Students: Use promo code “CUSTUDENT” at checkout to reserve free tickets for 11/23.

The Glitch is a one-act, true-crime opera based on the infamous 2015 Dannemora prison break. Told through a single charged conversation between a former prison employee (who is now a prisoner, incarcerated for helping plan the escape of her lover) and her husband (who refuses to accept his wife’s culpability, in his first visit since her guilty verdict), the work explores betrayal, lust, and jealousy in the shadowy world of illicit love.

Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda sets a famous episode from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata that tells the tragic story of two warriors fated to clash in battle. The Christian knight Tancredi encounters a Saracen soldier during the Crusades and, not recognizing the fighter beneath their armor, challenges them to combat. A fierce duel unfolds and after a prolonged and exhausting fight, Tancredi strikes a fatal blow. Only then does he remove his opponent’s helmet and discover, to his horror, that he has slain Clorinda, the woman he loves. Overwhelmed with grief, Tancredi fulfills Clorinda’s final wish and baptizes her with water from a nearby spring. She dies peacefully, and the piece closes with an air of solemnity and transcendence. 

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

Stage Director Marcus Shields describes the relationship between Nico Muhly and Monteverdi’s short operatic works. 

These two pieces share a striking kinship. Both are brief, both circle around love and conflict, and both capture the instant of a clash—emotional in the Muhly, physical in the Monteverdi. At their heart lies a struggle between a man and a woman, born of misunderstanding and misperception.

Taken symbolically, the stories open outward, resonating with mythological echoes: Zeus and Hera, Siegfried and Brünnhilde, and countless others who embody the tension of love entangled with strife. Push the abstraction further, and the human scale falls away and what remains are two cosmic forces—order and chaos, civilization and wilderness, justice and compassion—locked in eternal dialogue, within every person and every relationship.

The two works written almost 400 years apart invite us to see these conflicts poetically. Together, the works become a mirror of each other and of our world today: two visions of intimacy and violence, realized in opposite ways, leading us from one side of the spectrum to the other.