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Paul's Case is a two-act evening-length chamber opera for seven singers that chronicles the dissolution of a high school dandy living in sooty turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh. Paul, who spends his free time working as an usher at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Hall, eventually runs away to revel in the luxury of New York City's Waldorf Astoria hotel. Through the deft use of post-minimal and Baroque styles, the opera reminds us of our own struggle to cope with what Cather calls 'the homilies by which the world is run'.
The vocal lines, both pastoral and mechanistic, suggest the world of nature, luxury and art that Paul loves and the gilded-age machinery that will eventually destroy him. The opera may be performed with or without an intermission in small to medium-sized opera houses.
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