The Last of Manhattan

Virgil’s Aeneid is transplanted to the cunning and venomous cliques of today’s high society in The Last of Manhattan, an opera in progress by poet Ernest Hilbert, whose work veers on the edge between formalism and stream-of-consciousness, and Daniel Felsenfeld, the composer of “large, generous works, mediating between Honky-tonk and high art” (Boston Globe). In this tragic satire, love between a high-powered real estate broker and a newspaper magnate is a source of peril and mystery before acting as a safeguard against a world that threatens to devastate all that is private and vulnerable.