Coming to Nashville Opera
Josh Bedford | September 30, 2025
In 2016, composer Paul Moravec and librettist Mark Campbell premiered their adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining at St. Paul’s Ordway Center for Performing Arts with great success and excitement. And the thrill of the opera is making its way to the Tennessee Performing Arts Center and the Nashville Opera on October 9th and 11th. The opera’s performances have landed it constant adulation for Campbell’s transformation of the original novel into a tight, two-act opera and for Moravec’s accessible and thrilling score. The opera’s success was also the result of providing audiences and critics alike with a work that was both fresh and familiar. The opera’s immediacy and originality are rooted in the composer and librettist’s engagements with thematic, generic, and musical conventions. Ultimately, the opera succeeds by remaining aesthetically connected to contemporary styles and trends while remaining cognizant of the original novel and its earlier film adaptation.
As with any operatic adaptation, analysis can begin with its fidelity to the original source material or, if possible, its relationship to other adaptations of the same source material. Both Moravec and Campbell have been quick to remark on the opera’s faithfulness to the core themes of King’s novel, separating it from immediate comparison with Stanley Kubrick’s cult-film-turned-horror-classic adaptation from 1980. Nevertheless, comparisons inevitably arise given the film’s indelible position within American popular consciousness over forty years later. What distinguishes the opera from its cinematic predecessor is the result of stylistic and aesthetic trend differences between the avant-garde sensibilities of Kubrick, musically undergirded by the abrasive microtonal passages of Penderecki’s Threnody, the dense micropolyphony of Ligeti’s Lontano, or the synthesized reimagining of the Dies irae by Wendy Carlos. Moravec drew upon operatic precedents of motivic unity and symbolism to transpose the Overlook’s psychological manipulations of Jack Torrance and their deleterious effects into the score. Furthermore, Moravec’s inconspicuously triadic musical language revives the familiar sounds of the supernatural horrors that antagonize, confound, and deceive the Torrance family. The prevailing contemporary musical trends harnessed by Moravec in The Shining offer an individualized stylistic approach that is simultaneously progressive and retrospective, and studying the opera requires a similar analytical approach that engages with its nostalgic musical qualities to understand its present success.
The Shining is a horror opera that has precedents in the German Romantic Operatic tradition. The German Schaueroper (horror-opera) often highlighted the intrusion of the supernatural in the natural world, a significant component of operas such as Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821) or Richard Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer. Yet, The Shining presents more than just ghostly apparitions. Instead, the opera is a much broader exploration of the slow torment caused by the supernatural disturbances of the Overlook Hotel, namely those that affect the transformation of Jack Torrance from protagonist to antagonist by turning him mad.
Madness as a central theme in The Shining recalls various mad scenes prominent in the nineteenth-century operatic repertoire. Perhaps the most famous scene of this kind, and most familiar to recent Nashville Opera attendees, comes from Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835). The mad scene helped cultivate the archetype of the madwoman, which complemented the aesthetic trends of grotesque subjects, intense expressions of emotion, and virtuosic pyrotechnics popular in the nineteenth century. The madwoman became a “spectacle,” as musicologist Susan McClary has described, disconnected from the world around her through exhibitions of melodic and harmonic excess. No matter how alluring and attractive, the spectacle of madness always received a mediating chorus that helped juxtapose the realm of madness with reality, shielding the audience from the potential seduction of identifying with her.
Unlike his nineteenth-century predecessors, Moravec’s depiction of Jack Torrance’s descent into madness is uninhibited by structural constraints and occurs throughout the entire first act. The aim is to invite audiences into the Torrance family’s terrifying experiences inside the Overlook Hotel and bring them perilously close to the disintegrating boundaries between real and supernatural worlds. He accomplishes this by foregrounding the Overlook as an active participant in the drama and alerting the audience to its sinister capabilities. In the opening scene, when the family arrives and first gazes upon the Overlook Hotel, Jack sings a brief statement, “There it is,” accompanied by an unsettling three-note motive of F sharp-G-B flat (Example 1). This motive, comprised of a half-step followed by a leap of a minor third interval, and its various iterations become a fixture throughout the opera and sustain a feeling of haunting instability.
Underneath the initial motive rings out a pristine E-flat major triad from the upper strings in the orchestra. Here exists a curiously discordant juxtaposition between motive and harmonic accompaniment. On the one hand, the E-flat major triad evokes an impression of heroism associated with the Germanic conventions exhibited in Beethoven’s Eroica or Weber’s Der Freischütz. Yet, Jack’s motive betrays straightforward symbolism in the opening pitch, creating a major-minor triad even for a fleeting moment. Instead, this moment foreshadows the spectral encounters that await him and his family.
During the rest of Act I, Jack encounters the various ghosts, most of them slain former guests at the Overlook, but one that sends him into an emotional tailspin is the voice of his dead father. His melodic material remains short, motivic, and relatively narrow in range, even as these encounters increase, while the ghosts receive the bulk of the melodic material. In fact, he is the only character not to receive an aria. His most melodic passages occur at the climax of Act I, after he and Wendy discover that something attacked Danny, and they fly into a rage, blaming each other for the incident. They reconcile with Jack singing contritely about a patriarchal sense of duty in what sounds like the beginnings of an apologetic aria. The presumed aria begins at a critical dramatic juncture where a favorable resolution for the Torrance family seems possible. As he sings “I am the husband. I am the father. You are my family,” the orchestra agrees with its lush melodies that ring out with intensely emotional phrases evocative of Anton Bruckner’s Adagio from his Eighth Symphony or the rhapsodic exclamations of Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Example 2).
Nevertheless, these impassioned statements slowly dissolve into the Overlook Hotel’s ether, as a chorus of ghosts, including the murderous Delbert Grady and his slain family, usurp the musical space. The episode culminates in a recurring motif of the specters, an imitation of a swing band ballad in which the ghosts sing the ominous refrain, “Forever and a day. We’ll never, never part.” With the aria snuffed out, the ending confirms Jack’s submission to the Overlook’s devastating power.
Moravec scores the violent and domineering supernatural characters and events in conventional ways that harken back to early operatic presentations of such individuals. Again, Weber’s Der Freischütz is useful for comparison, especially the famous Wolf’s Glen scene from the second act. At the first invocation of the devil’s representative, Samiel, Weber supplies the orchestra with a fully-diminished seventh chord comprising a series of minor thirds stacked on top of each other (C-E Flat-G Flat-A). The significance of this chord is its harmonic associations with the demonic through the “devil in music”, or tritones (C-G Flat and E flat-A), present in such chords. Additionally, Samiel does not receive any melodic material and must only speak. Moravec frequently stacks tritones throughout the opera to create tension and instability for audiences. Yet, these do not form specific chords and instead use highly dissonant combinations of tritones to enhance anxiety about what lurks around the next corner of the Overlook Hotel.
Unlike in Der Freischütz, the supernatural in The Shining is not entirely diabolical or demonic. Danny and Dick Hallorann shared psychic capabilities known as “the shine,” which receives some of the most romantic musical treatment in the whole score. Yet, Moravec uses tritones to illustrate these supernatural abilities, but distinguishes them from the horrific ghosts and the violent powers of the hotel. In Act I, sc. 2, Hallorann discusses his ability to “shine” with Danny with some of the most soaring melodies of the opera. The orchestra accompanies Hallorann with a series of major triads, but their harmonic relationship to one another reveals a series of tritonal relationships between them. Towards the end of his aria, Hallorann encourages Danny: “But tough as it is, remember to: Keep shining on” (See Example 3). The orchestra moves underneath from an A major to an E-flat major triad, then a B major to an F major triad, and concludes by oscillating between D and A-flat major triads. These juxtapositions of tritone-related harmonies avoid the dissonance created by superimposing tritones on top of one another. The orchestral passage evokes the overture to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Christmas Eve that engages with similar tritone harmonic relationships to create a mysterious atmosphere. Likewise, Moravec’s use of these harmonies creates mystery and wonder for Danny and Hallorann’s auspicious “shining” abilities.
Moravec uses conventions to his benefit throughout the opera, engaging with the audience’s expectations while offering his contemporary twist. He sometimes strays from convention to introduce horror film score techniques à la Bernard Herrmann that aim to frighten the audience more than anything. In another essay, one might argue that using film score techniques might be Moravec’s acknowledgement of his audience’s varied interactions with Stephen King’s story, opening its appeal to a broad demographic that has enjoyed the story for nearly fifty years. Despite this, Nashville audiences can expect the excitement of the familiar combined with the thrill of the original in the performance of The Shining this October. If anything, The Shining reveals that even the mundane can still offer something fresh and horrific.
https://www.musiccityreview.com/2025/09/30/the-sounds-and-conventions-of-madness-in-moravecs-the-shining/
