Tony Award winning composer Adam Guettel has already garnered quite the following with both FLoyd Collins and The Light in the Piazza.  In RIP, a new opera, Mr. Guettel leaves caves and piazzas behind to explore the world created in the short stories of Washington Irving.  And now you can take home a page from the score, signed by Mr. Guettel, of this brand new, never-before-heard-or-seen opera.

In describing the piece, Adam writes, “In the epilogue of RIP, based on short stories by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle wakes up in a town he no longer knows.  He is the only person speaking English.  Everyone else is speaking a language made up of any possible configuration of the syllables of the name Rip Van Winkle.  When you include switching consonants at the front or back of those syllables, and retrograde, the possibilities are in the hundreds of millions, and a new, completely unintelligible language is born.”

Intrigued?  So are we!