The final scene, in which the narrator describes meeting a mortally ill Mitko for the last time, packs classic operatic force, with a shivering quotation from Schubert’s ‘Der Leiermann’ to close.”
The opera is a product of friendships that go back decades, but ultimately Pierson, founder and artistic director of the 20-member ensemble Alarm Will Sound, was the catalyst for this work of collaborative creativity. In the 1990s, Pierson and Garth Greenwell became friends while students at Eastman School of Music, where Greenwell was studying voice.
Tenor Karim Sulayman, who had the same voice teacher as Greenwell, had met Pierson at a summer music workshop during high school and played piano for him during their time at Eastman. After Greenwell left Eastman to study literature, he and Pierson maintained their friendship; over the years, Pierson often read Greenwell’s works in progress and was eventually the dedicatee for What Belongs to You.
Little came into the mix through New York new-music circles. He was formed by musical influences as diverse as heavy metal, high-school musical theater, and the film scores of Danny Elfman, which inspired him to become a composer despite almost no classical training.
Discovering The Rite of Spring was his entrée into the world of classical music, which had always felt too buttoned up for his tastes. He wrote music while an undergraduate percussion major and won a composition prize leading to his first commission, the powerful Soldier Songs, a staged song cycle based on Little’s interviews with men and women who had served in combat. His work often has a wild edge, a legacy of his rock-music roots.
Pierson was familiar with Little’s ability to dramatize intense psychological states from having conducted his 2012 opera Dog Days. Once Pierson had read it himself, he gave an advance copy of Greenwell’s novel to Little, who quickly saw the book’s potential as a song cycle or monodrama. “The thing I found so remarkable in the book was how much I did identify with,” Little said in a video interview. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that I have experienced all the things that the narrator experiences in the book, in a literal sense. But I felt that I had experienced on some level nearly all of it in an emotional sense.” Little worked on adapting the 200-page novel into a libretto that reflected Greenwell’s finely crafted, rhythmic language.
Greenwell’s novel is cast as the reminiscences of an American teacher in Bulgaria who becomes obsessively involved with Mitko, a young gay hustler. During a gap in their relationship, the teacher receives word that his estranged father is dying and wants him to come home. Remembering his discovery of his own sexuality, he moves from glowing nostalgia to rage at his father’s rejection. What belongs to the narrator is the indelible memory of his father’s words: “You disgust me. If I had known what you were, you would never have been born.” The harsh words, chanted in chorus by the musicians like an infernal curse, haunt The American’s psyche despite his self-acceptance as a gay man.
Central to the novel and to the opera is sex. As Greenwell wrote for The Guardian, “Sex is a uniquely useful tool for a writer, a powerful means not just of revealing character or exploring relationships, but of asking the largest questions about human beings…Sex is an experience of intense vulnerability, and it is also where we are at our most performative.” Without being pornographic, Greenwell’s descriptions of The American’s physical encounters leave little to the imagination. But the focus of the writing is on the precise shadings of his emotions. While he engages in sex with men, this is a character who lives primarily in his head, analyzing his every feeling even in the moment. Beyond the mechanics of any act, Greenwell skillfully probes the resonance of desire, betrayal, shame, and longing.
Little follows each nuance of the monologue, mixing styles as diverse as minimalism, rock, and Renaissance madrigal. The American’s first encounter with Mitko in a public bathroom progresses from initial furtive negotiations, which are underlaid with low strings, piano, and bustling, purposeful winds. The lyrical longing of “kiss me” is supported with lush strings and a plaintive oboe. As the encounter progresses, the accompaniment becomes more dense and agitated. Things end abruptly, The American muttering his disappointment while dissonant brass interjections blurt repeatedly. Little’s score captures the conflict between The American’s longing for intimacy as he wrestles with shame. Later, as The American reflects sadly on his definitive estrangement from his father, Little sets Greenwell’s words to John Dowland’s sorrowful English lute song, “Flow My Tears.” The emotional arc is always clear. Writing for Alarm Will Sound’s all-acoustic instrumentation, Little draws on more classical influences in this work than in the more raucous, rock-tinged Dog Days and Soldier Songs.
Any apprehension at the prospect of 90 minutes of what director Morris described to The New York Times as “all the usual ‘boo hoo I’m gay’ stuff” was dispelled by Morris’ translation of memory into realistic movement, showing a man reliving the emotions of his experiences. Sulayman’s embodiment of The American was a tour de force as he sang a long and vocally demanding score while moving almost continuously, weaving his way among the musicians arranged on and around a series of platforms. The simple staging transformed a potentially static recitation into a dynamic exploration of mind and body.
What Belongs to You joins the ranks of powerful monodramas by Poulenc, Davies, and Kurtág. Future performances and a recording are being planned.
