Our American Cousin (opera)
Our American Cousin is a 2008 opera in three acts by American composer Eric Sawyer with libretto by poet John Shoptaw. The opera depicts the assassination of Abraham Lincoln from the standpoint of the actors presenting Tom Taylor's play of the same name at Ford's Theatre at the end of the American Civil War. It aims to offer something new in the realm of American contemporary opera, an American myth told in an unfamiliar way, with both poetic and musical language drawing from the past but refracted through the present.
John Wilkes Booth (Tom O'Toole) and Jack Matthews (Aaron Engebreth) in a scene from Our American Cousin
Eric W. Sawyer is an American orchestral composer, pianist and professor of music at Amherst College. He has studied as an undergraduate at Harvard College, where he was selected as a Harvard Junior Fellow. He undertook graduate studies at both Columbia University and the University of California, Davis. Before taking up the position at Amherst, Sawyer spent four years as Chair of Composition and Theory at the Longy School of Music.
Our American Cousin, 2008
William Hite as Ned Spofford and Keith Phares as Newton Arvin in a scene from The Scarlet Professor by Eric Sawyer and Harley Erdman in 2017