Project in Development

Writing an opera based on family oral history and mental health

This upcoming opera* from composer Vivian Fung and librettist Royce Vavrek will be performed in collaboration with Edmonton Opera and Metropolis Ensemble. World Premiere dates to be announced soon.

The project builds on two operatic scenes — “Grover and Friends” and “Alarm” — that debuted in Fall 2021 at Edmonton Opera’s Wild Rose Opera Project, exploring mental health issues and the composer’s own family history of miraculously escaping the Khmer Rouge genocidal regime in an arduous foot journey through the countryside of Cambodia

*Commissioned by Edmonton Opera with grant support from Canada Council.

Notes from the Composer

Grover and Friends and Alarm are two scenes based on family oral history I gathered during the spring of 2021. My extended family–including my maternal grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins–lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in the 1970s as part of the overseas Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. They were there quite happily, in fact, until shortly before the Khmer Rouge stormed the capital in April 1975 and drove everyone out. My family miraculously survived an arduous journey – over a month on foot in the countryside of Cambodia, and then in Vietnam. Ultimately, they ended up in Paris and Canada, but those events changed the course of my family forever. I also was born in 1975, and even though I was born and raised in Canada, my birth and childhood were deeply affected by omnipresent anxiety and uncertainty over my family’s situation and safety.

Only recently have I been able to piece together more completely my family history and how it affected my family members' subsequent lives. I went to visit Cambodia for the first time in 2019 with my family–parents, son, and husband–and with some detective work, we were able to find my family’s former home and the hospital that my aunt ran, still standing all these years later but now abandoned. I look forward to returning and to continuing to understand more about their past. Many thanks to Royce Vavrek for his wonderful text and his intuitive grasp of what my family went through.

WATCH: “Grover and Friends” and “Alarm” by Vivian Fung, premiered in Fall 2021 by The Wild Rose Opera Project.

Vivian Fung

Juno Award-winning composer Vivian Fung has a unique talent for combining idiosyncratic textures and styles into large-scale works, reflecting her multicultural background. “One of today’s most eclectic composers” (NPR), she has a deep interest in exploring cultures and is passionate about fostering the talent of the next generation. Vivian has collaborated on numerous Metropolis crowd favorite concerts and world premieres over the years, including Glimpses, Renderings, Music for Voice, Cymbeline, and Double Helix. Our second studio album received a 2013 Juno Award for the works of Vivian Fung, including “Best Classical Composition of the Year” for Violin Concerto performed by Kristin Lee with Metropolis Ensemble. More »

Royce Vavrek

Royce Vavrek is a Canada-born, Brooklyn-based librettist and lyricist who has been called “the indie Hofmannsthal” (The New Yorker) a “Metastasio of the downtown opera scene” (The Washington Post), “an exemplary creator of operatic prose” (The New York Times), and “one of the most celebrated and sought after librettists in the world” (CBC Radio).  His opera “Angel’s Bone” with composer Du Yun was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music. More »