FULL Mrs.President (Bond) Anchorage 2012

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: Mrs.President  
• Composer: Victoria Bond  
• Libretto: Hilary Bell  
• Venue & Opera Company: Anchorage Opera  
• Recorded: October 5, 2012
• Type: Concert Semi-staged
• Singers: Valerie Bernhardt, Katrina Thurman, Rebecca Cloudy, Joy Hermalyn, Scott Ramsay, Kirk Dougherty, Robert Osborne
• Conductor: Victoria Bond  
• Orchestra:
• Stage Director:   
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: Victoria Bond  
• Date Published: 2017  
• Format: Unknown
• Quality Video: 2 Audio:2
• Subtitles: nosubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  In her opera Mrs. President, Bond tells the story of the first woman to run for President of the United States. Victoria Woodhull was a true revolutionary who fought for women’s rights under the law. An entrepreneur, she had a stock brokerage firm on Wall Street and her own newspaper. Woodhull ran for the country’s highest office in 1872, before women had been granted the right to vote. She was jailed on election night as a result of revealing preacher Henry Ward Beecher as a womanizer. The final scene of Mrs. President finds Woodhull in her prison cell, silenced but not defeated, looking ahead to future generations of women who will rise up to realize her vision of equality: “From my ashes a thousand more will rise. They will seize what I’ve begun, hold it high and carry it on. Arise!”

  Victoria Bond has admired generations of strong and determined women within her own family. Her grandmother lived in a tent in Israel while it was still ruled by the Ottoman Empire; Bond considers her the “first pioneer” in her family. Her mother was a concert pianist who traveled all over Europe playing concerts as a teenager. Bond inherited early on the belief that she could do anything she set her mind to, and her long career is a testament to this belief.

  Her career hasn’t been without its challenges, though. When Bond was first finding her feet as a conductor and composer, there was a pervasive skepticism about women’s capacity to thrive in positions of creative leadership. She had to fight against the view that a woman couldn’t be a serious conductor because there wasn’t a precedent for it, as well as the belief that women simply couldn’t compose larger-form orchestral works or operas. Bond has always taken inspiration from the examples of women throughout history who have done this work, as well as from women working in politics today who are constantly fighting to give voice to these and related issues. She hopes that her work “will act in the same way to other young women who come after [her] and who need constant reinforcement that they can do what they believe they’ve been set out to do.”

  Quoted from https://mrspresidenttheopera.com/

  (Visited 181 times, 1 visits today)