Classics professor Mark Usher first collaborated with John Peel, composer-in-residence at Willamette University (Salem, Oregon), when Usher was teaching there in the late 1990s. Peel had been commissioned to write a piece to dedicate a new music building, and “he wanted to do something monumental,” Usher says.

 

Usher offered to compose a cento—that is, a poem consisting of passages from other authors—on the theme of Dido and Aeneas, using lines taken from throughout the Aeneid. Peel set Usher’s creation to music, and the work, Voces Vergilianae, was performed by the Willamette Chamber Choir, the Salem Chamber Orchestra, and five vocal soloists in 1999.

 

Now Usher is working on a second collaboration with Peel: an opera about the Roman emperor Nero. Usher is crafting the libretto with lines and whole poems from ancient Greek and Latin authors, as well as some dialogue in English. The opera’s focus, Usher says, “is on the emperor Nero’s subcareer and psychological orientation as a singer and kitharode.” (Nero played the kithara, an ancient stringed instrument similar to the lyre.)

 

Neron Kaisar will premiere at Willamette in 2016, but you can listen to preview selections performed with piano accompaniment and see video here.