FULL INFERNAL ANGEL (Amy Beth Kirsten) Philadelphia PA 2026 Ty Bouque, Maya Mor Mitrani, Katie Trigg, Jackson Allen

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: Infernal Angel  
• Composer: Amy Beth Kirsten  
• Libretto: Amy Beth Kirsten    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: Gould Rehearsal Hall, Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia, PA  
• Recorded: May 10, 2025
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: Ty Bouque, Maya Mor Mitrani, Katie Trigg, Jackson Allen
• Conductor: Amy Beth Kirsten  
• Orchestra: Curtis New Music Ensemble  
• Stage Director: Amy Beth Kirsten  
• Stage Designer: Amy Beth Kirsten  
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Format: DVD
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: yessubs, ensubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  Infernal Angel was commissioned by the Curtis Institute of Music for the institution’s Centennial Celebration (2024–2025). I composed the score and wrote the libretto. I also designed and directed the full production—integrating film, staging, movement, scenic/visual design, and costumes—and sang and recorded the role of The Stag, a pre-recorded character whose voice lives inside the film.

  An evening-length work of composed theatre—music, text, staging, movement, and media built as one interlocking system—Infernal Angel unfolds inside projected “film sets”: a monumental, hand-built stop-motion world whose images carry narrative force. The score is for four soloists (baritone, tenor, mezzo-soprano, soprano), a six-voice chorus (SSATBB), violin, trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and percussion, with pre-recorded audio woven throughout. While the work stands fully on its own, it also serves as a companion piece to Savior (2018, after Joan of Arc), forming a diptych.

  Intention

  My intention was not to retell history, but to build a meditation on guilt, myth-making, and the fragility of truth—realized through the fusion of music, theatre, and an immersive film world. The story of Gilles de Rais—companion of Joan of Arc and later vilified as the historical source for the folktale Bluebeard—became a lens for asking: How do narratives of innocence and monstrosity get constructed, and what does a culture demand when it wants certainty? The opera is not a documentary; it is a ritualized exploration of descent, self-delusion—private and collective—and reckoning.

  The Fiction

  In this work of historical fiction, I reimagine Gilles as the agent of Joan’s capture: for political reasons, he gives a word, and on his word, she is found and taken—an act that leads directly to her death. Afterward, legends surround him—withdrawal, occult obsession, ruin. In Infernal Angel, those legends become the outward weather of an inward catastrophe: guilt that cannot be survived.

  Vocal Architecture as Drama

  From the start, I designed the voice itself to be central to the drama. Gilles (baritone) begins in an unnaturally high, soprano register and refers to himself only as “he,” as if dissociating from the truth—a rupture further embodied by a recurring hand gesture: at key moments when the pronoun is spoken, he covers his face. Across the work, the register slowly sinks toward baritone; at the confession it drops further into fractured subtones—split, animal, half-sung—until the voice itself becomes the “monster” history remembers.

  Isolation and paranoia shape the sound world: much of Gilles’ music is unaccompanied or sparsely shadowed, intensifying his solitude; fuller instrumental presence emerges only at specific thresholds.

  The role of Gilles was composed for Ty Boque and developed in close collaboration, enabling the score to move credibly through extreme register, extended techniques, and subtones.

  Embodied Performance Practice

  Also central to the work is the conviction that the performing body carries dramatic intent and musical meaning. Stylized movement—such as Gilles’ recurring gesture—makes visible the subtext language tries to conceal. Performers slip fluidly between musician and mechanism, sometimes embodying both at once.

  Infernal Angel is designed to be performed without a conductor. Responsibility for timing, balance, and pacing lives in the performers’ shared listening; melodic flexibility is built into the score, and notation gives way at times to lived rhythm. This is not merely a technical choice but an ethical one: in a world where truth is unstable, the ensemble must embody instability in real time. The collective performing body becomes the true conductor.

  Agents of the Drama

  Several figures press Gilles toward collapse. Baron—an emissary of the Devil—appears as a little girl in rabbit ears, a tulle skirt, and sparkly sneakers, snapping the production to life with a single clap: film powered on, stage activated. She is both character and stage machinery—animating the world and manipulating it in plain sight. Later, in the wake of the Stag’s abandonment, she seizes control completely, conducting a tea-and-torture party beneath a cosmic chandelier. With her grip tightening on the stage, she forces Gilles into first-person at last—the confessional “I.”

  Around Gilles gathers The Smoke (SSATBB): a choral force that moves between destruction, time, memory, and tribunal—first as an inventory of absence, singing the names and ages of missing children, and later as the pressure of public certainty.

  François Prelati (tenor), a charlatan and false friend within Gilles’ household, administers a “medicinal” tincture that worsens Gilles’ condition; in this telling, Prelati is the true murderer of children, hidden in plain sight. In his private studio, the ensemble becomes a ritual apparatus—chanting, moving in interlocking, gear-like patterns… to read more contact

  ABK

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