Famous by David Conte Choir - Sheet Music

SKU: EC.7305

Text: John Stirling Walker.

The extraordinary journey from death to life of a remarkable woman. As Salvador Dali's lover and one of Andy Warhol's Factory Superstars, Ultra Violet ascends from her abuse in a convent as a young French heiress to the decadent heights of the 1960's New York City art world to a spiritual reconciliation of Biblical proportions. With a brilliant and sweeping score by David Conte and a boldly penetrating libretto by John Stirling Walker, Famous breaks new ground in encapsulating an era of fame, fortune, death and redemption with stunningly original clarity and power. Synopsis Famous is in two short acts of four scenes each, the first act proceded by a prologue. In the prologue we see Isabelle alone at her desk, beginning to tell her story. In the first scene, we see Isabelle and Andy on the night of the Moon landing in 1969. Andy withdraws from the public event, referring to his fear of being in public after having been shot. A liaison between Isabelle and a Rock Star coincides with the excitement of the crowd in Central Park at man's first step on the Moon. In the second scene, a "flashback", we meet Edie Sedgwick, the vulnerable young beauty who moves Isabelle with her life story and asks about her encounter with Dali. This scene segues into scene three, a further "flashback" to Dali's and Isabelle's first meeting, where they paint together a model, Dali rendering her as a Madonna, Isabelle as a nun in the throes of sexual passion; the scene concludes with her introduction by Dali to Warhol, and with another segue, to a surrealistic first act finale with Warhol and his entourage in the Factory. The second act's first scene is a ballet depicting Isabelle's youth in a convent, where she witnesses a sexual encounter between the Mother Superior and a priest disguised as a nun, and then suffers an exorcism, with her parents standing by. Its second scene has Isabelle, after the Warhol years, at home trying to reconcile with her mother, who is distant and conservative. In the third scene of the second act, Isabelle confronts the way in which her acts of adultery have harmed the wives of her sexual partners. In the final scene, then, she experiences redemption in an encounter with Isaiah and with the spirit of Edie Sedgwick, the former singing of "sins as red as scarlet being made as white as snow", the latter of the history of the exploitation of youth. The opera ends in a touching scene of reconciliation, at last, between mother and daughter in the spirit of their homeland. Click here to view excerpts!