If you spend hours (or even days) hunched over your computer, losing yourself in link after link and viral video after viral video, take solace in falling down the internet rabbit hole – in real life you might be a muse.
That's how things played out for Spanish-American composer Ricardo Llorca, whose new opera, Las Horas Vacias (The Empty Hours), is being staged Friday at Linclon Center's Alice Tully Hall for a single engagement with the New York Opera Society.
The piece, named Best New Opera of 2007 by Festival der Sakralen Musik, is kind of an extended arc of the Rear Window scene where Jimmy Stewart spies on a lonely blonde woman as she prepares dinner for herself and an imagined paramour and then collapses into tears.
If that woman had an unhealthy obsession with her computer, you'd have the female protagonist in Hours. Each night, Llorca's heroine dresses for her weekly date with a fake cyberlover only to drink (and dance) herself into madness.
While themes of insanity and loneliness are as old as classical music itself, the internet-centric spin on things is decidedly zeitgeisty. Even composer Llorca found himself developing an addiction. He told The Wall Street Journal he thinks the internet can be "very dangerous" and revealed that he's currently fighting a YouTube dependence.
"When I began with this opera I was really addicted," he told the paper. "I could be all day chatting, skyping, texting. It can widen your horizon, but in another sense you lose your concentration."
So walk away from the computer and contemplate your own relationship to the cyberworld – or maybe just keep clicking.
Follow us on Twitter: @allisonpdavis and @theunderwire.
See Also:
