Daniel Catán's unfinished 'Meet John Doe' to be completed
15th December 2014
© Elizabeth Beristain
"He was in a very intense creative period when he was struck by death," his widow, Andrea Puente Catán told Cincinnati.com. "He left manuscripts, sketches, sources of inspiration — both poetic and musical — and a very clear road map. It almost seemed that he knew that we would have to follow his directions on how to finish it."
She will be the project's associate editor, adviser, and manager. Conductor/Composer Eduardo Diazmuñoz, a life-long musical colleague of Daniel Catán, will be chief editor and will lead the workshop, as well as oversee structure. The husband-and-wife team of Michaela Eremiásová and Jairo Duarte-López have edited the score and composed additional music based upon Catán's own themes. The director and filmmaker Robin Guarino, chair of the opera department at CCM, will serve as stage director and dramaturg.
Opera Fusion: New Works is led by co-artistic directors Marcus Küchle, director of artistic operations of Cincinnati Opera, and Guarino. The opera's piano/vocal score was jointly funded by Cincinnati Opera and Gotham Chamber Opera in New York.
The 1941 film, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, is about a political campaign inadvertently created by Ann Mitchell, a newspaper columnist who wrote a letter to the editor signed "John Doe," and the ex-baseball player John Willoughby hired to stand in as the author. Meet John Doe is Catán's first and only opera in English.
