The Hours

The Hours is a 2022 opera in two acts with music by Kevin Puts and an English-language libretto by Greg Pierce, based on Michael Cunningham's 1998 novel and its 2002 film adaptation, both with the same title. The opera was first performed on 18 March 2022 in a concert presentation at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia and received its stage premiere on 22 November 2022 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. The stage premiere was video-streamed at the Met Opera website, and the performance of 10 December was presented in movie theaters as a part of the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD series. Genesis The idea for the opera arose from a conversation between soprano Renée Fleming and composer Kevin Puts when they were collaborating on his 2019 song cycle The Brightness of Light. Someone in Fleming's office suggested Michael Cunningham's novel, and they both thought this was the right choice. The opera was commissioned by New York's Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Greg Pierce, who wrote the libretto for the 2016 opera Fellow Travelers, as well as the lyrics of two musicals with John Kander, The Landing (2013) and Kid Victory (2015), was hired to write the libretto. In an interview with NPR, Pierce stated: "The Met is a very big space. It's got a massive chorus, a big orchestra. Why not make use of all of that? You could do an Hours that's really intimate, a chamber piece. That's not what we wanted to do." A lot of the book consists of a stream of consciousness, that is character's thoughts and perceptions, "and the idea that they [the chorus] could potentially go in and out of the minds of these main characters and argue with them, they could be in inner argument – it was really exciting to us", Pierce said. Performance history The Hours was first performed on 18 March 2022 in a preview concert presentation at the Kimmel Center by the Philadelphia Orchestra under its conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The singers included Renée Fleming as Clarissa Vaughan, Jennifer Johnson Cano as Virginia Woolf, Kelli O'Hara as Laura Brown, Brett Polegato as Richard, Jamez McCorkle as Leonard Woolf, Deborah Nansteel as Sally, and Brandon Cedel as Dan. Nézet-Séguin, who is also the music director of the Metropolitan Opera, conducted the stage premiere at that company's house on 22 November 2022, in a production by Phelim McDermott. The set and costume designer was Tom Pye, and the choreographer was Annie-B Parson.